Psychiatrist, Surgeon, Historian: Authority, Risk, and Mid-century Legacies in the Practice of Trans Oral History

Many contemporary oral histories are rooted in principles of progressive and feminist politics, particularly in a respect for the truth of each informant's life experiences and a quest to preserve the memory of ordinary people's lives. Feminist scholars have been in the forefront of efforts to elaborate these ideals as methodological principles, seeking ways to dissolve the traditional distinction between historian-as-authority and informant-as-subject and to create what the sociologist Judith Stacey calls an egalitarian research process characterized by authenticity, reciprocity, and intersubjectivity between the researcher and her 'subjects.',1 Such oral history practices have been designed primarily to study and record the lives of who, historically speaking, would otherwise remain inarticulate.2 From this tradition of history from the bottom up has come a rich and sensitive body of interviews with union organizers, feminist activists, civil rights workers, and others whose experience progressive and feminist scholars share and whose life stories and world views they often find laudable. Historians have paid less attention to the life stories of ordinary people whose political agendas they find unsavory, dangerous, or deliberately deceptive.3 Oral history is a particularly valuable source for rectifying this scholarly lacuna since rightwing, reactionary, and racial hate groups tend to be secretive and highly transient, limiting the availability and usefulness of traditional documentary sources. But

For many indigenous peoples, oral history is a living intergenerational phenomenon that is crucial to the transmission of our languages, cultural knowledge, politics, and identities. Indigenous oral histories are not merely traditions, myths, chants, or superstitions, but are valid historical accounts passed on vocally in various forms, forums, and practices. Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective provides a specific native and tribal account of the meaning, form, politics, and practice of oral history. It is a rethinking and critique of the popular and powerful ideas that now populate and define the fields of oral history and tradition, which have in the process displaced indigenous perspectives. This book, drawing on indigenous voices, explores the overlaps and differences between the studies of oral history and of oral tradition, and urges scholars in both disciplines to revisit the way their fields think about orality, oral history methods, transmission, narrative, power, ethics, oral history theories, and politics. Indigenous knowledge and experience hold important contributions that have the potential to expand and develop robust academic thinking in the study of both oral history and tradition.

Oral history is now recognized as an integral component of educational programming, from elementary schools to museums. This is evident in the prescribed Australian Curriculum where oral history methodology is embraced. While innovative pedagogical approaches are being developed and implemented within schooling and post-compulsory training, I pose the following questions: Are educators familiar with the practice of oral history? Are they cognizant of the ethical complexities and challenges of story collecting? In this chapter I investigate the relationship between oral history, ethics, and appropriate training with particular reference to pedagogies, sound practice, and observance of cultural protocols within an Australian context. Appropriate training demands a system of accreditation to set benchmarks for the oral history profession. The nationally accredited Australian oral history training course “Record and Document Community History” is an innovation to support oral history practitioners, including history teachers, to become qualified in the field. I offer the viewpoint that accredited training will advance the prominence of oral history within education, further developing the potential for history to be experiential and inclusive. Examples of my own oral history practice and experience in remote north Western Australia working with Aboriginal communities are drawn upon to expound how and why the accredited oral history training course came to fruition, and the pedagogical approaches employed. Of particular significance is the setting in which the accredited training has been delivered. The environment is distinctive to an Indigenous Australian context where aspects of colonization remain in living memory, such as the forced removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands to Government-controlled sectarian missions.

Much has been said about the subjective nature of oral history interviewing. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how new meaning is produced at each stage of the oral history process, from recording, transcription and interpretation, to dissemination. There is, however, one type of document produced in oral history practice that is rarely given any critical attention: a timed summary. Their apparent banality as documents means that they are rarely subject to scrutiny, and the painstaking process of producing timed summaries is under-analysed. Accordingly, this chapter reflects upon the layers of production, interpretation, representation and reductive decision-making that go into the creation of these seemingly mundane documents. The chapter draws on examples from my own experience as the writer of timed summaries for the Bringing them Home oral history project, and as the interviewer/timed summary writer for the Reshaping Australian Manufacturing Project. Comparative examples are also drawn from other oral historians’ work, such as the Australian Generations project. The chapter finds that timed summaries are another forum in which an historian exercises power over a narrative, and must use their judgment and caution in relation to (often living) people’s life stories. The intersecting dynamics of power, open information access, future research possibilities and digital data searching drive this inquiry into a type of document that usually remains invisible, a mere ‘finding aid’.

In this interview, Professor Paul Thompson talks about his life and influences, and about his past and current works and projects. Thompson reflects on the ways by which his childhood in Eastern England has influenced his work, his love for architecture and art and how his pioneer work on oral history came to develop. He recalls the beginning of his interest about History and research, the role of W. G. Hoskins and other historians who introduced new perspectives in historiography and the community oral history projects developed by Ruskin College at Oxford. He describes the beginning of his practice in oral history, the foundation of the Oral History Society and the creation of the National Life Stories Collection in the British Library. Thompson also talks about his profound concern with data preservation and public archiving regarding not only oral history but also social science research, and about his role in the Qualidata project.

Over the last fifteen years, historians of the civil rights movement have been charting a new interpretive course. A nationally oriented narrative, with a chronology centered on key events in the life of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has given way to a host of state and local studies, with all the variety one would expect from such a turn. As a result, many basic questions are being revisited, including periodization (When did the movement begin and end?), scope (What events, actions, and issues constitute the movement?), and personnel and leadership (How do we write a history of activism and leadership in a mass movement?). Often, these questions refract upon each other. A narrative that begins in the 1930s, for example, will of necessity introduce previously ignored actors and events. To explore any of these questions is to ask, as Adam Fairclough did in a 1990 review essay that still raises many timely issues, What was the civil rights movement?' This essay considers this basic question, and especially the matter of periodization, through the life history method of oral history.2 The storytelling that emerges from oral history practice is a narrative act in which experience is ordered and interpreted, and the life history approach, which aims at a full narration of personal history, leads naturally to a consideration of beginnings and endings. Implicitly, each life story opens onto the question of periodization.3

In this article, I reflect on teaching oral history in a society with a centralized education system that inculcates a hegemonic national(ist) history. I suggest that the commitment to academic freedom and liberal arts education at Sabanci University, a private university in Turkey, encourages the teaching of interdisciplinary and research-oriented courses that critical pedagogy inspires. I show that while oral history is relatively new and weakly institutionalized in Turkey, recent interest in and growing debates about the past have led to growing demand for oral history. Using examples from the classroom, I argue that oral history teaching has enormous potential for addressing the silences and controversies in Turkey’s past. I show that the practice of oral history allows students to rethink the learning process, debate public history, reconsider their relations with others, and reflect on their own past and current subjectivities. Describing the contraction of the public sphere in Turkey in the last two years, I discuss the limits of the oral history classroom as a microcosm of society. I suggest that despite (or because of) these limitations, oral historians may develop creative new ways to continue teaching and collaborating with their students.

PurposeThe study aims to enhance our understanding of shared community oral history stewardship by exploring its practices and challenges from the perspectives of the stakeholders involved.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews with community oral history stewards. Each interview focused on their experiences and perspectives regarding community-based oral history projects. The interview data were transcribed and analyzed using a grounded theory approach.FindingsCommunity oral history stewards found oral history stewardship entails substantial effort, long-term commitment, and challenges. They concurred on the importance of partnerships between communities and archives in preserving community stories, with institutional archives providing valuable support, resources, and engagement beyond mere preservation platforms. Establishing trust between communities and archives emerged as a fundamental requirement for fruitful collaboration.Originality/valueCommunity oral history has stood out as the prevailing form within the theory and practice of oral history, but its shared stewardship practices have not been thoroughly explored from the stakeholders' viewpoints.

As the Oral History Association prepares to gather for its twelfth annual colloquium at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, it does so as a firmly established organization, prepared to deal with the challenges and the problems posed by ten years of striking associational growth. Having grown phenomenally during the first decade of its existence, OHA's membership-some 1100 individual and institutional members-has begun to stabilize during the past two years. This leveling off of membership growth poses a question roundly discussed by both general members and the governing Council of the Association: to what extent and what end should membership recruitment be actively pursued? For those whose affiliation with the Association dates back to its modest beginnings and its earlier clublike atmosphere, the prospect of significant growth tends to hold only marginal appeal. Even our earliest recruits, however, cannot escape the fact that the practice of oral history is witnessing remarkable national growth. Spurred on, in part, by the recently concluded Bicentennial observance of our nation's birth, oral history projects have sprung to life all across the country. Whether the individuals who are involved in those projects know it or not-and many do not-they are practitioners of oral history, and the question logically posed is: should they not be invited to join the Oral History Association? The answer to this question would seem to be yes, they should be enlisted. The Oral History Association, as it stands today, embraces a multiplicity of talents and project efforts, and much of its appeal and value rests in its ability to provide insight and direction for seemingly dissimilar efforts. Irrespective of the dissimilarity of these efforts and of recognized differences in the value and worth of the tapes and transcribed materials emanating from such activities, the Association welcomes this community of oral history practitioners to OHA membership. Affiliation with the OHA is an opportunity for those who tape-record and transcribe to share working experiences, profit from the triumphs and failures of others, and refine skills appropriate to their particular projects. The Oral History

The purpose of this essay is to examine the relationships between “the oral” and “the written” in a particular application of narrative research (life rendering research). First, we examine a functional and valuing contrast between oral and written language within oral history methods. Second, we present a critical examination of the use of these linguistic predispositions as they impact life history narratives. Next, we examine a particularly close analogy between oral history and psychiatric patient write-up. Finally, the historical oral/written tension located in oral history practice is located within the frameworks of newer, media-based literacies. The tensions that these intentions create are particularly acute in power-based relationships, such as those between interviewers and informants. Therefore, the organization of the paper is a series of issues that combine to form a critical look at the use of informants’ words in the written narratives of the oral history as a form of discourse synthesis (Spivey, 1997).

Reviewed by: When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin by Anna Shternshis Jarrod Tanny Anna Shternshis. When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Xii + 264 pp. Cloth $34.95. ISBN 0190223103. Who gets to tell the story? In Anna Shternshis’s When Sonia Met Boris it is 474 Ashkenazi Jews, all born in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union between 1906 and 1928, Soviet citizens who came of age during the Stalin era and experienced the attendant social upheavals and cataclysmic events that marked this tumultuous era. Through oral histories, Shternshis seeks to uncover the daily lives of her subjects, how work, home, family, and migration patterns intersected with being Jewish in a time of modernization, famine, terror, war, and, antisemitism. The collapse of the USSR engendered a massive wave of Jewish emigration. Shternshis conducted her interviews in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Russia over the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The result is an informative, sophisticated, and lively account of Soviet Jewish history, one that “fleshes out and revises the historical record” (21) because “some events in Soviet Jewish history simply cannot . . . be understood properly without oral histories.” (9) When Sonia Met Boris is divided into three parts. In part one, Shternshis reflects on the practice of oral history, its strengths, and its limitations. She illustrates the techniques she used to get her interviewees to voice their histories, fully cognizant that hindsight, location, and her own role as an intermediary might severely compromise the stories they tell. In parts two and three, Shternshis examines Soviet Jewish family life and Jews in the Soviet workplace. In the eight chapters that make up these two sections, she strikes a delicate balance between a chronological thematic approach, periodically returning to topics already discussed—marriage, education, internal migration in search of work, fear of shame and arrest during Stalin’s purges—because such is the nature of human memory. The author tries to go where her subjects take her, letting them articulate their past as they remember it. But ever aware of her own role as mediator, Shternshis regularly tells the reader when her subjects’ responses surprised her, undermined her previous assumptions, or resonated with her as a scholar and—one may speculate—as a Soviet Jewish émigré. “Teachers were my favorite narrators,” writes Shternshis. “They were the most articulate, usually recalled events of the past with remarkable detail, were amazing storytellers, spoke loudly and clearly, and made sure the interviewer understood their point,” even though “they quickly recognized the interviewer’s agenda and sometimes exaggerated.” (123) Such personal interjections strengthen Shternshis’s work, because they remind the reader that the collector and interpreter of oral histories is not (and can never be) an impartial conveyer of unfiltered material. Although Shternshis’s composite picture of “the first Soviet Jewish generation” offers insight into many questions typically raised by scholars, two conclusions stand out. First, the final period of Stalin’s reign, 1948–53—what is commonly referred to as “the black years of Soviet Jewry” because of the [End Page 94] sharp uptick in state-sponsored antisemitism—was in fact a turning point in the lives of most of her subjects. “Whoever forgot that he was as a Jew, or didn’t know, learned about it in 1948!” (122) stated countless interviewees to Shternshis, because being Jewish became a liability; it prompted an enduring awareness that antisemitism could lead to obstructed professional mobility, public ridicule, and even arrest. But “these stories of antisemitism are not solely tales of victimhood,” (108) cautions Shternshis, because her subjects presented them as “quests,” as challenges that they needed to face and surmount, much as “one beats a disease, succeeding despite being burdened by misfortune.” (188) Shternshis may not be the first historian to reach this conclusion, but her use of oral testimony allows us to see how Soviet Jews perceived their changing relationship to the state and to their non-Jewish neighbors. It reveals the many secrets people kept and it fills in the spaces of silence historians encounter in archival and printed sources...

Popular concerns about blood-stealing, trade in body parts, surreptitious birth control and the deliberate spreading of disease are common across sub-Saharan Africa, and there are indications that they are becoming more common in pace with the process of deprivation that economic and political destructuring has, over the last quarter century, set in motion across most of the continent (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000). Such stories are commonly referred to as ‘rumours’ – by those who observe and dismiss them, but also by those who, usually with due scepticism, pass them on to others. With its connotation of hearsay and gossip, the term is often used in contrast to ‘truth’, much like the equally problematic distinction of ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’. It is our aim in this paper to move beyond the dismissal of these stories as ‘mere’ rumour, based on erroneous belief or traditional superstition, and to appreciate them as modern commentaries on social relations that involve, and extend far beyond, scientific medical research. If we nevertheless use the words ‘rumour’, ‘story’ and ‘concern’ synonymously, we follow the historian Luise White’s understanding that rumours, such as vampire stories in 20th-century Africa, ‘are neither true nor false, in the sense that they do not have to be proven beyond their being talked about; but as they are told, they contain different empirical elements that carry different weights: stories are told with truths, commentaries, and statements of ignorance’ (White 2000). By telling these stories, relating them to empirical facts in a given locality and at a particular moment, and intertwining them with other seemingly unrelated tales, people make new connections and reveal hitherto unseen links, weaving wide, often global connections into local patterns of relatedness (Geissler 2005). When, below, we speak of ‘rumour’ we are not expressing our scepticism; rather, we are reflecting the scepticism of those who tell these stories: their ambiguity towards formations of knowledge and power that reach deep into their everyday lives, and which are set in a world order that provokes their doubts. Medical research and the ‘trial communities’ it constitutes by linking scientists and subjects, institutions and funders, media and publics, is one of the networks of global connections that has been particularly prolific in the generation of rumours (P.W. Geissler and C. Molyneux, in press). The sort of rumours mentioned above, particularly those about blood, are often directly related to medical research and health interventions. During 15 years of involvement in medical research in Africa we have repeatedly encountered such rumours. From friends and colleagues we have heard many more reports of such rumours, sometimes impeding recruitment to research, affecting adherence to interventions and even threatening the continuation of whole research projects while more commonly providing a background noise without direct impact (Geissler 2005; Molyneux et al. 2005a; Pool & Geissler 2005; Fairhead et al. 2006; for a rare note in a medical paper, see Nchito et al. 2003; for the potential detrimental impact of public debates see most recently Singh & Mills 2005). Most of these rumours follow a relatively limited number of themes, while also showing regional and locally specific variation. On a more general level they merge into related genres such as urban legends and oral traditions (Burke 1998; Ellis & Ter Haar 2001), Tropical Medicine and International Health doi:10.1111/j.1365-3156.2006.01682.x

The UK population is living longer. By 2030 one in five people will be aged 65 or over, with the 85+ age group the fastest growing (Office for National Statistics, 2018). A larger older population means more people developing conditions in later life appropriate for palliative care. However, there is limited understanding of this older group’s end-of-life care needs, which include psychosocial issues of loss of meaning, wellbeing and dignity (Stow, Spiers, Matthews, Hanratty et al., 2019). Oral history is a biographical approach that captures personal experience, it complements and enhances palliative care by offering opportunities to audio record memories and have them permanently archived. Oral history is an opportunity to reinforce identity, acknowledge achievement, reflect on challenges and enhance self-esteem. The first UK oral history project in palliative care began in 2007 in the Sheffield Macmillan Unit for Palliative Care, followed by six further projects in England and Northern Ireland. Team members are staff and volunteers who are trained and supported in oral history methods and ethical practice. This presentation will reflect on experience from these projects, discuss best practice in the context of adding value to care, consider the patient’s expert role regarding their own interests and draw on research in partnership with Macmillan Cancer Support. Key findings are that oral histories recorded with an empathetic, non-judgemental listener, with no time limit or medical agenda, enables expression of earlier life identities that can be cathartic, validating and dignified. Bereaved family and friends highlight that an important aspect of oral history is receiving a voice recording as a lasting memory. The oral history process can be as beneficial and important as the oral history outcome. Oral history projects can add an additional positive dimension to the care of older people in palliative care through in-depth and meaningful interaction between project teams, participants and family.

When I began teaching women's studies in 1974, there were no materials in what we now proudly identify as women's oral history-oral history that, guided by a feminist sensibility, leads us to an examination of women's lives, consciousness, values. Except for the work of the Bancroft Library, there were not even many available oral histories of women. Additionally, methodological articles and books never addressed the special nature of women's oral history. In those early days, I relied on several standard methodological sources: Willa Baum's booklet on local history, Norman Hoyle's article, and Lewis Dexter's book on specialized interviewing. Now, almost ten years later, there is a growing body of literature in/on women's oral history, including methodological articles and guides, published interviews, and documentary films. I draw on the full range of these materials, in different ways for different classes and different purposes. First, when I offer students the option of an oral history as a class project, in any number of classes, I insist that they read my own methodological article in the Special Issue of FRONTIERS (Women's History, 2, No. 2). This, combined with the various topical outlines published in that issue, provides them with a good basis. (In the one-unit Oral History Methods class which I teach, I rely heavily on Edward Ives, assigning my own article as a supplementary reading.) I also suggest to students that they review the entire FRONTIERS issue so that they are exposed to the various ways that oral history can be used. Their oral histories, which are the basis for an interpretive paper, have been consistently good. Second, because we lack extensive social history documents for the study of women's everyday lifeparticularly the lives of working-class women and women of color-oral history provides much of the reading for my course, Women's Lives (an interdisciplinary course on the lives of women in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present). It is especially valuable as a means of examining the lives of Latina, black, Native American, and Asian American women. Although short fragments of interviews are usually not too fruitful for an intensive examination of women's lives, I do find that sections of Las Mujeres and of the Generations issue of Southern Exposure are very useful. As short as the segments in Las Mujeres are, certain themes can be explored, including generational change. Likewise, though the oral history fragments in The Ways of My Grandmothers cannot provide the detailed exploration of consciousness that more complete life histories do, within the total context of the volume they lead to a fruitful exploration of the Native American woman. Though perhaps not technically oral history, selections in Coming Out Stories provide some moving as well as humorous insights into the lesbian experience.

This research is the first to propose a nationwide protocol, the Community Oral History Collections’ Development Protocol, to develop and manage local community oral history collections in Malaysia. In Malaysia, the shortage of documentation from previous authorities and colonial powers has accelerated the need for oral history to be used as a method to capture valuable untold community stories. This research interprets current oral history practices from the perspectives of oral history practitioners and cultural institution professionals in Malaysia. The Mediated Recordkeeping: Culture-as-evidence model was used to interpret the practices, and the study found ways to extend this model to reflect oral history practices.