Mission Statement

The Unheard Voices Project (UVP) is dedicated to collecting and recording the thoughts, feelings and stories of working people concerning their occupations and the impact of change on their lives and families.

The working poor and blue-collar workers are often marginalized in our society. The mainstream media and policy wonks often characterize low-status workers as inept or passive, stuck in a cycle of poverty through their own lack of initiative or knowledge. This is far from the reality: Working people have wise, honest insights about their lives and the wohrld around them. 

The first project of the Unheard Voices Project will be to capture the stories and insights of people involved in traditional workways and professions. We want to gather these narratives before the occupations have vanished. Some of these, such as commercial fisheries, furniture making, stonemasonry, textiles, and steel working, are in the process of being extinguished/wiped out by forces of the global marketplace. Others—migrant workers, temporary workers, people making minimum wage at big-box stores and fast-food joints and gas stations—are part of an invisible subculture whose needs are ignored by the powers that be American society.

The core asset of the Unheard Voices Project is the hours of videotaped interviews that will be available for scholars and journalists, both as video and searchable transcripts. The project will also support and distribute documentary films based on these interviews. An educational component, with short films developed for integration into high school curriculums, is in the planning stages.

A cross-disciplinary venture involving history, journalism, documentary filmmaking, anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, the Unheard Voices Project follows the protocols established by the Oral History Association concerning the proper procedures for doing oral/visual history. The project is designed to integrate into the field of oral history the tools and interpretive impact of visual—or more correctly, audiovisual—history.
A key concept is the idea of recording these stories while there still are shipyard workers or textile workers or other disappearing trades in the United States. We are witnessing the destruction, outsourcing and disappearance of vast tracts of our workforce. It is vitally important to preserve these stories for the use of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and members of the lay public—while the witnesses are still with us.
The Unheard Voices Project was conceived during the editing of Wild Caught: The Life and Struggles of an American Fishing Town. The wisdom and integrity of the Snead’s Ferry fishermen filled 109 hours of footage—of which only 100 minutes, more or less, could be integrated into one film. By making the archived footage and transcripts available, researchers, teachers and the public can benefit from their insights into traditional fisheries, perhaps after the individuals who possess those insights can no longer share them.