What is Oral History? Handout

Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature …, 2011

From those involved in the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the United States to those engaged in contemporary environmental controversies, there is a wealth of people who participated in and experienced these historical moments in the story of environmentalism. The stories of these people can provide new perspectives and windows into environmental issues and controversies, which are often only documented through newspaper articles, public hearing transcripts, congressional hearings, and famous speeches. In this essay, I contend that the collection and analysis of oral histories is a useful endeavor for environmental communication scholars. While oral history is not completely new to communication scholars, its potential, especially for environmental communication, has not yet been reached. Not only can the collection of oral histories create a body of archival documents for contemporary and future generations, but analysis of oral histories may reveal new insights into the communicative dimensions of environmental controversies. In addition to arguing for the value of oral history, I offer practical suggestions for undertaking oral history projects.

A team of four students and one faculty member from the University of Winnipeg, as well as two community representatives, undertook a collaborative action-research project in Fisher River Cree Nation, Manitoba, Canada, to explore Indigenous knowledges associated with cultivation, production, and consumption practices of traditional foods and community food security. Previous research on community food security has mostly used quantitative approaches and not given adequate attention to Indigenous perspectives and Indigenous knowledges associated with food. Our research, therefore, underscores the value and significance of communities' Indigenous knowledge systems and their perspectives and prescriptions on enhancing Indigenous food sovereignty. We employed oral history interviewing as the main research method and used social learning to guide our data collection relating to Indigenous food sovereignty. This method was used to conduct in-depth interviews with 17 community members and elders. Our experiences, challenges, and some practical lessons for future researchers are provided in this case study to help student researchers who will be engaged in work relating to food sovereignty, oral history, and action-oriented participatory approaches.

Historical Social Research, 2009

Oral History als prozess-generierte Daten«. This article describes how to use (archived) oral histories as process-generated data. It explains how social scientists may locate and use such data in an informed way and assess the qualities of such data systematically and effectively. The article describes oral history as a method and as form of source or data; it surveys aspects of oral history that affect data analysis and interpretation, including project design, recording technology, interview strategies and interviewer skills/training, interviewee-interviewer relationship, the dialogic construction of the source, legal and ethical aspects, summaries and transcriptions, the orality of the sources and the importance of listening to sources. The article then problematizes the use of oral histories as evidence by discussing subjectivity, memory, retrospectivity, and narrativity and exploring the meanings, values, and validity of this kind of data.

During an election year, questions often arise about how best to engage youth in the political conversations affecting our nation and world today, and in the future. This issue of Our Schools/Our Selves provides a timely conversation about the emerging use of oral history education to promote youth democratic engagement within different international contexts. Moreover this collection illustrates the impacts that doing oral history can have for understanding how our relationships with the past influence our decision-making about the present. Often the historically lived experiences of students counter their nation’s grand narratives and/or add to them. As such, how might educators draw on oral history as a site of empowerment that in turn opens up spaces for students to become engaged citizens by sharing accounts of past that are still absent within the histories taught in schools? In their work and research with youth, Levstik and Barton call for history teachers to recognize that every student already comes to class with a history, with a capacity for doing history.2 Hence if citizens are already doing history, most often as oral history within their families like Brockmann in this collection illustrates, then how can we enhance their skills as researchers to situate such social histories in relation to the grand narratives that are often advocated for and/or taught through the school curriculum?

2015

Sensory experiences are often considered triggers of memory, most famously a little French cake dipped in lime blossom tea. Sense memory can also be evoked in public history research through techniques of elicitation. In this article I reflect on different social science methods for eliciting sound memories such as the use of sonic prompts, emplaced interviewing, and sound walks. I include examples from my research of medical listening. The article considers the relevance of this work for the conduct of oral histories, arguing that such methods “break the frame,” allowing room for collaborative research connections and insights into the otherwise unarticulatable.

In recent years, oral history has been celebrated by its practitioners for its humanizing potential, and its ability to democratize history by bringing the narratives of people and communities typically absent in the archives into conversation with that of the political and intellectual elites who generally write history. And when dealing with the narratives of ordinary people living in conditions of social and political stability, the value of oral history is unquestionable. However, in recent years, oral historians have increasingly expanded their gaze to consider intimate accounts of extreme human experiences, such as narratives of survival and flight in response to mass atrocities. This shift in academic and practical interests begs the questions: Are there limits to oral historical methods and theory? And if so, what are these limits? This paper begins to address these questions by drawing upon fourteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, during which I conducted multiple life history interviews with approximately one hundred survivors, ex-combatants, and perpetrators of genocide and related mass atrocities. I argue that there are limits to the application of oral history, particularly when working amid highly politicized research settings.

International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2012

Documentary & Archival Research, edited by Jason Hughes and John Goodwin, SAGE Benchmarks in Social Research Methods Series, SAGE., 2014

This chapter recounts how oral historians and composition scholars working with oral histories have responded to disciplinary and methodological challenges—and how these issues might inform one’s own research. The chapter outlines the methodological processes and considerations at stake (practical, ethical, and rhetorical) that govern data collection, transcription, editing, publication, and preservation. Throughout, the aim is to show how archival recordings must be approached with attention not only to their use but also to the processes of their creation. [Reprint of chapter in Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Alexis Ramsey et al. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. 259-77.]

Written with co-author, Kathleen Schilling, this publication was prepared to assist in the research and collection of oral history as part of the management of cultural heritage in NSW national parks.