Over twenty years ago, the Chilean practice of collecting oral histories or testimonies of political violence that could later be used to prosecute war criminals was found to have positive effect on the mental health and social adjustment of those who had been tortured and severely traumatized. Later the “testimony method” emerged in Scandinavia as an effective approach to working with individual refugees and other survivors of political violence and is now standard practice worldwide in therapeutic work with such survivors. Recently, oral history methodology has been employed with communities in the form of memory archives (in Kosovo) and “theaters of witness” (oral histories collected by theater companies and represented theatrically) to promote the strengthening of community resilience following major traumatic events. This paper will present findings from two such projects implemented in New York City during the past year:

a video narrative archive and theater of witness project in the lower Manhattan neighborhoods around the World Trade Center which were highly impacted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 a video oral history project in the Liberian refugee community of Park Hill on Staten Island, a housing project that is home to 3000 war refugees. The paper will present theoretical framework for exploring the psychosocial effects that oral history and narrative projects may have on communities that have endured the massive trauma of war and terrorism including theories of the social impact of traumatic events, the collective process of recovery, and how resources for resilience may be facilitated. From a psychosocial perspective, these projects may provide validation for a wide range of experience, particularly histories that are marginalized or subjugated by social dynamics, media and cultural constraints access to stories of resilience rather that just stories of vulnerability alternative public sites for processing traumatic events and promoting community action Methods for conducting such projects will be presented and includes the training of community interviewers and actor/interviewers, precautions for interviewing trauma survivors, and decisions about appropriate sites for project presentation. Video of collected histories and of the process of conducting a “theater of witness project” will be presented.