CARDS Oral History Interviews , 2021 - 2023

The CARDS Oral History Project contains six alum audio recordings and transcriptions of five interviews. This project involved collecting oral histories from graduating Disabled Barnard students talking about their complex relationships to their respective Disability identities, accommodations, and navigating them at an elite institution. Rebecca Sime Nagasawa in 2021, the director of CARDS, interviewed these graduates over Zoom. The CARDS office staff also summarized the five interviews they conducted. Olivia Newsome and Obden Mondesir, archives staff, interviewed Alexa Easter in 2023 to document the transition from ODS to CARDS and to highlight student activism which changed how CARDS administered their services.

The CARDS staff decided to complete these interviews as a way to document and preserve the stories of Disabled students on campus. Oftentimes, Disabled people are absent from archival records or have their lives told by non-Disabled people where they show up as nondescript names and numbers in institutional records. Oral history as a medium allows for the storyteller to share their own life from their own perspective; a radical assertion of agency and personhood.