Who is eligible to participate in the storytelling project? 

• Transgender adults 50 years of age and older who live in or have strong ties to rural areas and smaller cities/towns in Washington State (outside the Sea-Tac metro). In 2024, we will be expanding the project to include transgender older adults who live in Oregon, Idaho, wesetern Montana, and British Columbia.  

How will stories be collected? 

• M. Eliatamby-O'Brien and Griff Tester will interview individuals or small groups of participants in person or online. Individual interviews will last approximately one hour and, with participants' permission, will be audio recorded and transcribed.

• If you are not comfortable being interviewed, participants can share their stories in writting or other creative ways. 

How will the interviews/stories be used? 

• Segments of participants' stories will be shared on the interactive TransRural Lives webpage. The primary audience for the project, via the webpage, is LGBTQ+ individuals and groups, particularly transgender youth and older adults in more rural areas.

• Participants' stories will also be used to educate students in the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies program, in other relevant academic programs, and during community and academic presentations. 

What will happen to the audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews (or other materials shared, such as writings and photos)?  

• Full audio recordings and transcripts (and other materials shared) will be securely stored at the CWU Library, Archives & Special Collections. However, participants retain copyright of the audio file and other shared materials and can have it removed from the Archives and the TransRural Lives webpage at any time, upon request. 

Who are the indivduals and groups involved in the project? 

• Helen House is a LGBTQ+ youth organization in Ellensburg, WA. Tylene Carnell (she/her) is the founder and director and has extensive experience supporting and organizing on behalf of LGBTQ+ people, including transgender adults, in and beyond Central Washington.  

• M. Eliatamby-O'Brien (they/them), Ph.D, is an Associate Professor in the English Department at CWU trained in interdisciplinary, Cultural Studies methods, and directs the Women's Gender, and Sexuality Stuides Program (WGSS). Their research focuses on the experiences of gender, sexual, and racially-minoritized forced migrants through engagement with digital life narratives, digital storytelling, and multimodal rhetorics. They co-led Cosmopolitan Possibilities, a digital storytelling project connecting the contents of the life narratives within Australian Multicultural Archive with digital storytelling projects in Canada and the USA, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ forced migrants. 

• Griff Tester (he/him), Ph.D, is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at CWU and program faculty in the WGSS program. His research focuses on sexuality, gender, and social gerontology, specifically the social ties and support networks of gender and sexual minorities in later life. He brings extensive experience with engaging and interviewing minoritized, hard-to-reach groups and, using queer and life course perspectives, analyzing interviews to discover and conceptualize underlying social patterns and structures.