This oral history interview is an intimate conversation between two people, both of whom have generously agreed to share this recording with Oral History Summer School, and with you. Please listen in the spirit with which this was shared.
This interview is hereby made available for research purposes only. For additional uses (radio and other media, music, internet), please inquire about permissions.
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This focused interview on the theme of care was conducted on the top floor of Solaris Camphill Hudson in Hudson, NY on Sunday, June 24th, 2018, with Elizabeth Shaw, fellow participant and classmate in Oral History Summer School’s intensive workshop focused on care. This interview may be of use to those who are interested in caregiving within family kinships as well as school settings. Topics covered include: being a ‘devoted aunt’, being a children’s librarian, care within families, mental health (with emphasis on depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), children’s books, fantasy, feminism and care, collaborative and communal caregiving, parent-child relationships, sibling relationships, and understandings of need and duty, comfort and discomfort, chronic pain (with emphasis on migraines), schools (working in them as well as attending them), and self-care.
Becky Carmel is and has been a caregiver in many different capacities, including long-term babysitting & nannying relationships, hospital caregiving in times of change & crisis, and having extended networks of chosen family.
Oral history is an iterative process. In keeping with oral history values of anti-fixity, interviewees will have an opportunity to add, annotate and reflect upon their lives and interviews in perpetuity. Talking back to the archive is a form of “shared authority.”