<SAS Friday Talks @ 11> Sana Saboowala, Stress-Related Narratives in Oral Histories with South Asian Immigrants to the United States

Stress-Related Narratives in Oral Histories with South Asian Immigrants to the United States

This talk explores how oral history can show us how stress and migration narratives operate intergenerationally in South Asian immigrants to the United States. Originally, I was interested in using oral histories to design better, more open-ended surveys, to achieve a more holistic sense of trauma. As I continued forward with this work, it became apparent that the nuance oral histories provide could not be translated to surveys. Thus, I use narrative analysis of thirteen oral histories with South Asian immigrants to the United States to better understand how stress and migration interact with memory to shape a person’s life narrative. This work is part of my dissertation, in which I look at how historical trauma impacts South Asians’ bodies. Here I discuss how memories and stress interact in individual life histories, with the understanding that oral histories operate at multiple scales, presenting specifically on the analysis of the oral histories focused on narratives of stress.