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Genna Duberstein is a third year student majoring in Spanish and Art. Her research project this past summer was creating a documentary about Japanese-American internment camps during World War II with Dr. Judy Wu in the History Department. She is continuing her research for her Spanish senior thesis by creating materials concerning prenatal care for the Latina community in Columbus. After graduation, she plans on attending film school and pursuing a career in documentaries.

How did you become involved in this research project?

I got involved in this project through a class I took with Dr. Judy Tzu-chun Wu. The first day she told us about it, the floor rocked underneath me; I knew I had to be a part of it. It is an oral history project recording the stories of Japanese Americans who were former internees during World War II. I contacted Dr. Wu immediately and asked how I could get more involved. She welcomed me on board to be part of the planning committee for the Month of Remembrance, a series of programs by Asian American Studies to commemorate the interment of Japanese Americans.

The program I became involved in was collecting oral histories from internees now settled in Ohio. I got to do the publicity art for the whole Month of Remembrance series, and was one of the 42 students who participated as interviewers. An overall total of about 30 hours of footage was generated, and each team of interviewers created a 30 minute mini-documentary from his or her interview. When that was all done, the mini documentaries were supposed to be housed in the library. I suggested that we take the huge mass of footage and create one documentary.

How did you create this documentary?

Dr. Wu and I applied for the Research on Research (R2) grant sponsored by TELR, Technology Enhanced Learning and Research here at Ohio State. It was a life changing experience for me because I had never made a documentary before. I was a total technology klutz, and the program is focused on technology-based research. I spent the first couple weeks of the program thinking they must have chosen my application by mistake, but by the end of the summer, I had built a website as well as shot and edited parts of a documentary. I had gone from 0 to 90 in technology proficiency during a single summer, and it was because of this program.

Watching all the 30 hours of footage to figure out which parts I would keep, I was totally overwhelmed. I felt like I could not do these people’s stories justice. One of my friends showed me a website where there was footage from the War Relocation Authority, the government body that controlled the internment. There were propaganda reels of an American official who was making claims that the camps were comfortable. I could hear in my head the voices of the internees, directly contradicting what the announcer in the propoganda was saying. It put it all together for me. I classified the footage from the interviews into themes that then juxtaposed these clips with propaganda footage to form the documentary.

My goal of this project was to take a subject that no one talks about and present it a medium that is easy to watch and easy to understand. History tends to get so bogged down with names and dates and faces and places that people start to forget the issue.

How are you using this experience for your next research project?

My senior thesis in Spanish is promoting awareness about prenatal issues in the Latina community here in Franklin County. I m planning to turn that into a documentary also. My goals are to identify the barriers to prenatal care and to establish some sort of brochure that would give information about prenatal care in a simple form. There is not even one in English, let alone one in Spanish. I will be interviewing people in the community including doctors, and I hope to have a camera along with me to make a documentary. I hope to turn it from a political to a humanitarian issue by putting a face and story to it. This would also directly benefit the Latina community by showing that one can interact with the health care system at the level of prenatal care.

What advice would you give undergraduates interested in research?

It really helps to have a faculty mentor; it is nearly impossible to get anywhere alone. That is not to say effort and motivation aren’t important as well. I owe a lot to the foresight of Victoria Getis who runs the R2 program, to the advice of Florence Minnis, a BBC veteran and the current Media Consultant for the College of Humanities, and to the unwavering faith of Dr. Wu, who took me on as a just another student and gave me a position. Although I’ve called my project an independent film, it has really relied on the time and talents of many people. Without mentors, you will miss out on developing relationships with faculty and staff. Students tend to just sit behind the desk and wait for instructors to give the grades. There’s so much more to that connection and it is valuable on both a personal and professional level.

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