ABSTRACT The realms of oral history and linguistics can provide insight into the geographic, social, historical, and linguistic connections of different populations. In this article, we seek to highlight the interactions between the fields as they relate to African American Language (AAL), specifically spoken by African Americans in the Gulf South. We present a case study of how the two disciplines, linguistics and oral history, complement each other through an analysis of the Joel Buchanan Archive at the University of Florida Digital Collections. The unique grammatical features of AAL are present in many oral history interviews that we analyzed, and we argue that our findings show that oral history is beneficial for education and linguistics and that linguistics technological endeavors are increasingly important to the oral history field. Throughout our process, we address the challenges of preserving unique grammatical features in language varieties without a written standard and examine possible routes to provide consistent and linguistically accurate transcripts of an oral language variety through oral history work. AAL has a rich history within the United States, and it is an important part of Black culture. We believe our efforts make oral histories conducted in AAL accessible to the general population, provide informed guidelines for transcription and linguistic feature annotation, and streamline the collection of AAL for use in research, education, and technology settings.

ABSTRACT Beginning in 2022, the Human Sexualities Research Lab at Binghamton University conducted more than one hundred oral history interviews with former staff and volunteers of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), New York City’s premier HIV/AIDS service organization of the 1980s and 1990s. Led by project organizers Dr. Sean G. Massey and Dr. Julia B. Haager, these digital interviews were conducted in a small group setting, with three to five student research assistants present for each conversation. In this article, the authors reflect upon utilizing conversations about collective history to form intergenerational networks between cohorts of queer people, equipping a younger generation with consciousness about their community history while offering opportunities for reflection and storytelling to those who lived through the AIDS crisis during that time. Detailing the team’s interdisciplinary methodology, pedagogy, and contributions to the history of HIV/AIDS, this article also highlights the ways in which a virtual and group-led method was helpful in attending to the comfort of interviewees; coaching junior researchers; and bolstering sensitive, cross-generational conversations around topics that included emotional storytelling. The authors discuss the successes of the project, detail stories elicited through these conversations, and offer additional cautions and recommendations for teams interested in facilitating digital oral history interviews between multiple generations of queer people.

ABSTRACT This article explores the successes and pitfalls in an open-source project moving interviews and historical digital artifacts into a web-based virtual archive. It argues that the Australian Aboriginal storytelling tradition of “yarning,” or knowledge production through deep listening, offers new ways to engage in oral history’s demands of a shared authority between narrator and interviewer. However, that same practice is challenged by technological platforms that demand authorship by the project producer. The article offers recommendations for best practices to achieve a shared authority within feminist oral history and digital humanities projects.

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the relationship between individual memories and frameworks for collective remembering in Argentina since the most recent civic-military dictatorship (1976–83). Drawing on long-form, semistructured interviews with the former secretary general of one of Argentina’s largest unions, I analyze a moment of conflict in which the narrator confronted archival evidence that contradicted a key claim within his life story: namely, that he had not interacted with regime authorities. The narrator responded to these documents by explicitly claiming that they had been falsified. What I only partially understood at that moment was that the discrepancy between the narrator’s claims and the documentary evidence echoed long-standing accusations that he had either been complicit or actively collaborated with the dictatorship in the 1970s. The article is an attempt to make sense of his reaction along two axes. First, I situate the narrator’s denial of the evidence within the sociopolitical context of Argentina in 2015, analyzing how that denial fits alongside broader shifts in collective memory frameworks. I suggest that the thematic scaffolding of the narrator’s life story can help illuminate a more general response to the dominant emblematic memory of the time. Second, I interrogate our interpersonal relationship and look at the power dynamics that enabled the narrator to feel confident in asserting that the evidence was counterfeit. I argue that our interaction sheds light on problems within oral history methodologies related to assumptions about truth, clashes of personality, and differing levels of linguistic comfort. By considering the narrator’s life story, the accusations against him, and his refutation of evidence that ran counter to his interpretation of the past, I suggest that this incident helps illuminate how narrators remember, and forget, specific aspects of their lives to better fit post-conflict emblematic memories.

ABSTRACT This article explores my choice to not interview rapists and sexual assault perpetrators in an Asian American oral history project. This oral history project developed in response to the rise of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two narrators disclosed the names of sexual assaulters and rapists in off-the-record moments during and after their oral history interviews. While the sexual assaulters and rapists named could be considered important to the community history, I believe that, by not interviewing these men, I follow the lead and best honor the wishes of the women and nonbinary individuals who shared their truths with me.

ABSTRACT This article draws on eight years of collaborative research on the “afterlives” of the revered Tibetan Buddhist hierarch, the tenth Panchen Lama (1938–1989), among Tibetans in Amdo (Qinghai province). The article reflects on the methodological, ethical, and political dilemmas of conducting oral historiographic interviews under authoritarian rule in China. The analysis takes a linguistic anthropological approach to narrative as a world-making and risky practice, bringing that into dialogue with both methodological debates in oral history and recent critical race theories in the United States that explore the potentially liberative practices of subaltern “refusal” amid experiences of precarity and exploitation. The article thereby challenges statist or academic notions of oral history as a politically neutral practice in which national subjects seek the Truth. The author considers instead how the absences or “refusals” in their interlocutors’ stories reveal important aspects of the Panchen Lama’s absent presence for them, as well as the interviewers’ own entanglements in the ultimately uncontrollable generativity of the multimedia figure of the Panchen Lama in and outside of Tibet.

ABSTRACT This article builds upon my previous research on silence and sexual violence in written works of female Holocaust survivors by exploring their oral counterparts in personal narratives from the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. In earlier analyses, I examined textual silence (moments of intrinsic unreadability) and figurative silence (narrative ellipses requiring interpretation) as forms of agency in navigating experiences of sexual violence. The potential of comparing oral and written genres, coupled with a notable gap in the literature regarding the operation of silence in oral history—specifically concerning women’s experiences during the Holocaust—has prompted me to establish a nuanced framework for exploring silences in oral narratives through an interdisciplinary lens. The embodied nature of silence in oral history challenges traditional logocentric views that equate silence with disempowerment, revealing how survivors assert control over their narratives and reframe silence as an act of agency. This approach contributes to contemporary feminist thought by reconsidering the binary between voice and silence, offering a deeper understanding of how violence is mediated in testimony. This article explores deliberate silences as aural and embodied phenomena, revealing the Shoah as a gendered process and silence as both a communicative and empowering strategy in oral history.

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the complex dynamics of reflexivity, the social and psychological elements of subjectivity, and the unconscious processes at work in family oral history research. Centered on an interview with my aunt Penelope, I examine the narrative complexities and interpersonal dynamics that arise when long-standing familial relationships intersect with academic inquiry. I focus on Penelope’s vivid recounting of her late husband Ulysses’s wartime experiences during the events of 1974 in Cyprus and their subsequent conversations about this period. Employing a self-reflexive methodology, I seek first to highlight how Penelope’s narrative intersected with hegemonic and counter-hegemonic historical narratives in post-1974 Cypriot society. I then explore the perceptions of the research project’s objectives between interviewer and narrator, and the challenges of empathy in emotionally charged research encounters. My findings underscore the critical importance of reflexive practice in revealing the narrator’s efforts to construct a coherent narrative and the emotional dimensions of oral histories while also addressing methodological and ethical complexities in family research. Finally, by reflecting on the interpretive aspects of the interview, I offer insights into the interplay between personal memory and historical narratives, the performative dimensions of storytelling, and the role of empathy in shaping oral history accounts.

ABSTRACT Oral history is not just about archiving spoken memories—it is an embodied, creative practice that thrives through play. Serious Play, a graduate course at Columbia University, and Push Play, an experiential workshop, reimagine oral history as an artistic, performative act. By engaging sensory memory, movement, and improvisation, participants explore how bodies, beyond words alone, can serve as vessels of memory. This approach challenges conventional interview structures, fostering inclusive and expansive ways of listening and remembering. Through collaborative exercises and artistic prompts, Serious Play creates a dynamic space where oral historians become artists, oral history becomes an act of creation, and the boundaries of memory stretch beyond speech. Reframing oral history as serious play opens pathways to deeper engagement, joy, and radical inclusivity, thus shifting the field toward more expansive, decolonial possibilities.