This working group, led by Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, investigates the history of oral history as a method in the social sciences and humanities, and seeks to develop innovative ways of using oral history and related techniques to study the history of knowledge. In recent years, widening access to audiovisual technologies, new forms of digital media, and growing interest in documenting the voices, stories, and perspectives of people who do not usually leave written records have led to a resurgence of interest in oral history and to experimentation with new formats and approaches. It is therefore an opportune moment to determine what oral history has to offer to the history of knowledge, and vice versa.
One aim of the working group is to explore the historical and contemporary relationships between oral history and neighboring practices. Ethnographic interviewing and documentary film-making, for example, share some aims and challenges with oral history but have emerged from different traditions and followed different trajectories. Building on critical work by oral historians, the group also explores the gaps, silences, limits, and contradictions of oral history as a method. Finally, it seeks to articulate a politics of care for historians of knowledge who use oral history and related methods, recognizing that these methods are most likely to be both effective and ethical when they engage interlocutors at eye level, as research partners rather than as objects of research.
