The Oral History Review’s inaugural issue, published fifty years ago in 1973, explored themes with which we are all quite familiar today: employing oral history and oral tradition to capture, tell, and preserve the histories of marginalized, abused, and ostracized groups in America; using oral history as a teaching tool; developing methods and approaches to use when interviewing specific groups of narrators; understanding the legal considerations of our work; and acknowledging social, cultural, economic, and political variances in the practice of oral history within other national contexts. These articles and those that followed in subsequent issues over the past half century guided us through our relationships with our narrators, the stories they tell, and how we work with those narrators to make their histories available and accessible to others. This archive of OHR articles demonstrates how we as a field and as members of the Oral History Association have crafted what we consider to be best practices, shaped by our collective knowledge and experiences shared in books, at conferences, and in conversations with each other at regional, national, and international meetings.
In the fall of 2021, we and our editorial board began to reflect on the current state of oral history, initially discussing the topic within the context of the journal’s fortieth volume (2013; guest editor: Doug Boyd) that focused on the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) Project. Soon, though, we realized that many of the questions we were asking ourselves based on our own experiences—the talks we attended, the articles we read in this journal and others, and the fruitful discussions and debates we had with colleagues and friends—went well beyond revisiting oral history practice since the launch of OHDA. They pulled us into questions about the state of oral history’s current best practices, especially in the wake of a global pandemic and ongoing racial, social, cultural, economic, and political inequities nationally and internationally. So, we decided to ask our readership to reflect on contemporary theories and practices in oral history in a call for papers for a planned special issue on Disrupting Best Practices:
As oral historians, we define our field by a set of commonly-held best practices – the conventions that distinguish our work from journalism, ethnography, folklore, and amateur recordings.
But what if our *best practices* prevent us from innovating, reaching new communities and audiences, and more thoughtfully listening to and preserving stories? How do practitioners in the field of oral history–whether interviewers, archivists, community organizers, activists, historians, folklorists, or other scholars–approach and adapt these guidelines? OHR’s mission is to interrogate the methods and theories of the discipline, and at times this may mean reimagining conventional standards and upending the way we approach our practice. Many practitioners have already engaged in these processes of questioning our methods, including authors in our recent special section on oral history and COVID-19 and our special issue on ethics in oral history. Likewise, through recent initiatives and in informal conversations, practitioners are considering how we can do our work better. For example, Jess Lamar Reece Hollar’s proposed new guidelines for equity budgeting, the Oral History Association published the Independent Practitioners’ Toolkit for Oral Historians addressing alternative ways of working in the field without institutional affiliation, and the Oral History in the Digital Age project has0 published new guidelines that respond to the digital environment. Mary Rizzo’s recent blog post, “Is Sharing Authority a Cop-Out?” questioned one of the most revered tenets of oral history; Crystal Baik’s forthcoming OHR article “From “Best” to Situated and Relational: Notes Toward a Decolonizing Praxis,” [since published in issue 49.1] challenges ideas including copyright and archival ownership, and Fanny Garcia has focused on distinct practices for interviewing migrant families.
The Oral History Review invites oral history practitioners to submit articles considering ways they have disrupted best practices in order to adapt and change the mold. Questions prospective authors might consider include, but are not limited to:
When might it be appropriate to compensate narrators for their testimonies? What are the logistics, challenges, and benefits of such practices?
How have digital technologies changed approaches to disseminating and analyzing interviews? How have scholars used interviewees’ words as data? How can we examine oral history at the macro level instead of at the micro level?
In what ways have oral historians attempted to decolonize the archive?
How can practitioners adapt the tenets of shared authority and informed consent when necessary? How does anonymizing interviews change these practices?
Should oral historians embrace institutional review, or embrace being treated as journalists?
How do social media and easily shared video and audio change the gold standard of the life history interview?
Many authors answered our call.
The articles in this second issue of the fiftieth volume of the Oral History Review represent just a few of the practices with which we need to engage as a community. What these articles reveal will be of no surprise to anyone who has worked on an oral history project: each project and each interview is distinct–in the stories they tell, in the audiences they reach, in their objectives and outcomes. No single best practice can apply to oral history as a field in its entirety; as Douglas Lambert writes in his article herein, many decisions in oral history “defy best-practice framings: the choices involved always ‘depend.’” As such, this issue interrogates best practices in their multiplicity, acknowledging that one size can never fit all. We have best practices, plural, and should, from time to time, disrupt them.
Fanny Garcia and Nara Minanich’s “Money Talks: Narrative Compensation in Oral History” pushes practitioners to consider the possibility of paying project participants. Taking a point/counterpoint approach, the authors think deeply about the consequences of compensation, describing the lessons they’ve drawn from their own work with Central American migrant families and ultimately urging oral historians to make the decision of whether to issue compensation a critical component of the project planning.
In “Oral History Indexing (OHI),” Douglas Lambert most directly engages with Oral History in the Digital Age, by examining a practice that has developed from the digital age’s renewed emphasis on the oral history recording as a primary source–rather than the transcript. Through his detailed analysis of the modes through which several prominent oral history archives have developed indexing practices–the act of creating metadata tied to the time stamps in oral history media–Lambert demonstrates the evolving nature of a humanistic field dependent on technology. Rather than attempt to encapsulate a set of OHI best practices, he urges care and flexibility, acknowledging that “distinct projects require distinct solutions, and that OHI methods are subjective—tailored to the context of individual collections and institutions with distinct OHI methods and processes.”
Leslie McCartney reflects on the long history of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks Oral History Program in her article, “The Evolution of Best Practice at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program,” detailing the ways in which the Oral History Program has navigated relationships with narrators, addressed the legacies of release agreements signed well before the modern, digital age, and interacted with communities to obtain release agreements for interviews missing them. She does this through a close reading of iterations of legal release agreements used at the university and a discussion of two case studies. Throughout her article, McCartney also emphasizes the need to work closely with communities to make sure their histories are respected and made available in ways that reflect communal and individual beliefs and traditions.
In “Learning about Sharing Authority with the Gathered Voices of Malmö,” Robert Nilsson Mohammadi and Sima Wolgast reflect on the meaning of shared authority in their effort to translate the phrase into Swedish, and how the varied interpretations of the concept reflect back on sharing authority as an intellectual enterprise and evolution. The authors lay out the genealogy of shared authority in project-based research and suggest careful consideration of the differences between a shared authority and sharing authority, with the aim of avoiding the expectation of participation as best practice.
Rhonda Povey, Susan Page, and Michelle Trudgett, in “Getting it Right: Safeguarding a Respected Space for Indigenous Oral Histories and Truthtelling,” contemplates the ways in which oral history can be used to understand Indigenous experiences and perspectives of a post-colonial past. The authors call for Indigenist methodologies and collaborative design, affirming the “fundamental prerogative for all those in the domain of history-making in colonized contexts, to work with Indigenous people in the rewriting of post-contact history.”
As our tenure as co-editors of the OHR draws to a close with this issue, we find this an opportune time to take pause on the current state of our field and to reflect on the possibility and potential for continuing to create a more equitable, intentional, collaborative, and inclusive set of guidelines for all practitioners entering into the work of oral history. We fully realize that there are more topics for discussion, more opportunities for interrogation, than we could fit in this one issue, and we look forward to reading how future OHR authors continue to disrupt best practices, and how they address many other issues and themes in the volumes of OHR we have not yet even imagined.
It is impossible to name everyone who has been so generous with their time over the past six years, many who have appeared in these pages as members of the editorial board, as authors, and as media and book reviewers, and many whose names could not appear because of their roles as blinded peer reviewers. Please know that in the years to come, as we meet at conferences, at workshops, in the halls of institutions, in the stacks of libraries, and in coffee shops, we will be thanking you in person for your kindness, your support, and for the time you gave the journal to make it a flagship for our field.