The Pedagogical Potential of Affective Oral Histories: A Case Study of Student Interviewer Testimonies in the Health and Human Rights Oral History Project

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ABSTRACT The Health and Human Rights Oral History Project (HHROHP) is a growing collection of video testimonies from diverse figures in the health and human rights movement, organized and overseen by the Institute of Inequalities in Global Health at the University of Southern California (USC IIGH). This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between USC IIGH and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, to review the methodology of the pilot phase and consider its expansion as a new resource for teaching and research. In foregrounding the testimonies of the three student interviewers who had been involved in the pilot phase of the HHROHP, this article argues that cataloging student interviewers’ perceptions and reflections has embedded an additional primary source within the HHROHP archives, which can—and should—be used to engage with the subjectivity of the interviewer and the process of creating and curating archival collections. In engaging with the students’ reflections, it is clear that their personal perspectives and professional trajectories had been meaningfully affected by their involvement. The resulting sense of personal responsibility felt among the HHROHP’s student interviewers toward the promotion of health equity and justice work more broadly offers interesting implications for the employment of oral history in furthering the aims of the contemporary health and human rights movement, which this article aims to investigate.