‘We Bounce Off Each Other’s Vibe’: The Importance of Symmetrical Intersubjectivity between Interviewer and Narrator

ABSTRACT

The field of oral history has long theorized the intersubjectivities forged between narrators and interviewers, yet there is still a lingering assumption in some oral history literature that the positionality of the interviewer in relation to the narrator does not matter much to the interview process. This article seeks to challenge these assumptions by reporting on empirical data collected via interviews and focus groups with narrators who told their stories as part of two different peer-to-peer oral history programs led by two different community archives centered on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC): Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). In peer-to-peer oral histories, narrators and interviewers share at least some formative experiences and identities, reflecting a relationship of equality rather than extraction. Our findings indicate that, across participants from both organizations, shared positionalities engendered trust, safety, and rapport, creating conditions for life-changing interviews (that is, conversations that resulted in significant realizations and actions in narrators’ lives). Peer-to-peer oral history programs, in which members of minoritized communities interview each other, correct the power imbalance inherent when members of dominant groups interview narrators from minoritized groups. They counter extractive models in which credentialed academics mine minoritized community members as sources. We propose the notion of symmetrical intersubjectivity to describe the ways in which positionalities held in common between narrator and interviewer create the conditions for more honest, rich, and intimate life histories to be shared and recorded.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• community archives
• intersubjectivity
• power
• relationships

There is a force, a generative force of movement that pulls and pushes simultaneously. At the interstices of interviewer and interview, the coming together and coming apart produces and is produced by tensions, powers, and proximities. Intimate and public spaces are stitched together at this pivot. Two seemingly distinct gradations of intimacy that stand opposing but become an in-between space of mediated navigation that creates imbricating affectivities. Pushing. Pulling.¹

— Jamie A. Lee

Writing about the mutually co-constructed relationship between narrator and interviewer, Jamie A. Lee—oral historian, archivist, and founder of the Arizona Queer Archives—describes a push and a pull, a distance and a proximity between two forces negotiated through the interview. It is this pushing and pulling, the simultaneous sameness and difference, about which this article is concerned. What points of difference matter in oral history? How should sameness between narrator and interview be defined? When is sameness between narrator and interviewer not only desirable but necessary?

The field of oral history has theorized the intersubjectivities forged between narrators and interviewers. Yet power and difference in this relationship warrant much further attention. There is still a lingering assumption in some oral history literature that the positionality of the interviewer in relation to the narrator does not matter much to the interview process.² This assumption, particularly (though not only) as it relates to racialized difference between narrators and interviewers, obfuscates the way whiteness haunts oral history as an unspoken but given frame of reference.³ This article seeks to challenge these assumptions by reporting on empirical data collected via interviews and focus groups with narrators who told their stories as part of two different peer-to-peer oral history programs led by two different community archives centered on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). In peer-to-peer oral histories, narrators and interviewers share at least some formative experiences and identities, reflecting a relationship of equality rather than extraction.

The authors of this article are part of the UCLA Community Archives Lab, a group of faculty and graduate students in information studies who conduct transformative research reconceptualizing dominant Western archival studies alongside, in collaboration with, and in support of independent community archives.⁴ We are primarily a research team rather than a team of practice; rather than stewarding records and conducting oral histories, we study the work that archivists and oral historians do in order to build theory in the fields of archival studies, information studies, and oral history. Our previous work explored the emotional impact of community archives on users from the minoritized communities they serve and represent.⁵ From “suddenly discovering yourself existing,” to “being able to imagine otherwise,” our prior research detailed the ontological, epistemological, and social aspects of robust and complex representation after experiences of symbolic annihilation in archives.⁶ In our research, we have focused on users of archives, which has led to new conceptions of and methods for assessing archival impact (particularly emotional impact) through qualitative interviews and focus groups that we have conducted with researchers of all types, from curious community members, to activists, organizers, genealogists, artists, students, and academics.⁷ Yet users of archives are only one group of stakeholders in the documentation process. Recently, with input from community partners, we have turned our attention to the impact of community memory projects on record creators, specifically on those who narrate their stories as part of oral history projects.

Our first partner on this project is Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). TAVP, in its own words, “is a public memory archive that fosters deeper understandings of the effects of state violence on individuals, families, and communities.”⁸ Their community partners are “majority BIPOC people who are directly impacted by state violence and the criminal punishment system. Because poor and working-class communities of color are disproportionately impacted by state violence, TAVP ensures these communities are decision makers in their projects at every stage.”⁹ Their Visions After Violence Community Fellowship program is a nine-month fellowship in which those directly impacted by state violence design oral history projects, conduct and record interviews with people from their community, and creatively activate their work for the public. This program affirms TAVP’s belief that interviewers with shared lived experiences bring unique and necessary insight to memory work.

Our second partner on this project is the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). SAADA collects, preserves, and shares stories of South Asian Americans, and through its postcustodial digital archives, participatory storytelling initiatives, and educational outreach, shapes public understanding about the more than 6.1 million people in the US who identify as South Asian American. SAADA’s Archival Creators Fellowship supports community members in becoming active participants in proposing, designing, appraising, curating, and creating archival collections that reflect the histories and perspectives of the most marginalized groups within the South Asian American community. The participants include community members who are working class, undocumented, LGBTQ+, Dalit, Indo-Caribbean, and/or from other South Asian groups that have been traditionally excluded from dominant narratives. Because there is a lack of existing accurate documentation of these communities, many Archival Creators projects feature oral histories.

Although these two different organizations represent and serve two different communities, they share a commitment to centering the voices of the most marginalized and vulnerable BIPOC communities in archival work. This study, as part of a larger community-engaged research project with both organizations, focuses on each organization’s peer-to-peer oral history work. Working together, a team from the UCLA Community Archives Lab, TAVP, and SAADA, developed a project to both answer research questions about the impact of oral history work (the work of the UCLA Community Archives Lab) and to implement emotionally responsive oral history projects based on the findings (the work of TAVP and SAADA). The three-year community-led participatory action research (PAR) project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is called “Virtual Belonging: Assessing the Affective Impact of Digital Records Creation in Community Archives.”¹⁰ This article is one of several to emerge from the “Virtual Belonging” project (in which we report on the impact of record creation on those who share their stories with TAVP or SAADA) with the goal of more holistically assessing the impact of community archives and of providing appropriate care to minoritized people who narrate and record oral histories for inclusion in archives.

We ask, In doing oral history, does shared identity between narrator and interviewer matter? Do interviewers that have identities and experiences in common with their narrators conduct better oral histories? How does a shared sense of positionality between minoritized narrators and interviewers affect the narrators’ experiences of telling their life stories? These questions, answered through the empirical data that the UCLA Community Archives Lab collected from TAVP and SAADA participants help us theorize a larger question of critical import to the field: How does power work through oral history?¹¹

Literature Review

Although oral histories are central to many independent, minoritized-identity-based community archives, discussions in archival studies have only recently begun to address the stewardship of oral history collections, most notably in the work of Jamie A. Lee and Thuy Vo Dang.¹² Conversely, while many community archives theories and practices form the architecture by which oral histories are preserved and made accessible, literature in oral history has yet to address in detail the specific concerns of working with independent, minoritized-identity-based community archives (as opposed to university or museum repositories).¹³ This literature review is conducted in the hopes of further bridging the two fields, acknowledging the significant overlap in subject, if not approach.

Intersubjectivity, Positionality, and Power in Oral History

Since at least the 1970s, oral historians (particularly feminist oral historians) have examined the relationship between interviewers and narrators.¹⁴ Shifting from a positivist paradigm that positioned interviewers as objective recorders of fact to an interpretivist framework that acknowledged the complex interplay between narrator and interviewer in constructing an intersubjective dialogue, changes in the field of oral history mirror those of other humanistic and social scientific fields in recent decades. As Alistair Thomson summarized, “one key development … has been an acceptance that inevitably the interviewer’s questions and character, and how he or she is perceived by the interviewee, affect the stories that are shared. Equally the interviewer is also impacted by the experience of recording the life story.”¹⁵

Oral historians came to understand oral histories as the products of the interplay between two people, each with their own subjectivity, identity, motivation, language, experiences, and positionality. As communication scholars Allan Futrell and Charles A. Willard wrote, “the oral history interview may more precisely be viewed as a dialogue between interviewer and narrator—a mutual construction of reality” in which interviewer and narrator negotiate meaning.¹⁶ This interaction produces intersubjectivity—what Lynn Abrams defined as “the relationship between the interviewee and the interviewer, or in other words, the interpersonal dynamics of the interview situation and the process by which the participants cooperate to create a shared narrative.”¹⁷ Some scholars have noted the affective or emotional dimensions of intersubjectivity; as Katie Holmes wrote, “ … the intersubjective relationship between, and expectations of, the interviewer and the interviewee shapes the emotional terrain of the interview.”¹⁸ She further posited, “In the interview context, there are two subjectivities, two emotional underlays: the interviewer’s and the interviewee’s. The dynamic between them shapes the possibilities for remembering emotion and its expression.”¹⁹ More recently, Adam Wiesner has highlighted the relationship forged by the shared emotional experience of dialogue marked by mutual vulnerability, deep listening, and empathy.²⁰

As part of exploring intersubjectivity, some oral historians have theorized the role of difference between narrator and interviewer. Abrams asserted that “a different interviewer would solicit different words, perhaps even a different story or version of it.”²¹ As early as the 1980s, some scholars acknowledged the importance of racial difference in determining what narrators disclose to interviewers. For example, James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle wrote, “the most important cue an interviewer was likely to have given [to a narrator] was one presented before any conversation took place. Was the interviewer white or black?”²² Yet while some have acknowledged the impact of differences between interviewers and narrators, the field has yet to fully grapple with issues of power, particularly as they pertain to racialized difference and racism.

Feminist oral historians first drew attention to power differentials between interviewers and narrators but often overlooked the importance of race and class differences in stressing the sameness of women’s experiences. “Not all of us had yet learned to be skeptical of the claims for a single feminist methodology,” wrote Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai.²³ But soon, they continued, “It was no longer possible to ignore the distinct imbalances of power and privilege that characterize most women’s oral history projects.”²⁴ Describing then-recent developments in the field, Valerie Yow wrote in 1995 that feminist oral historians

seek to be become more aware of the political situation in the interpersonal relationship and of the political context within which interviews can be used. We analyze the effects of differences in gender, race, class, status, age, and culture. The stance that there is a researcher and there is a subject is replaced by the conviction that two people, each bringing a different kind of knowledge to the interview, share equally in a process of discovery.²⁵

Yow’s approach certainly acknowledges power differences, but ultimately posits an equal relationship of knowledge-sharing as not just a possibility, but an ethical conviction, even across described lines of difference. As Alessandro Portelli has claimed, the interview is “an experiment in equality.”²⁶ Yet, the effects of gender, race, class, status, age, and their attending oppressions do not dissipate through self-reflexivity and analysis. Scholar Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, influenced by the Black feminist tradition, warned against a single-vector analysis, claiming that “multiple, interconnecting variables are more representative of real-life experiences,” pointing toward what we might now call intersectionality.²⁷

Most of the literature from the 1990s and 2000s asserts that while insiders have access to different stories than outsiders, the stories are neither better nor worse, only different. British historians Joanna Herbert and Richard Rodger typified this position when they wrote, “scholars have contended that interviews with an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ produce different types of knowledge; neither is superior, yet it is crucial to attend to how the social location of the interviewer may shape the interview.”²⁸ What’s more, most of this literature focused on race as the most prominent factor of difference.

Some scholars have even claimed insider status as a disadvantage. Sherna Berger Gluck, in an important dialogue with Susan H. Armitage, cautioned, “the complex and shifting relationship between interviewer and narrator cannot be captured in simplistic assumptions about ‘insiderness.’ ” She continued, “In fact, sometimes the insider is severely disadvantaged, both by the assumptions she makes of shared meaning and by the assumptions the narrator makes about her.”²⁹ Yet more than thirty years ago, Karen Olson and Linda Shopes accurately assessed that “what is missing … is an explicit analysis of ‘different’ as also meaning ‘unequal.’ ”³⁰

Writing in the context of racial differences between himself as a white (European) interviewer and an African American narrator, Alessandro Portelli posited that “there’s always gonna be a line” between the two of them. Furthermore, Portelli claimed that it is up to Black narrators to determine when that line is crossed, and when an authentic relationship of trust can begin.³¹ There are two assumptions at play here. The first is that the interviewer is assumed to be white. Whiteness is “an unspoken norm” in oral history, as oral historian Crystal Mun-hye Baik has asserted.³² (Similarly, Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis critiqued white feminist oral history for positing “the white female norm as the standard by which all others are judged.”³³) The second assumption here, like in most of the oral history literature, is that, with time and good rapport, that line of (in this case racial) difference can be crossed—that Portelli’s being white can be overcome in an interview with a Black American to access insider information.³⁴ Referring to Portelli’s “line” almost twenty years later, Linda Shopes wrote, “It is precisely because of these differences that we interview the people we do in the first place, and it is these differences that shape the dialogue at the heart of oral history.”³⁵ Similarly, in the widely used practical handbook, Doing Oral History, Donald A. Ritchie asked, “Do differences in race, gender, or age between interviewers and interviewees make any difference in the interview?” He continued, “Differences in age, race, gender, and ethnicity may influence both the questions and the responses elicited … . Some may want to match interviewers closely with interviewees, but men and women of different races and ethnicity should be able to interview each other … . Even without any common reference, the interviewer can compensate by having thoroughly researched the subject and being familiar with names, dates, and events long past.”³⁶ In this formulation, difference can be overcome with proper research.

At the same time, there is occasionally consternation in the literature over genuine friendships and authentic relationships developing between interviewers and narrators outside of and after the interview. Valerie Yow asked, “Do I like them too much?” in a well-known article of the same title.³⁷ Yow wrote, “There is also the possibility that the interviewer can be too much invested in the topic, too closely identifying with a person or cause.”³⁸ Similarly, oral historian Carrie Hamilton cautioned against interviewers identifying and empathizing too much with narrators telling their stories as victims of human rights abuse.³⁹ Assigning negative value to affinity or empathy between interviewers and narrators or the refusal to assign value to differences between the two is notable in light of feminist standpoint theories that assert the importance of researcher positionality in determining what questions get asked and how they get answered. In contrast to the oral history literature described above, feminist oral history also positions radical empathy as an epistemological and political tool.⁴⁰

Thus, while some of the oral history literature from previous decades, particularly feminist literature, acknowledges difference between interview and narrator, it often fails to acknowledge how that difference (particularly, but not limited to, racial difference) may signal an insurmountable power differential. More specifically in relation to racial difference, much of this literature does not question whether white interviewers are ethically, ontologically, and epistemologically best positioned to interview BIPOC subjects in the first place. These assertions further a kind of color-blind racism that first (and often falsely) positions interviewers as white and second, positions white interviewers as good enough or simply differently poised rather than ontologically and epistemologically unequipped or ill-equipped to conduct oral history with BIPOC narrators.

Some of the assumptions made by oral historians in the 1990s and early 2000s have become ethically and politically untenable in the political and cultural context of the last few years. Questions of race, difference, and power have very recently been brought to the fore in the field, led by BIPOC oral historians. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, for example, brilliantly illustrated the ways in which whiteness and settler proprietorship have legitimated certain formal Western forms of oral history, while delegitimizing the situated and relational practices of listening and telling found in nondominant cultures.⁴¹ In Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, Nēpia Mahuika exposed the way in which unspoken assumptions of whiteness and dominant white values permeate the academic field of oral history, from emphasizing recordings over acts of speech, to treating knowledge transfer as decontextualized and universal rather than a situated relational practice, and to generating decontextualized best practices rather than culturally situated protocols.⁴² White scholar Elizabeth Melton’s “hometown ethnography” approach, while named after a geographic rather than racial positionality, seriously considers race, and specifically Melton’s whiteness and her family’s history of property ownership, as a foundational factor in the web of relationships woven, in part, by oral history research.⁴³ The important 2020 Oral History Association panel, “Is Oral History White? Investigating Race in Three Baltimore Oral History Projects,” followed by the 2022 symposium, “Assessing the Role of Race and Power in Oral History Theory and Practice,” focused on the need for oral history as an academic field to grapple with its historical and ongoing whiteness and to dismantle the ways that white supremacy culture has permeated its theories and practices.⁴⁴ While race is not the only vector of difference addressed by the field, it has become one of the most salient in the contemporary US context.

In this contemporary milieu, the dynamics of insider/outsider status and its influence on rapport and trust between interviewer and narrator have been revisited in some recent literature. In one of the few articles to emphasize the importance of shared positionality between interviewer and narrator, Amy Tooth Murphy, a scholar of oral and queer history, contrasted her experiences as an out lesbian interviewing other lesbians with her experience as an outsider interviewing survivors of the Bethnal Green tube station disaster in London. Murphy wrote both that “the impact of the interviewer’s position as insider/outsider cannot be overlooked,” and that “in the case of LGBTQ oral histories, the perception of this shared identity is invaluable in overcoming many other social and cultural differences, placing the emphasis on a mutual understanding of the issues faced as members of a marginalised and historically oppressed group.”⁴⁵ Canadian oral history scholar Alan Wong positions himself as an “intimate insider” with his narrators and noted the importance of relationships in creating an environment for deep listening, writing that “familiarity often bred content.”⁴⁶ Insider/outsider dynamics simmer just beneath the surface of oral history, and thus warrant further attention, as do the vectors along which this difference is distributed (be it race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, experience, or some combination thereof).

However, work published in the past few years has also started to address the complex nuances of power as it relates to insider/outsider differences. Surely, by invoking positionality we cannot assume that everyone who inhabits the same identities share the same perspectives, because an interviewer and narrator that are the same race, gender, class, sexuality, or ability will certainly mediate other differences. Some oral historians, like Francena F. L. Turner and ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, noted that even when racial identities are shared between narrator and interviewer, factors like gender, class, and generational differences can foreclose possibilities for intersectional analysis.⁴⁷ Amy Tooth Murphy also called attention to the dangers of “assuming sameness” in the face of difference based on shared identity.⁴⁸ In acknowledging systems of oppression, communities of resistance, and vectors of power, these oral historians remind us that it is important not to collapse important differences between individuals.

Yet while these authors have started to address how the field deals with difference between interviewers and narrators, there has yet to be a generalized theoretical analysis of how power operates along those differences. There has also been a lack of methodological claims and ethical guidelines for practice in relation to those differences. Nor is there a thorough exploration of how community-engaged research, built on ongoing webs of relationships, demands a lasting engagement with narrators after the interview is over. Curiously, oral history literature does not systematically and empirically ask narrators what they think about the shared or differing positionalities they experience or the affinities they might feel with their interviewers. This information and analysis are key from a community-engaged research perspective, in which minoritized communities assert “nothing about us, without us.” Here, the community archives literature is useful.

Community Archives

Oral histories, in the dominant paradigm, are not just told—they are recorded, with the intention of being preserved and made accessible by archives. Yet there has been little dialogue between oral historians and archivists and little overlap between the literature in oral history and archival studies. Archival studies is a subfield of information studies concerned with the creation, preservation, description, use, and digitization of records as potential evidence of human activity that cross space and time. Shifting from a positivist paradigm that viewed archivists as neutral and objective and focused on bureaucratic records, the last two decades have seen a shift (parallel to that in oral history) toward examining power, politics, and positionality in archival theory and practice.

As part of that recent shift, archival studies has turned toward the study of community archives, “independent memory organizations emerging from and coalescing around vulnerable communities, past and present.”⁴⁹ The first attempts to describe community archives in the field emerged from London-based scholars. Writing in 2009, archival studies scholars Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd stated, “A community is any group of people who come together and present themselves as such, and a ‘community archive’ is the product of their attempts to document the history of their commonality.”⁵⁰ The same research team defined community archives as “collections of material gathered primarily by members of a given community and over whose community members exercise some level of control … . The defining characteristic of community archives is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible their history of their particular group and/or locality on their own terms.”⁵¹ Archival studies scholar (and coauthor of this article) Michelle Caswell has further distinguished “independent, minoritized identity-based community archives” from both university-based community-engaged projects and some historical societies that represent dominant groups and can uphold systems of oppression.⁵² Some archival theorists, such as Jarrett Drake, questioned whether the label “community archives” has any utility at all, pressing instead for a distinction between liberatory and oppressive archives, regardless of type of institution or repository at which collections reside.⁵³

Scholars portray community archives as grassroots alternatives to mainstream repositories through which communities can make autonomous collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shape collective memory of their own pasts, and control the means through which stories about their past(s) are constructed. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd named political activism, community empowerment, and social change as prime motivating factors for those who volunteer at these organizations.⁵⁴ Caswell has identified several factors that distinguish community archives from other kinds of repositories, namely participation, shared stewardship, multiple formats and voices, archival activism, and reflexivity.⁵⁵ Activists and advocates like Bergis Jules have stressed the connection between fiscal sustainability and archival autonomy, calling for funders to shift priorities and redistribute financial resources toward community archives.⁵⁶ For many minoritized communities, these archives may have life-and-death consequences. For example, TAVP executive director Gabriel Daniel Solís has termed TAVP collections “archives of survival” that serve as “conduits for the channeling of harm into opportunities for healing.”⁵⁷

Archival studies, steeped in dominant Western bureaucratic recordkeeping traditions, has, however, only recently begun to address and accommodate community-based theories and practices. Writing in 2012, archival theorist Terry Cook declared that the then-emerging emphasis on community in archival studies constituted a paradigm shift in dominant archival theory akin to previous conceptual guideposts archivists have relied upon, such as evidence and memory.⁵⁸ In the realm of practice, the rise of interest in community archives from within dominant archival discourse has meant reframing the functions of appraisal, description, and access to align with community-specific priorities, reflect contingent cultural values, and allow for greater participation in archival decision-making.⁵⁹ These shifts have vastly influenced university-based practices as well, with increased emphasis on “community-driven practices,” as archivist Nancy Godoy described them, even within mainstream institutions.⁶⁰ Coauthor Caswell, influenced by feminist standpoint theory (which posits one’s positionality as a basis from which to make knowledge claims), has called on archivists across all types of institutions to acknowledge their own standpoint in relation to power when thinking through important decisions about what to preserve, describe, digitize, and make accessible—and how.⁶¹ Alongside archival studies scholar Marika Cifor, Caswell has emphasized a web of relationships that guide archival decision-making practices, and posited, like feminist scholars before them, that radical empathy is a political and methodological tool that should be employed in archival practice.⁶² Academic repositories have begun to follow suit, taking the lead from practices developed in collaboration with communities or in independent community archives settings.⁶³ Issues of power, race, and other forms of positionality remain at the fore of the field, even while the composition of both the student body at master of library and information science/studies (MLIS) programs and professional archivists remains overwhelmingly white in the US.⁶⁴ Like academic oral history, archival studies has turned in recent years toward examining the unsustainability of its whiteness, with many scholars and archivists working toward more equitable archival theories and practices despite the ongoing and entrenched nature of systemic racial oppression.⁶⁵

Methodology

As the coauthors of this article, we use a social science research paradigm to report on this community-led PAR project, which, again, is an iterative process by which communities play leading roles in every aspect of research design and implementation, from formulating research questions to analyzing data.⁶⁶ As researchers, we worked with practitioners at community archives to design this PAR study. Community-led PAR has been used within archival studies in the past decade by several teams of researchers working in different national and international contexts who simultaneously design research inquiries and create or maintain archival projects alongside community members.⁶⁷ Working within Indigenous communities in Australia as a Koori person, for example, scholar Shannon Faulkhead used the term “negotiated methodologies” to describe formulating a research design that meets the needs of marginalized communities and fully reflects their own autonomous epistemologies and research methodologies.⁶⁸

In this PAR study, the research questions, project design, and implementation emerge from equal partnerships between the UCLA Community Archives Lab, TAVP, SAADA, and community members who have participated in TAVP and SAADA programs. Our overarching research questions, interview protocol, and method of data collection were collaboratively designed, and our findings have been reported back to staff and stakeholders at each organization via both private and public presentations at meetings and community events. The design of this research strives to meet the nine principles for building mutually beneficial relationships between academic researchers and community archivists outlined by the Reciprocity in Researching Records Collaborative, a group of academics and community archivists working to advocate for minoritized communities: relational consent, mutual benefit, investment, humility, accountability, transparency, equity, reparation, and amplification.⁶⁹

Participants in this research were recruited by TAVP and SAADA staff after they told their stories to fellows in TAVP’s Visions After Violence Community Fellowship Program (for people directly impacted by state violence) or SAADA’s Archival Creators Fellowship Projects (for South Asian Americans from further minoritized communities.)

The two authors of this article used in-depth, one-on-one, semistructured interviews and focus groups as specific methods of data collection. (See the appendix for the semistructured interview protocol.) We followed the seven stages of the interview process recommended by information science professor Alison Pickard. These are thematizing, designing, interviewing, recording, transcribing, analyzing, and verifying.⁷⁰ Between April and June 2022, the UCLA Community Archives Lab conducted in-depth, one-on-one, semistructured interviews over Zoom with twenty-one people who had previously participated in oral history projects at TAVP or SAADA. In June 2022, coauthor Anna Robinson-Sweet also conducted two focus groups (one for each organization) with an additional eight participants for a total of twenty-nine research subjects. A well-established method of data collection in the social sciences, focus groups are group interviews in which participants with some experiences in common create a social dynamic that ideally encourages sharing and collaborative idea formation.⁷¹

Each participant received a one-hundred-dollar stipend for their participation. Interviews and focus groups were recorded and transcribed, with the permission of each interview subject, and coded for themes using NVivo software. Thus, the data for this study refers to these coded interview and focus group transcripts rather than the oral histories themselves.

We position our research within an interpretivist research paradigm, which presupposes reality to be socially constructed and for which it is critical for researchers to acknowledge their own positionality, as positionality influences what research questions can be asked, what data is collected, and how that data is interpreted. In keeping with this, it is important for us as coauthors to identify ourselves as white women. Michelle Caswell is originally from a working-class background who is in the first generation of her family to graduate from high school. She cofounded SAADA and has been actively engaged in research about SAADA and other community archives sites for the past fifteen years. Anna Robinson-Sweet is from a middle-class background. She has worked as an archivist, oral historian, and community organizer. While we are both in continuous conversation with staff at each site, we remain outsiders to the communities represented and served by the organizations. (Neither of us has been incarcerated, nor are we South Asian.) We argue that our very real differences in identity in terms of race and class, as well as life experiences, mean that our understanding of and outlook on the world are simply not the same as the people from TAVP and SAADA who we have interviewed. In other words, our positionalities limited the data we were able to collect and the lens through which we interpret it.

Although few works in the field of oral history report on more generalizable empirical data across different subjects (rather than individualized accounts gleaned from specific oral histories), and few published articles in the field are structured in the social science format that we follow here, we highlight commonalities among narrators across both organizations; we also attempt not to conflate or collapse important differences between them. Both approaches are epistemically valuable, but we find the social science paradigm to be most useful here in answering research questions for which there has been very little (if any) systematic empirical data outside of oral histories themselves. We think directly asking narrators about their experiences in interviews and focus groups outside the oral history process itself provides information that cannot be gleaned from the recorded oral histories alone, because few oral histories provide the space for such reflection and such reflection can more honestly be encouraged through conversations with a third party.

Findings

Although several significant themes surfaced in our interviews and focus groups, we will focus in this article on a single reoccurring one: the importance of shared identities between the narrators and interviewers.⁷² This theme emerged repeatedly, even though we did not ask a specific question about it. (See the appendix for interview questions.) Below are the responses of several narrators who illustrated this in most striking detail. First, we report on how the shared experience of incarceration engendered a sense of intimacy during TAVP interviews. Next, we report the impact of shared experience and racial identity between narrators and interviewers at SAADA both as South Asian Americans and as members of marginalized communities therein, examining how shared positionalities built trust and rapport. We then discuss how, across participants from both organizations, shared positionalities created conditions for life-changing interviews—that is, conversations that resulted in the narrators having significant realizations about their lives, some even taking major action as a result. We conclude this section by showing that at least some narrators realize the dangers inherent in being so vulnerable in conversations that later become publicly accessible recordings.

Shared Experience at TAVP: “We Bounce Off Each Other’s Vibe”

In TAVP’s Visions After Violence Community Fellowship Program, narrators discussed how having the experience of incarceration in common with their interviewers was crucial for building trust and rapport. Many described how they would not have agreed to an interview otherwise.

In an interview for TAVP, one narrator, Rabia Qutab, shared her experiences being incarcerated with Visions After Violence Fellow Alexa Garza, whom she met when they were both fellows in a reentry program after incarceration. The two have since remained in close contact as friends and colleagues working with other people who were formerly incarcerated.⁷³ Robinson-Sweet spoke with Qutab about her interview with Garza. Qutab said,

I did this [interview] only because Alexa and I … are very good friends. We met each other in our reentry journeys and connected and … I think what I admired about Alexa is that she’s such an amazing storyteller and she uses her narrative to empower women of color in this whole journey from incarceration into reentry and into higher education, and so whenever Alexa needs me, I’m there.

Qutab then described the experience of telling her story to Garza:

My interview with Alexa was very personal … It felt like a dialogue. It was very conversational. She’s my really good friend, so it felt casual, but at the same time, we were shedding light into those things that oftentimes it’s hard for people to talk about … .

The most important thing is we are survivors. We’re fighters, you know? People who have been through incarceration, we know how to juggle our lives, right? And if we are committed to a pathway, we will find a way out, anywhere. Yeah, so definitely anytime that I have a chance to connect … I find a way.

I know Alexa … that’s my friend, that’s my partner, and that’s my colleague. We do research together. I’ve done, my God, I don’t even remember how many boot camps, webinars we’ve done together … . I mean, it looks like we prepared so much, but we have not prepared shit. [Laughter] We bounce off each other’s vibe.

Alexa can say, “Girl, I’m putting you on there [for public speaking].” I’m like, “ok.” Because I know everything she does is very ethical. I would not question her ways or methods. She’s always been very transparent about everything.⁷⁴

Qutab unequivocally said she would not have done the TAVP interview without having known Garza for so long in the context of shared experience. The rapport between the two of them is easy and obvious. Their friendship, based on shared experiences of incarceration, forms the ethical basis of the interview, and enables Qutab to speak freely and to allow herself to be vulnerable. The interview is neither the start nor the end of their relationship, but merely an inflection point in an enduring friendship marked by shared experience, trust, and mutual respect.

Another narrator, James Figueroa, had shared his life story with Visions After Violence Fellow Lovinah Igbani-Perkins for TAVP. He said he agreed to the interview with TAVP

because Lovinah has experienced some of the same things [I have], or watched what I went through … . She’s seen me overcome all that stuff, get deep in my recovery, get to the root of my issues and be able to share that on a platform that supports what we all believe in. So Lovinah was very … tough, but she understands, and she asked questions that were direct, and really felt like they would help other people to understand what’s really going on, where it comes from, the trauma, the childhood, CPS [child protective services?], then prison, just the whole [experience], and then to be able to restate what I said with so much clarity. I thought I was chopped up [in my interview with her], but she was able to restate everything I said in a clear manner. So, it was real good.

She’s working on her master’s. I’m working on mine. There’s just a lot in common from her story to mine, getting out of prison. She’s an inspiration to me. It’s just her whole, the overall background, just related so much. And to have somebody that understands mental health and addiction, and change, and all these different things. She’s, so that’s kind of how we started.⁷⁵

Katelyn Smith, who also narrated her story to Igbani-Perkins, described the importance of their shared experiences to the conversation. She said,

She and I had both been incarcerated [and are married to people who are incarcerated] as well, so we had that common denominator in the sense of being able [to talk.] I felt like I could talk to her openly because I felt like she understood. She actually did time on the same unit that I was on. And so, it was really cool to be able to have somebody that understood what I was talking about … . She was just so great. She’s wonderful.⁷⁶

The “common denominator” Smith described enabled her to share honestly and freely. A different interviewer, one who had not experienced incarceration, would not have been able to conduct the same interview. In some of the TAVP interviews, narrators shared racial identities with their interviewers; in others, they did not. Similarly, some TAVP interviewer-narrator pairs shared gender identities; others did not. Here, the primary marker of shared positionality seemed to be experiences with incarceration. While mass incarceration overwhelmingly and disproportionality impacts BIPOC communities in the US, and TAVP is a BIPOC-centered organization, racialized differences or similarities between TAVP narrators and interviewers were not raised as such by the narrators in our interviews and focus groups.

Shared Identity at SAADA: “We Had Quite a Few Things That We Clicked On”

SAADA narrators similarly described the importance of having shared experience and identity with their narrators. In the case of SAADA, all narrators and interviewers shared some form of South Asian American identity, usually in tandem with some other experience or positionality.

A narrator named Kamala Kiem told her story to Michael A. Henry as part of a SAADA Fellowship focused on Jamaican Americans of Indian descent. Kiem said,

I felt fully comfortable with Michael and affirmed. I didn’t even really know Michael’s full history, but I felt professionally we shared some similarities in higher education, so he was speaking my language. And he sounds Jamaican, he sounds Indian, he looks Indian to me, so I felt safe with him, and I felt comfortable talking with him. And he was affirming along the way. I felt like he was encouraging, affirming, and created, made the space for me to tell my story without censoring.⁷⁷

Shared identity, even without a previous relationship between narrator and interviewer, enabled a sense of safety and comfort for Kamala Kiem, creating the conditions for a fuller and more honest life story to be told.

Identity and experience are inextricably bound for many SAADA participants. Dr. Minal Ahson had been interviewed by nurse Roshni Shah in a SAADA project documenting South Asian American medical workers’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, an interview that Dr. Ahson described as “more of a conversation.”⁷⁸ We then spoke with Dr. Ahson about the experience. She told us,

Roshni and I clicked very quickly. I think her having a similar background in healthcare and taking care of COVID patients during this time, we had a lot to discuss and a lot in common. And she actually also lost a very close loved one recently and I, both of my parents passed away in the last few years, so I think we kind of clicked on that as well. And that came out in the conversation—it wasn’t, obviously, something that came out right away, but through the conversation we both had [the same experiences with grief]. So, I think we had quite a few things that we clicked on and led to very interesting conversation. So, I think, because our rapport was so good, we were able to kind of talk about things that maybe I wouldn’t necessarily talk to with a stranger or somebody that maybe I didn’t have a lot in common with.⁷⁹

Even though Shah and Ahson had not met before their oral history interview, their shared experience as South Asian American healthcare workers was crucial in developing a quick rapport. That rapport enabled another commonality to surface—the experience of grief—facilitating a fuller and richer story to be told, as Ahson described.

Life-Changing Realizations: “The Fact That I Knew She Knew”

At both archives, a sense of shared positionality between narrator and interviewer catalyzed life-changing realizations with lasting tangible consequences on some narrators. For example, Indira Rahman, a nonbinary Bangladeshi refugee, had been interviewed by Efadul Huq in a SAADA project on queer Bangladeshi American experiences.⁸⁰ When we interviewed Rahman about their experiences participating in Huq’s project, they said, “The interview didn’t feel like an interrogation, it felt more like just a conversation.” And the conversation, they said, was cathartic. Before the interview, Indira described being “scared to put my name on publications about LGBTQ+ human rights … But, after the interview, it was like, ‘you know what, let me really assess this,’ and then I decided I was going to apply for asylum” on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

When Robinson-Sweet asked if the interview really did lead to their asylum application, Rahman responded,

Yes, yes, because before that I’d never even, I didn’t even know how to articulate the things I was feeling or the things that I had experienced, right? It was also helpful to have Efad, someone else from the community, from the Bangladeshi queer community, who is actually doing this work and trying to make a change in his own way [conducting interviews]. So, I decided I can’t live my life looking over my shoulder, right, just wondering if I’m going to be next on someone’s hit list, right? So yeah … the conversation with Efad was really instrumental in making me realize that talking about these things doesn’t have to be hard, especially if you have, like, a safe environment in which to talk about them.⁸¹

Sharing experiences and identity with Huq along the lines of ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, and queerness was crucial for fostering a sense of safety during the interview and beyond, inspiring a transformative shift that led to an application for asylum. An outsider to the LGBTQ+ Bangladeshi American community would not have been able to get the fullest story, as Huq did, but even more importantly, an outsider would not have been able to catalyze such a shift in Rahman. Having a shared identity along several vectors was key for safety, and subsequently, safety was key for catalyzing a change.

Life-changing shifts, catalyzed by shared experiences and/or identities between narrator and interviewer, were also described by TAVP participants. A woman named Mandi Jai Zapata also shared her experiences with TAVP Fellow Alexa Garza, with whom she had been incarcerated. She described her oral history interview with Garza as “more of a personal conversation” in which Garza “could not only hear what I was saying but understand where I was coming from.” Zapata continued,

For me and Alexa, when I was sharing with her my experiences and how coming home [from] prison and the feelings that we had to go through to deal with that, and how people don’t understand, the fact that I knew she knew and she could be like, “Oh my God, like, yes, you said it,” that was welcoming to me, because a lot of people don’t [know]. And trying to understand that, when they’ve never been through it, especially, people who are closed-minded and judgmental, it’s just, it’s just more stress than it’s worth.

… so it was real relaxed. It was relaxed and it was welcoming because, again, she understood. I don’t think it was so much [because of] our history together, it was just the fact that she had been through the experience, so being able to relate was very important when it came to doing [the interview].

… The fact that she was like, “Yes. I get that, I get that. I can understand, you know, like [other] people don’t understand … .” It made me feel like I was right. You know what I mean? That was really beneficial when I talked to Alexa, that it made me actually learn that when you’re coming home and you’re learning how to cope, a lot of times you don’t really know how. Like, you don’t understand why the transition is so hard, right? And so, what I told Alexa was [that] I’ve learned that when you go to prison, you basically have to grieve the life you used to have. You go through the whole five stages of grief: anger, bitterness, depression, bargaining, and then you go to acceptance, and that’s what you do. You create a new life in prison. But then when you get pulled out of it, you come home, even though it’s supposed to be what you dreamed up, what you wanted, you know that’s the goal, you have to grieve the life you had in prison. And you don’t realize that until you go through it. You’ve basically lived two lives that no longer exist—friends, anything that you thought you had—you’re basically starting all the way over again as a new different person with a label and limitations.⁸²

Robinson-Sweet: So that realization came out of talking to Alexa?

Zapata: Yeah, so that was really it, and the fact that she was like, “yes, that’s exactly what it is,” and I was like “yeah, I’m so glad we agreed on that because now I know.” I thought I had said it out loud to someone who would get it, you know? That was really beneficial. But, again, I think it was because of our familiarity with each other that we had a really good conversation.⁸³

Zapata’s conversation with Garza provided a safe space for an important revelation. Zapata, now being able to articulate incarceration and reentry as grief work, can process grief and move forward to acceptance. The interview, made possible by shared experience, was transformative. Notably, Zapata and other TAVP participants did not address race as a salient vector of sameness or difference; rather, the focus of our research conversations with TAVP narrators was on shared experiences of incarceration.

Awareness of the Afterlives of Recording: Knowing Who the End User Is

Clearly, some sense of shared positionality can engender feelings of safety that enable more intimate, and more honest, personal stories. But what happens when those stories become records, divorced from their original context of creation, and widely available to the public? We found that some narrators have thoughtfully considered the afterlives of their recorded interviews. Some choose to redact or embargo sections of their oral histories. Some decide to never make their interviews available at all. Other narrators choose to remain anonymous. Although editing and approving transcripts and recordings before they are made public is standard practice, ongoing relational consent is key, and common for community archives like TAVP and SAADA.

For example, for part of a SAADA project on Afghan American women, one Afghan American woman (who preferred not to be named) discussed her experiences narrating her oral history to someone named Zainab Mohsini, a fellow Afghani. The two had previously met as volunteers welcoming refugees at the airport. The narrator said, “We both had the same purpose, the same vision to help as much as we could because we felt devastated and just didn’t know how to help our fellow Afghans. We became fast friends, hit it off right away, just had the same vision for fellow Afghans, for refugees, for just world politics all around.” In this case, shared national origin and gender created the conditions for intimacy in their interview.

But, the narrator stated, while she was happy to record her story with Mohsini for SAADA, she wanted to remain anonymous. She said,

I’d said before the interview started, I don’t know who the end user of this information is and who it goes to, so I’m always very wary of people using or abusing this kind of information or exploiting it for their benefit. So, I asked to stay anonymous for that reason and I didn’t mention my name during the interview. But [Mohsini and I] talked about it the other day, and I told her again about it, and I think she hit it on a nail, she was saying, “I think our people, Afghan people, have been exploited so much that it’s kind of like ingrained in us that we always feel like somebody [is] out there to kill us.” And I was like, “You couldn’t have said it better.”⁸⁴

Here, the narrator felt that her recorded story could be used by people who lack “the same vision,” as she had put it. SAADA has honored her autonomy by presenting her with a range of archival options to protect her privacy. Expertly navigating between private and public, insider and outsider, she has found a way to both achieve the catharsis of an intimate interview and protect herself from exploitation in public. Here, the inflection points built into community archival practices are key; the recording is not a single event, but an ongoing relationship between narrator and archives in which the narrator can negotiate privacy before, during, and after the interview. It is crucial both that narrators understand the risks of making public those interviews that are conducted in the shared space of intimacy and that archives create infrastructures and policies that empower narrators to understand risks and protect themselves appropriately. Our findings show that SAADA’s and TAVP’s narrators are both aware of those risks and are enabled to mitigate them through each archives’ policies and procedures.

Discussion⁸⁵

As these findings indicate, shared positionality can be crucial for narrators from marginalized backgrounds to build relationships of trust with those who interview them. For TAVP, mutual experiences of incarceration engendered an empathetic intimacy. For SAADA, mutual intersectional identities enabled an easy rapport. At both organizations, fostering a sense of safety was crucial. In both cases, safety was built into the project design via both the peer-to-peer interviewing model and ongoing relational consent. Although the two archives represent and serve different communities, by developing peer-to-peer oral history programs both organizations cultivated the conditions in which revelatory, life-changing oral histories could be created and shared.

At SAADA, characteristics of sameness between narrators and interviewers always fell along ethnic lines, but also in conjunction with other attributes like nation of origin, religion, profession, class, gender, and sexuality. In these interviews, ethnicity operates in conjunction with (not separate from) these other factors. At TAVP, on the other hand, the most salient vector of sameness between interviewer and narrator was experience of incarceration.

These findings raise further questions that cannot be answered solely by this particular research project. Which shared positionalities matter? What shared positionalities matter most to oral history? Much more research is needed to explore these issues. If answerable at all, these questions will warrant much more nuanced data and context-specific analysis than can be provided by a single study. Clearly, the oral history project itself, if framed along identity or experiential lines, determines and shapes the primary modes of analysis. As independent, minoritized-identity-based community archives increasingly engage in these types of peer-to-peer oral history projects, there will be many more opportunities to explore these questions.

Peer-to-peer oral history programs, in which members of marginalized communities interview each other, correct the power imbalance inherent when members of dominant groups interview minoritized narrators. They counter extractive models where credentialed academics of all backgrounds mine marginalized community members as sources. Programs like SAADA’s Archival Creators Fellowship and TAVP’s Visions After Violence Community Fellowship Program harness relationships of symmetry to challenge dominant oral history practices and make archival practice more equitable. The subsequent oral histories serve their narrators first and foremost, catalyzing profound emotional and ontological shifts in narrators before being made available to others. These programs then extend the trust between narrator and interviewer into the archival process, establishing key points of autonomy to safeguard narrators’ privacy in an ongoing relationship marked by consent, mutual respect, and autonomy.

Writing in the context of a community-engaged storytelling project focused on narratives of racism and resistance, communications scholar Anjuli Joshi Brekke introduces the concept of “radical listening” to acknowledge that listening is “(1) intersubjective, (2) resisting certainties about both self and other, and (3) always in relation to power.”⁸⁶ Our research surfaced these same themes: telling one’s story is social, it can be ontologically and socially destabilizing, and it is always done in the context of power relations. When those relations reflect a symmetry brought on by shared identity and experience, listening and recording can be radical acts. When those relations reflect asymmetry brought on by power differentials, listening and recording can be extractive, inequitable, and unjust. Our research is just one step in cultivating the wisdom to know the difference.

In this article, we propose the notion of symmetrical intersubjectivity to describe the ways in which positionalities held in common between narrator and interviewer often create the conditions for more honest, rich, and intimate life histories to be shared and recorded. When narrator and interviewer have mutual experiences of marginalization, trust and rapport can develop quickly and naturally. In turn, sameness between narrator and interviewer can open up the possibility for a more detailed exploration of difference.

Oral histories are situated knowledges forged in the context of power. Collecting stories from disempowered people with trust and sensitivity depends on a leveling of power between narrator and interviewer that can best be formed by shared experience and identity. Our interviews and focus groups with narrators underscore the importance of symmetrical intersubjectivity between interviewers and narrators. Oral history does not sit apart from nor is it neutral toward the salient vectors in which power is distributed, including (but not limited to) gender, class, sexuality, ability, nation of origin, age, and religion. Our research suggests that interviewers who share at least some common experience or characteristics with marginalized narrators are ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically better positioned than interviewers who inhabit positions of power in relation to narrators. We contend here that symmetrical relationships can produce better oral histories—more open, more honest, more authentic, more engendering of trust, and most importantly, more impactful on narrators from minoritized communities. It is worth asking, do oral histories produced in asymmetrical relationships produce interviews that are, in effect, worse? Oral histories in which narrators are more guarded, more distrustful, and projects which are ultimately more extractive? In short, oral histories that are more likely to reproduce inequity and exploitation?

Two notes of caution are warranted here, however. First, there is of course a danger that narrators may disclose too much to interviewers with whom they share identities and friendships, forgetting the recorder is running. Our interviews and focus groups showed that narrators are well aware of this risk and negotiate vulnerability through involvement in archival practices after the oral history is recorded. These findings underscore the importance of the continuing involvement of narrators in the archival endeavor, from confirming transcripts, editing recordings, and determining levels of accessibility. The relationship between narrator and interviewer, and between both parties and the archives, cannot end when the recording does. Consent must be an ongoing and relational practice, not a singular legal transaction. The trust created during the interview process must be extended to the archival process as well. Narrators must be given the autonomy to choose anonymity, redaction, embargo, or even deletion on an ongoing basis. Community archives are leaders in this regard and can show the way for oral history archives of all types in developing relational rather than transactional practices.

Second, identities are complex, intersectional, contextual, and shifting. No one narrator will share exactly every intersection of identity with an interviewer. And of course, people who share positionalities can certainly form different opinions, have conflict, and harbor animosity toward each other. There is a danger in assuming sameness when there is always difference. These are complexities worth exploring further, but they do not negate this article’s central assertion that intersubjectivities marked by at least some commonalities between narrator and interviewer, or intersubjective symmetry, can produce more impactful oral histories.

Conclusion

Our research indicates that in oral history, shared positionalities matter. They matter for interviewers, who might, in an asymmetrical relationship, not be able to recruit narrators. They matter for narrators, who might, in an asymmetrical relationship, tell very different stories, not feel safe while telling their stories, or not tell their stories at all. They matter for subsequent listeners, who could have access to more intimate and authentic stories from a much wider range of society. And they matter to our understanding of history, as peer-to-peer interviews—wherein interviewer and narrator share positionality—expand the possibilities of whose stories get told and how, and subsequently, who listens and how. And they matter for the field of oral history, which needs to expand its narrow views of who is best qualified to conduct oral histories with whom.

Oral history sessions are not magic moments when differences of power and positionality melt away; they are highly charged, deeply personal and political experiences in which differences of power and positionality are thrown into heightened relief. Having experiences and identities in common helps to level the power imbalance between interviewer and narrator, fostering symmetrical subjectivities. The push and pull, the “coming together and coming apart” described by Jamie A. Lee as quoted in our introduction, provides a fertile ground to investigate power in oral history.⁸⁷ Our research suggests that, if we as a field are to ethically collect and preserve oral histories from marginalized communities, we must also recognize the epistemic value of narrators from those same communities, leveraging the push over the pull, and design projects, policies, and training programs accordingly.

Acknowledgments

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-250102-OLS-2). The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The authors would like to thank Gabriel Daniel Solís, Jane Field, Hannah Whelan, Murphy Anne Carter, Sreedevi Sripathy, and Samip Mallick, as well as all of the Fellows and participants from both the Texas After Violence Project and the South Asian American Digital Archive. Working in partnership with them has been a massive joy. Much gratitude is also due to Thuy Vo Dang, who commented on an earlier draft of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [LG-250102-OLS-21].

Notes on contributors

Michelle Caswell

Michelle Caswell is a professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she codirects the UCLA Community Archives Lab. She serves as the UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor/Provost’s Special Advisor on Community-Engaged Scholarship. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell cofounded the South Asian American Digital Archive (https://www.saada.org), an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than four dozen peer-reviewed articles.

Anna Robinson-Sweet

Anna Robinson-Sweet is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Previously, she was an archivist at The New School Archives and Special Collections. Her research focuses on how archives and records can be used by activists for reparations and redress of state-sponsored violence and discrimination. She holds a master’s of library and information science (MLIS) from Simmons University.

Notes

^1. Jamie A. Lee, “Mediated Storytelling Practices and Productions: Archival Bodies of Affective Evidence,” Networking Knowledge 9, no. 6 (2016): 72.

^2. Positionality “refers to … how differences in social position and power shape identities and access in society.” “Positionality and Intersectionality,” Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, Indigenous Initiatives, University of British Columbia, https://indigenousinitiatives.ctlt.ubc.ca/classroom-climate/positionality-and-intersectionality/. In constructivist social science research, a statement of positionality “requires researchers to identify their own degrees of privilege through factors of race, class, educational attainment, income, ability, gender, and citizenship, among others,” as described in Marisa Duarte, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 135.

^3. I am defining whiteness here as a default normalized racial category based on a system of white supremacy, which is “a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.” Frances Lee Ansley, “Stirring the Ashes: Race Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship,” Cornell Law Review 74 (1988): 993.

^4. “UCLA Community Archives Lab,” University of California, Los Angeles, https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/.

^5. We use the term “minoritized” here rather than “minority” to call attention to the power dynamics of subordination, which do not necessarily correlate to statistical composition. As Erik Wingrove-Haugland and Jillian McLeod wrote, drawing on decades of ethnic studies scholarship, “Using ‘minoritized’ makes it clear that being minoritized is about power and equity not numbers … .” Erik Wingrove-Haugland and Jillian McLeod, “Not ‘Minority’ but ‘Minoritized,’ ” Teaching Ethics 21, no. 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.5840/tej20221799.

^6. Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Affective Impact of Community Archives,” American Archivist 79 (Spring/Summer 2016): 56–81; Michelle Caswell et al., “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: Community Archives and the Importance of Representation,” special issue on public history, Archives and Records 38, no. 1 (2016): 1–20.

^7. Michelle Caswell et al., “Assessing the Affective Impact of Community Archives: A Toolkit,” UCLA Community Archives Lab, November 2018, https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/InitialToolkit-compressed.pdf.

^8. “Texas After Violence Project,” Texas After Violence Project, https://texasafterviolence.org/.

^9. Texas After Violence Project, “Virtual Belonging: Assessing the Affective Impact of Digital Records Creation in Community Archives” (proposal submitted to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2021), https://imls.gov/sites/default/files/project-proposals/lg-250102-ols-21-full-proposal.pdf.

^10. Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to “action research” that emphasizes participation and action by members of communities affected by that research. Action in turn refers to experience—the experience of people in a given context or community versus that of outsiders.

^11. As social scientists, we report here on what is called in social science terminology “empirical data”; that is, observable information that we have collected in both our focus groups and with individual interviews who first participated in the TAVP and SAADA projects.

^12. Jamie A. Lee, Producing the Archival Body (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2021). Thuy Vo Dang, “The Preservation and Production of Diasporic Knowledge: Oral History and Archival Contributions,” in Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory, eds. Linda Ho Peche, Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, and Tuong Vu (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2023), 273–86.

^13. What is now the Oral History Association’s Archive Caucus began meeting as an Archives Interest Group in 2013. For more information, see “OHA Archives Caucus,” Oral History Association, https://oralhistory.org/oha-archives-interest-group-oha-aig/. See also “Archiving Oral History: Manual of Best Practices,” Oral History Association, October 2019, https://oralhistory.org/archives-principles-and-best-practices-complete-manual/. This manual addresses working with vulnerable communities and notes the power differentials between vulnerable communities and some repositories, but does not specifically address independent, minoritized-identity-based archives per se.

^14. Mary Stuart, “You’re a Big Girl Now: Subjectivities, Feminism, and Oral History,” Oral History 22, no. 2 (1994): 55–63; Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991).

^15. Alistair Thomson, “Anzac Memories Revisited: Trauma, Memory, and Oral History,” Oral History Review 41, no. 1 (2015): 27.

^16. Allan Futrell and Charles A. Willard, “Intersubjectivity and Interviewing,” in Interactive Oral History Interviewing, eds. Eva McMahan and Kim Lacy Rogers (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), 85. Alessandro Portelli called the interview process a space of “mutual sighting.” Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

^17. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London, UK: Routledge, 2010), 54.

^18. Katie Holmes, “Does It Matter If She Cried? Recording Emotion and the Australian Generations Oral History Project,” Oral History Review 44, no. 1 (2017): 57.

^19. Holmes, “Does It Matter If She Cried?,” 71.

^20. Adam Wiesner, “The Dialogic Process, Relational Approach, and Transformative Aspect of Interviewing,” Oral History Review 48, no. 1 (2021): 100–115.

^21. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 54.

^22. James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: Knopf, 1982), 181–82.

^23. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, “Introduction,” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2.

^24. Gluck and Patai, “Introduction,” 3.

^25. Valerie Yow, “Ethics and Interpersonal Relationships in Oral History Research,” Oral History Review 22, no. 1 (1995): 53.

^26. Alessandro Portelli, “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.

^27. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, “Black Women’s Life Stories: Reclaiming Self in Narrative Texts,” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, eds. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991).

^28. Joanna Herbert and Richard Rodger, “Narratives of South Asian Muslim Women in Leicester 1964–2004,” Oral History 36, no. 2 (2008): 55.

^29. Susan H. Armitage and Sherna Berger Gluck, “Reflections on Women’s Oral History: An Exchange,” in The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed., eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 77.

^30. Karen Olson and Linda Shopes, “Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Doing Oral History among Working-Class Women and Men,” in The Feminist Practice of Oral History, Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991), 189.

^31. Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 37.

^32. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, “From ‘Best’ to Situated and Relational: Notes Toward a Decolonizing Praxis,” Oral History Review 49, no. 1 (2022): 4.

^33. Etter-Lewis, “Black Women’s Life Stories,” 43.

^34. Holly Werner-Thomas has shown how moments of white fragility and Black resistance sometimes emerge in oral histories conducted by white interviewers with Black narrators. Holly Werner-Thomas, “Is Oral History White? The Civil Rights Movement in Baltimore, an Oral History Project from 1976, and Best Practices Today,” Oral History Review 49, no. 2 (2022): 377–98.

^35. Linda Shopes, “Community Oral History: Where We Have Been, Where We Are Going,” Oral History 43, no. 1 (2015): 99.

^36. Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 100–101.

^37. Valerie Yow, “ ‘Do I Like Them Too Much?’ Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice-Versa,” Oral History Review 24, no. 1 (1997): 55–79.

^38. Yow, “ ‘Do I Like Them Too Much?,’ ” 76.

^39. Carrie Hamilton, “On Being a ‘Good’ Interviewer: Empathy, Ethics, and the Politics of Oral History,” Oral History 36, no. 2 (2008): 35–43.

^40. Sandra Harding, ed., The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).

^41. Baik, “From ‘Best’ to Situated and Relational,” 3–28.

^42. Nēpia Mahuika, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

^43. Elizabeth Melton, “Hometown Ethnography: Race, Place, and Reflexivity,” Oral History Review 46, no. 2 (2019): 304.

^44. Holly Werner-Thomas et al., “Is Oral History White? Investigating Race in Three Baltimore Oral History Projects,” presentation, Oral History Association virtual conference, October 24, 2020, https://oralhistory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1110/collection_resources/31544; “Assessing the Role of Race and Power in Oral History Theory and Practice” (symposium, Oral History Association and the Oral History Center at University of California, Berkeley, 2022).

^45. Amy Tooth Murphy, “Listening In, Listening Out: Intersubjectivity and the Impact of Insider and Outsider Status in Oral History Interviews,” Oral History 48, no. 1 (2020): 37.

^46. Alan Wong, “Listen and Learn: Familiarity and Feeling in the Oral History Interview,” in Oral History Off the Record, eds. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zambrzycki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 97.

^47. Francena F. L. Turner and ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, “Black Baby Boomers, Gender, and Southern Education: Navigating Tensions in Oral History Methodology,” Oral History Review 49, no. 1 (2022): 77–96.

^48. Tooth Murphy, “Listening In, Listening Out,” 39.

^49. “What Are Community Archives?,” UCLA Community Archives Lab, University of California, Los Angeles, https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/.

^50. Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens and Elizabeth Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream,” Archival Science 9 (2009): 75.

^51. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?,” 73.

^52. Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021).

^53. Jarrett Drake, “Seismic Shifts: On Archival Facts and Fictions,” Sustainable Futures, Medium, August 20, 2018, https://medium.com/community-archives/seismic-shifts-on-archival-fact-and-fictions-6db4d5c655ae.

^54. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?”

^55. Michelle Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Human Rights Archives: Lessons from Community-Based Archives,” special double issue on human rights archives, Archival Science 14, no. 3–4 (2014): 307–22.

^56. Bergis Jules, “Architecting Sustainable Futures,” Shift Collective, https://architectingsustainablefutures.org/.

^57. Gabriel Daniel Solís, “The Pain Belongs to Us,” Texas Observer, June 14, 2022, https://www.texasobserver.org/the-pain-belongs-to-us/. Solís also uses the phrase “archives of survival” in Gabriel Daniel Solís, “Documenting State Violence: (Symbolic) Annihilation and Archives of Survival,” in “Endangered Knowledge,” special issue, KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.28.

^58. Cook, Terry, “Evidence, Memory, Identity and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archives and Museum Informatics 13, no. 2–3 (2012).

^59. Jimmy Zavala, Alda Allina Migoni, Marika Cifor, Noah Geraci, and Michelle Caswell, “‘A Process Where We’re All at the Table’: Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice,” Archives and Manuscripts 45, no. 3 (2017): 202–15.

^60. Nancy Liliana Godoy, “Community-Driven Archives: Conocimiento, Healing, and Justice,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.136.

^61. Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal,” special issue on feminist ethics, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.113.

^62. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives,” Archivaria 81 (Spring 2016): 23–43.

^63. Godoy, “Community-Driven Archives.”

^64. Mario H. Ramirez, “Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative,” American Archivist 78 (Fall/Winter 2015): 339–56. For work on critical race theory and information studies as a whole, see Sofia Leung and Jorge Lopez-McKnight, “Introduction: This Is Only the Beginning,” in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).

^65. Tonia Sutherland and Zakiya Collier, eds., “Black Archival Practice I,” special issue, Black Scholar 52, no. 2 (2022), https://www.theblackscholar.org/now-available-52-2-black-archival-practice-i/.

^66. Jacques M. Chevalier and Daniel J. Buckles, Participatory Action Research: Theory and Methods for Engaged Inquiry (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013).

^67. Gregory Rolan et al., “Voice, Agency, and Equity: Deep Community Collaboration in Record-Keeping Research,” Information Research 24, no. 3 (2019): 1–7.

^68. Shannon Faulkhead, “Negotiated Methodologies: Designing Research Respectful of Academic and Indigenous Traditions,” in Research in the Archival Multiverse, eds. Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish, and Andrew J. Lau (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Press, 2016), 479–515.

^69. Jennifer Douglas et al., “‘Come Correct or Don’t Come at All’: Building More Equitable Relationships Between Archival Studies Scholars and Community Archives,” white paper prepared by the Reciprocity in Researching Records Collaborative, UCLA (December 2021), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v00k2qz.

^70. Alison Jane Pickard and Susan Childs, Research Methods in Information, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: Neal-Schuman, 2013).

^71. See the chapter on focus groups in Pickard and Childs, Research Methods in Information.

^72. Other articles will address the following themes: imagined future uses of the now-documented stories, the ability of digital technologies like Zoom to engender storytelling across distance, and the internal emotional impact of record creation on narrators.

^73. Rabia Qutab, interview by Alexa Garza, After Violence Archive, February 25, 2022, https://afterviolencearchive.org/digital-heritage/interview-rabia-qutab.

^74. Rabia Qutab, interviewed by Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, April 20, 2022.

^75. James Figueroa, interviewed by Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, April 22, 2022.

^76. Katelyn Smith, interviewed by Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, May 6, 2022.

^77. Kamala Kiem, interviewed by Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, May 31, 2022.

^78. Minal Ahson, interview by Roshni Shah, South Asian American Digital Archive, February 18, 2022, https://www.saada.org/item/20220617-7141.

^79. Minal Ahson, interviewed by Michelle Caswell and Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, April 15, 2022.

^80. Indira Rahman, interview by Efadul Huq, South Asian American Digital Archive, https://www.saada.org/movingmemories/indira/

^81. Indira Rahman, focus group meeting led by Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, June 15, 2022.

^82. Mandi Jai Zapata, interviewed by Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, April 22, 2022.

^83. Zapata interview, April 22, 2022.

^84. Anonymous participant, interviewed by Anna Robinson-Sweet, Zoom, April 27, 2022.

^85. “Findings” and “Discussion” are standard subheadings in the social sciences. The first refers to what the data indicates, and the latter represents an analysis of those findings.

^86. Anjuli Joshi Brekke, “Listening across Difference: Mapping StoryCorps’ Affective Archives” (dissertation, University of Washington, 2020), 22.

^87. Lee, “Mediated Storytelling Practices and Productions,” 72.

Appendix: Semistructured Interview Protocol

1. Please introduce yourself. How did you get involved in telling your story to TAVP/ SAADA?

2. Have you listened to other stories in TAVP/SAADA? If so, whose stories did you listen to? How did these stories make you feel?

3. Had you ever shared your story in a similar way before?

4. Can you tell us about the process of telling your story?

   • How did you meet your interviewer?

   • Were you given the questions in advance?

   • How was the consent process?

   • Did you tell your story over Zoom or in person?

   • How did you prepare yourself for telling your story?

   • How long did it take you tell your story?

5. How did it feel to tell your story? What emotions did it bring out? How did you feel after the interview was done?

6. Did you feel supported in dealing with these emotions during and after the interview? What resources were offered to you to help you with these emotions?

7. What was the relationship like with your interviewer? Can you describe the rapport during the interview?

8. If your story was told via Zoom, what impact do you think that mode of interaction had? Do you think it mattered if your story was told via Zoom or in person?

9. Was your story recorded? Is it included in archives? If so, who do you think might listen to your story in the future? Who would you want to listen to your story? Does it matter to you that your interview is accessible freely online? What might you want listeners to think or do after listening to your story?

10. Did telling your story change you in any way? If so, how?

11. Why did you want to tell your story? What motivated you to participate? Did you have any reservations or concerns about telling your story?

12. What kinds of programs would you like TAVP/SAADA to run to enable people to tell their stories online?

13. Is there anything we haven’t asked you that you would like to share with us?