filter_framesVehicle City Voices

The Vehicle City Voices project was developed with the goal of creating a corpus of the varieties of English spoken in Flint, Michigan while also serving as a repository of resident reflections on life in Flint throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This project contains oral history interviews with residents of Flint that were collected between 2012 and 2020. These interviews were collected by undergraduate and graduate students for civic engagement projects in linguistics courses at UM-Flint and by undergraduate and graduate research assistants and faculty researchers for the Vehicle Voices Project. Interviews took place in several locations in the Flint community including a church, coffee shops and cafés, and university and community meeting spaces and residents were asked to recall their memories of important community events and festivals, important buildings, community centers, and neighborhoods. They were also asked to describe their relationship to the automotive industry and provide their reflections on the economic, demographic, and physical transformations of the city. In addition, some residents were also asked specific questions about their sense of community pride, their own activism, and the impacts of the way that Flint is perceived by the general public.

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