Learning about Sharing Authority With the Gathered Voices of Malmö

ABSTRACT

For more than two years we were involved in a collaborative process with the aim of finding out how sharing life stories could ensure “the right to the city” in Malmö, Sweden. This process led to the formation of the Gathered Voices of Malmö, an association for social justice oral history that strives to become a community archive. This article is about how sharing authority was interpreted collectively in the collaborative process when it could not be directly translated into Swedish, and how those interpretations reflect back on sharing authority as an intellectual development. Drawing upon documents created during the collaborative process and interviews with our coparticipants, we revisit what we learned, including our rereading of sharing authority’s genealogy through project-based research. As participants in, and then analysts of, that process, we learned that our trouble with translating sharing authority was not only linguistic, but also had to do with how the approach might conceal community-embedded ways of working, instead normalizing participatory practices which center research rather than community as the primary sphere in which important learnings are made. We suggest that a deeper consideration of the differences between “a shared authority” and “sharing authority” could help us avoid making participation the best practice.

KEYWORDS:

• collaborative oral history
• participatory research
• sharing authority
• urban justice

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

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^2. Albert Capuder, “Trots framgångssagan: Malmös invånare har blivit fattigare,” Helsingborgs dagblad, September 6, 2019, https://www.hd.se/2019-09-06/trots-framgangssagan-malmos-invanare-har-blivit-fattigare.

^3. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019 [1980]), 216.

^4. Marcia R. England and Stephani Simons, “Scary Cities: Urban Geographies of Fear, Difference and Belonging,” Social and Cultural Geography 11, no. 3 (2010): 201–207.

^5. Gyan Prakash, “Introduction: Imagining the City, Darkly,” Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1; Ove Sernhede, René Léon Rosales, and Johan Söderman, “När betongen rätar sin rygg”: Ortenrörelsen och folkbildningens renässans: Från stigmatisering till kunskapssökande och social mobilisering (Göteborg: Daidalos, 2019).

^6. Leandro Schlarek Mulinari, “Contesting Sweden’s Chicago: Why Journalists Dispute the Crime Image of Malmö,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 3 (2017): 206.

^7. Mattias Gardell, “Urban Terror: The Case of Lone Wolf Peter Mangs,” Terrorism and Political Violence 30, no. 5 (2018): 793–811.

^8. Schlarek Mulinari, “Contesting Sweden’s Chicago,” 206.

^9. Ståle Holgersen, Staden och kapitalet: Malmö i krisernas tid (Malmö: Daidalos, 2017), 146–151.

^10. Mats Franzén, Nils Hertting, and Catharina Thörn, Stad till salu: Entreprenörsurbanismen och det offentliga rummets värde (Göteborg: Daidalos, 2016), 22–39; Dalia Muhktar-Landgren, Planering för framsteg och gemenskap: Om den kommunala utvecklingsplaneringens idémässiga förutsättningar (Lund: Lund University, 2012), 179–197; Johan Pries, Social Neoliberalism through Urban Planning: Bureaucratic Formations and Contradictions in Malmö since 1985 (Lund: Lund University, 2017), 15–22.

^11. Steven C. High, Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014), 3–29.

^12. One work that proposes working collaboratively is Elizabeth Miller, Edward Little, and Steven High, eds., Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017); a work that critiques popular forms of oral history for being caught up in storytelling culture is Alexander Freund, “Under Storytelling’s Spell? Oral History in a Neoliberal Age,” Oral History Review 42, no. 1 (2015): 96–132.

^13. During the project we did two rounds of interviews with key participants. In the first round of interviews, we focused on the interviewees’ motivations for participating and their expectations for the process. In a second round of interviews, we followed the life story format, which led interviewees into explorations of the connections between their biographies (including their experiences of urban life in Malmö) and our collaborative process. Since some of the interviewees have asked to be anonymized, we have used pseudonyms for all our interviewees, and also have had to anonymize the organizations they come from. The collaboration involved many individual and collective actors, but core participants came from Malmö University, Lund University, the Museum of Movements (MoM), Malmö’s Iraqi, African-Swedish, and Roma communities, and from urban justice initiatives. Interview recordings and transcripts are in the possession of the interviewers.

^14. See, for example, Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, eds. Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World (Philadelphia, PA: Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011); Kathryn Sikes, “Shared Authority, Reflective Practice, and Community Outreach: Thoughts on Parallel Conversations in Public History and Historical Archaeology,” paper presented at Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington, January 8, 2015.

^15. Amy Starecheski, review of A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, by Michael Frisch, Oral History Review 44, no. 2 (2017): 375–376.

^16. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 1.

^17. Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), xv–xvi; Brooke Blackmon Bryan, review of A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, by Michael Frisch, Oral History Review 44, no. 2 (2017): 380.

^18. Linda Shopes, “Commentary: Sharing Authority,” Oral History Review 30 (2003): 110; compare Starecheski, review of A Shared Authority, 375. Shopes is referring to Alessandro Portelli, “Methodology: Research as an Experiment in Equality,” in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 29–44.

^19. Frisch, A Shared Authority, xxvii–xx; Luisa Passerini, “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” History Workshop 8 (no. 8, 1979): 84.

^20. Frisch, A Shared Authority, 9.

^21. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso Books, 2012 [1994]), 8.

^22. Alistair Thomson, “Introduction: Sharing Authority—Oral History and the Collaborative Process,” Oral History Review 30, no. 1 (2003): 22.

^23. Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

^24. Daniel Kerr, “‘We Know What the Problem Is’: Using Oral History to Develop a Collaborative Analysis of Homelessness from the Bottom Up,” Oral History Review 30, no. 1 (2003): 29–45.

^25. Elizabeth Miller, “Building Participation in the Outreach for the Documentary The Water Front,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’etudes canadiennes 43, no. 1 (2009): 59–86; Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 57–58.

^26. High, Oral History at the Crossroads, 3–29.

^27. Sujatha Fernandes, Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–13.

^28. Wendy Rickard, “Collaborating with Sex Workers in Oral History,” Oral History Review 30, no. 1 (2003): 47–59.

^29. Alicia J. Rouverol, “Collaborative Oral History in a Correctional Setting: Promise and Pitfalls,” Oral History Review 30, no. 1 (2003): 61–85.

^30. Alan Wong, “Conversations for the Real World: Shared Authority, Self-Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’etudes canadiennes 43, no. 1 (2009): 242, 245.

^31. Stacey Zemrzycki, “Sharing Authority with Baba,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’etudes canadiennes 43, no. 1 (2009).

^32. High, Oral History at the Crossroads, 17.

^33. High, Oral History at the Crossroads, 10.

^34. Richard Cándida Smith, “Publishing Oral History: Oral Exchange and Print Culture,” in Handbook of Oral History, ed. Thomas L. Carlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: AltaMira press, 2006), 411–424.

^35. Freund, “Under Storytelling’s Spell?,” 96–132.

^36. Joan W. Scott, “The Third Annual History and Theory Lecture: The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History,” History and Theory (February 2012): 65.

^37. Mary Rizzo, “Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater,” Oral History Review 48, no. 2 (2021): 171.

^38. Rizzo, “Who Speaks for Baltimore,” 156.

^39. Lisa Ndejuru, “Sharing Authority as Deep Listening and Sharing the Load,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 43, no. 1 (2009): 9.

^40. Fredrik Elg, “The Museum of Movements: Presenting the Results of a Feasibility Study and Introducing the Next Step,” in Creating the City: Identity, Memory and Participation: Conference Preceedings, ed. Pål Brunnström and Ragnhild Claesson (Malmö: Malmö University, 2019); Olga Zabalueva, “‘It’s the Right Who Belong in a Museum’: Radical Popular Movement in the Museum Context,” Museological Review 23 (2019): 46–57.

^41. Lars Berggren and Roger Johansson, “I Turning Torsos tidevarv,” in Malmö stads historia 9:I, ed. Roger Johansson (Malmö: Kira förlag, 2020), 13–29.

^42. Mikael Stigendal and Per-Olof Östergren, Malmö’s Path Towards a Sustainable Future: Health, Welfare and Justice, 3d ed. (Malmö: Commission for a Socially Sustainable Malmö, 2013).

^43. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September–October, 2008): 23.

^44. Richard Rodger and Joanna Herbert, “Frameworks: Testimony, Representation and Interpretation,” in Testimonies of the City: Identity, Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3.

^45. Joseph Plaster, “Safe for Whom? And Whose Families? Narrative, Urban Neoliberalism, and Queer Oral History on San Francisco’s Polk Street,” Public Historian 42, no. 3 (2020): 91.

^46. High, Oral History at the Crossroads, 24.

^47. Ndejuru, “Sharing Authority as Deep Listening and Sharing the Load,” 8.

^48. Alessandro Portelli, The Order has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). The reading of Portelli’s book coincided with representatives of the Danish far-right party Stram Kurs burning the Koran publicly in Malmö, an act that was followed by uprisings, which in turn occasioned public condemnations and media coverage that divided Malmöites into respectable and violence-prone strata.

^49. Lizette Gradén and Tom O’Dell, “Rörelsernas museum—mellan ekonomi och politik …, ” in Polarisering och samexistens: Kulturella förändringar i vår tid, ed. Maria Zachariasson, Magnus Öhlander, and Oscar Pripp (Tullinge: Boréa, 2022); Meltem Ozturk, “Closing a Museum: A Cultural Analysis on the Dismantling Process of the Museum of Movements in Malmö” (MA thesis, Lund University, 2021).

^50. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 43.

^51. Linda Shopes, “Commentary,” 110; Alessandro Portelli, “Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience,” Oral History Review 45, no. 2 (2018): 239–48.

^52. Greenspan and Bolkolsky, “When Is an Interview an Interview?,” 446–447.

^53. Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, 2 ed. (St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2011), 3.

^54. François Matarasso, A Restless Art: How Participation Won, and Why It Matters (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, UK Branch, 2019), https://arestlessart.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/2019-a-restless-art.pdf, 45–46.

^55. Matarasso, A Restless Art, 46.

^56. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

^57. Frisch, “Commentary,” 113.

^58. Scott, “The Third Annual History and Theory Lecture,” 65.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Nilsson Mohammadi

Robert Nilsson Mohammadi is an associate senior lecturer at Malmö University. His most recent employment was as a project manager for oral history at the Museum of Movements. Nilsson Mohammadi has researched the social movements of the 1960s. His expertise also includes memory studies, public humanities, and community art. His work revolves around utilizing history production as a valuable tool in community development and organizing social movements, with a particular emphasis on community archiving. Since 2019, he has been actively involved in the creation of an antiracist monument and memory site meant to replace the divisions, fear, and self-doubt initially instilled by a racist serial killer and subsequently exacerbated by institutional responses. Email: [email protected]

Sima Nurali Wolgast

Sima Nurali Wolgast has been a psychologist since 2007 and a psychotherapist since 2013. Currently, she is a senior lecturer at Lund University. Her doctoral thesis focused on investigating various factors that influence recruiters when selecting candidates from a pool of applicants comprising individuals from ethnic backgrounds other than Swedish, as well as white Swedish applicants. She actively participates in research aimed at developing interventions to address segregation and discrimination, as well as interventions promoting psychological well-being among minority groups. In her role as a senior lecturer at the Department of Psychology, she teaches courses on psychotherapy, creativity, social psychology, and conversational methods. Email: [email protected]