Experiential

Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Anchor questions

Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.

• Walk us through your workday. What do you actually do all day, and how do you feel about it?
• Who owns the place where you work? Who gives the orders, and who takes them?
• Have you ever been paid less than you knew your work was worth? How did you know?
• What do you and the people you live with do to make ends meet that does not show up as a paycheck?
• When money has been tight, what got cut first? What did that cost you?
• Have you ever been part of a workplace or a building or a neighborhood where people organized to change something? What happened?
• What did the adults around you when you were young believe about money, work, and getting ahead? Do you still believe it?

Materials that may help

Experiential work begins from the room. These outside materials extend or challenge what the room can offer. All are free unless marked otherwise. Use them to prompt recognition (“that is my life too”) or contrast (“that is not my experience at all”).

Oral histories and testimonio

• The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive (interviews 1952 to 1997, digitized from 2018). More than two thousand streamable programs, including Terkel’s own reflections on the interviews behind Working (1974), his book of ordinary people describing what they do all day and how they feel about it. The cornerstone experiential archive for this theme. Free: studsterkel.wfmt.com
• The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel, restored by Radio Diaries. Eleven stories from Terkel’s original Working tapes, the switchboard operator, the beat cop, the piano tuner, in their own recorded voices. A polished, roughly one-hour listen that is ready for a session. Free: soundcloud.com/radio-diaries
• StoryCorps (2003 to present). Recorded oral histories from people of all backgrounds, searchable by theme, with collections on work, poverty, and economic hardship and a Callings work-life series. Short enough to play one and discuss. Free: storycorps.org/stories
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 (WPA, Library of Congress). More than 2,300 first-person accounts by formerly enslaved people, the largest body of testimony on the lived economy of slavery, and the model of the New Deal oral-history method that StoryCorps later echoed. Public domain and free: loc.gov

Worker testimony grounded in a single event

• Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives (Cornell ILR School). More than 350 labor oral-history interviews, plus the widely used Triangle Shirtwaist Fire collection of survivor accounts, photographs, and cartoons. Strong when a session anchors itself in one struggle and lets the room encounter the people who lived it. Free: digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/kheel

First-person testimony as readings

• Voices of a People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2004, ongoing project). First-hand testimony, speeches, letters, and songs, from workers, women, and marginalized people usually left out of the record. The book is for sale, but many of the primary texts and dramatic readings are free through the Zinn Education Project. Ready-made testimonios for reading aloud. Free teaching materials: zinnedproject.org
• Barbara Ehrenreich (1941 to 2022), Nickel and Dimed (2001). Ehrenreich takes jobs as a waitress, a cleaner, and a Walmart clerk, and reports what they cost the body and the mind. Worth naming the standpoint in the room: this is a writer visiting poverty and able to leave, not a worker testifying, which makes it a sharp contrast case to read against Domitila rather than a substitute for her. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: us.macmillan.com. Ehrenreich on the book, free and with a transcript: democracynow.org

Testimonio from the Global South

Capitalism is not experienced most sharply where this school is written. These are people describing it from where it bites hardest, in their own voices.

• Domitila Barrios de Chungara (1937 to 2012) with Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! (1977). The canonical Latin American testimonio: the wife of a Bolivian tin miner on hunger, the company store, repression, and the Housewives’ Committee she organized. Her class analysis was arrived at from inside the mining camp, not from books, and it is sharper for it. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Rigoberta Menchú (b. 1959) with Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983). A K’iche’ woman’s account of plantation labour, land dispossession, and state violence in Guatemala. The later dispute over its factual details is not a reason to drop it: it is a session of its own on who is permitted to testify, and to what standard of proof we hold the people we already believe. Free to borrow: archive.org
• People’s Archive of Rural India (P. Sainath, 2014 to present). A free, living, multilingual archive of first-person reportage from rural India: debt, drought, migration, caste, and dispossessed labour, in people’s own words across fifteen languages. Where the other archives here are historical and American, this one is happening now. Free: ruralindiaonline.org

Work as it is lived now

• Notes from Below (2018 to present). A workers’ inquiry journal whose first-person accounts are written by the workers themselves, couriers, drivers, call-centre and warehouse staff, on the stated principle that workers are the analysts of their own conditions and not raw material for someone else’s analysis. The closest thing to a living Terkel. Free: notesfrombelow.org

A note on method

Experiential work is not a warm-up. Give it real time. The point is to establish that the people in the room are already knowers of how capitalism organizes their lives, before any theory enters. Outside material should be used sparingly and only to deepen what the room surfaces, never to override it.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008). Three years with young women migrants on the Dongguan assembly lines, built from their own accounts of dormitories, wage theft, ambition, and escape. Lets the workers set the terms rather than casting them as victims. Not free: penguinrandomhouse.com
• Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). Two years with eight Milwaukee families losing their homes, and with the landlords profiting from it, told largely through the tenants’ own words. Shows eviction as an engine of poverty rather than a symptom. Not free: penguinrandomhouse.com

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Global South testimonio is now here through Domitila, Menchú, and the People’s Archive of Rural India, and contemporary work through Notes from Below. Contributions welcome, especially African and Southeast Asian testimony, and first-person accounts of debt and of care work.