Case study on a scientific oral history project using information practice analysis

This paper discusses community college students’ responses to an oral history project about their own community, based in South Phoenix, Arizona. The South Phoenix Oral History (SPOH) Project is a research initiative operated by students, the vast majority of whom call South Phoenix home. Students take part in recording, processing, and analyzing their hometown history, making coauthorship a built-in feature of the project. Research shows that oral history teaches students to do research and to do history, but can academy-based projects have a positive impact on community interests? What do students learn through oral history besides research skills? To conduct this study, I analyzed data from seventy-three student reflections dating from fall 2018 to spring 2021. The reflections illuminate how students become more aware of their role in creating historical narratives and deepen their bond with their own community and its history. I argue that oral history projects, such as the SPOH Project, which implement a shared authority method, can productively combine community interests with academic research. By giving their contribution to the collection, students deepened their connection and sense of responsibility to South Phoenix and its history.

ABSTRACTThis article outlines the process of developing a collaborative multi‐sited oral history project on the history, traditions, and ongoing resilience of Black and Indigenous farm and garden practices in the Southeastern United States and Appalachia. The Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project is a collaboration between the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, the Spelman College Food Studies Program, and the Princeton Food Project. Our model used student oral historians that we trained in oral history methods and ethics. Our initial goal was to collect oral history interviews and develop an engaging open access multi‐media archive. The project documents seed saving and gardening stories from people who have helped preserve Black and Indigenous foodways, including elders and newer generations of gardeners and small‐scale farmers. The stories serve as an important record of heirloom practices with rich cultural traditions and knowledge. Collectively, the archive documents the movement of seeds, practices, and ideas across people and space. This article details our process of conceiving the project, building collaborations, and the results of 2 years of oral history collections in six different field sites. We believe this project can serve as a model for developing similar oral history projects.

Background Before 1999, there was little research on teachers and apartheid aside from some biographical sketches. “A Mother and Her Daughters” is part of an ongoing oral history project of teachers who fought apartheid. It is contextualized through the literature on Jews and apartheid in South Africa and joins the growing literature on teachers in the country. Purpose: The article describes and analyzes the lives of three Jewish women, a mother and two of her daughters, who as teachers challenged the apartheid regime in their communities and in their schools. The elder teacher taught in a Jewish day school and brought the issues of apartheid to Jewish studies, and her daughters taught in black schools during the struggle years. The lives of the three women portrayed are analyzed within the context of the political divide among Jewish South Africans during apartheid. Setting and Participants “A Mother and Her Daughters” is part of an oral history project in South Africa with over 200 teachers from each of the apartheid government designated ethnic groups: Africans, coloureds, Indians, and whites. Research Design I have spent the last six years working on an oral history project with teachers who fought apartheid. The first people that I interviewed were referred to me by university colleagues in South Africa. As the project continued, I spoke to teachers who often provided me with lists of other teachers. The methodological process is what ethnographers define as network sampling, or snowball sampling. As I have argued elsewhere, and with a sensitivity to issues of memory, culture, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and power and their relationship to oral history, I view my work as testimony as oral history. While most oral historians conduct research by identifying informants and conducting interviews, testimony as oral history recognizes that individuals need to speak—to testify and provide witness to their lives. Conclusions The women portrayed in the article joined many other South Africans on the ground to fight the apartheid regime. The lives of the Silbert women are important because they went against the norm of their own Jewish community, and white South Africa, to work for the end of apartheid and for a democratic South Africa. They went against the grain of most South African teachers and represent what scholar and politico I. B. Tabata called “teachers with the fighting spirit.” Marlene, Beth, and Patti Silbert combined pedagogy and politics to fight apartheid. Their stories are significant because with other “teachers with the fighting spirit,” they were part of derailing apartheid and facilitating the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. In addition, individually and collectively, the stories of the Silbert women offer possibilities of education for democracy—in South Africa and throughout the world.

This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues surrounding oral history for qualitative researchers including an examination of various types of oral history projects, participants, power issues, issues of researcher-narrator-participant relationships in oral history, and Institutional Research Boards (IRBs). Theory, methods, and ethics are intertwined in oral history research, with each having an impact on the other. The chapter illustrates the characteristics of oral history, examines how theories of the self impact oral history approaches, and discusses the meaning of intersubjectivity. Further, the meaning of orality in oral history, oral history narration as performance, and the concepts of neutrality and objectivity, as well as what it means to adopt a critical perspective as a researcher are examined in this chapter.

This paper examines the development of the oral history programme in Malaysia as a methodology to reconstruct the nation's history and heritage. Oral history refers to efforts to record and document a historical event or social phenomenon through people's experience and memory that enable us to have a deeper understanding of the past. In short, by recording people's experiences and memories from their personal lives, the oral history methodology acts as a bridge to connect the past to the present. For Southeast Asian countries which are rich in historical experiences and cultural diversity, the oral history project had begun in the 1960s with each country individually initiating its own oral history programme. This paper focuses on the experience of Malaysia which was the first to initiate an oral history programme, its subsequent development, the parties involved and the inclination or focus of oral history projects that were implemented. Even though Malaysia preceded other Southeast Asian countries in creating an oral history programme, the oral history methodology as a mode of reconstructing the nation's past and heritage is not particularly outstanding. This paper addresses this nagging issue and examines the challenges in implementing the oral history programme in this country. The paper recommends to the Malaysian government to activate the oral history programme which should be subsumed under an Oral History Centre at the national level so that the collection of historical information and the nation's heritage will be based on the inclusive memory of the community not just on written documents which are remnants of the colonial legacy.

For more than thirty years, collecting oral histories has been recognized as an effective teaching strategy in the West. Although it is rare in Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) countries, the authors adopted it to bridge knowledge gaps they observed in their Saudi Arabian students. The reclamation of familial stories and tribal information using oral history methodologies reconnected students to their past while facilitating a unique learning experience. This paper describes how an oral history project was created for undergraduate students in Saudi Arabia to help them move beyond the hard science approach supported in the Arabian world to one that embraces a narrative based methodology. Historically, oral histories – an important pillar of Arabian society - were used to transfer significant tribal information, customs, traditions and stories from one generation to the next. Since the discovery of oil, the kingdom has undergone dramatic societal and lifestyle transformations resulting in the loss of some traditions, namely oral history. Consequently, younger generations know very little about their Arabian heritage. The fundamental goal for this project was to improve the students’ comprehension of humanities and social science courses by reconnecting them to their past using oral history methods.

Oral history, life history, and biography are three approaches to qualitative inquiry that share certain characteristics. At the same time, each has a unique flavor and set of goals and meaning. Narrative in style, all three approaches can often use video or photography and more recently use found data poetry, and thus multiple text analysis is often warranted. These three sister approaches have in common the end result of capturing the lived experience of an individual or a collective of individuals by telling stories. In other words, we are investigating subjectivity that is human lived experience. My reference point to distinguish among the three approaches is that of the theoretical approach of the researcher, and the statement of the researcher defining the selected approach. In this chapter I will describe and explain the three approaches and discuss the relative merits and generous contributions of each approach. Next I will discuss the touchstones and criteria for reviewing oral history, life history, and biography. In fairness I will also need to talk about narrative storytelling, a technique closely associated with these three approaches and with qualitative work in general. In addition, since this is the digital era, near the end of this chapter I will list some resources available for free on the internet through listservs, blogs, YouTube, and other sites that can enhance our understanding of oral history, life history, and biography. Finally, I look at the power and possibility of all three approaches in terms of informing social justice projects in the social sciences. Likewise, wherever possible I will add web resources for understanding these approaches because the internet is exploding with oral history and life history projects on YouTube, Myspace, Second Life, and Facebook. Wherever possible I will also include relevant blogs such as the one on institutional review, www.institutionalreviewblog.com. The requirements of any institutional review board become critical when doing oral history, life history, or biography because of the debates within the field of oral history over whether or not oral history is research. In fact, there is a federal statement on this excluding oral history from IRB review. As a result, many oral historians have taken to writing about this and as you might imagine there is a wide range of opinions. Some say all one needs is a signed consent form and others say just do the IRB review or both.

Teaching a class titled Oral History and Life at the University of California at Davis in 1998 became a challenge and a singularly exhilarating experience. By the end of the quarter, students were to know major themes in twentieth-century history, to learn the ethical standards of oral history practitioners, to be able to evaluate oral history testimony, and to develop a sense of when and when not to use oral history methodologies in their research. They would gain many of these skills through planning, researching, conducting, transcribing, editing, and cataloging oral history interviews. Because I had presumed that many students taking a course on Jewish life would be or have a strong interest in culture, the original assignment was to interview a family member or an older adult whose experience would be interpreted in the context of the history studied in the class. Although the class was offered as part of the studies program, it was also listed as a humanities class. Therefore, some of the students registered for the class to fulfill a general education requirement and were not sure of its content. The students were primarily immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries as far-flung as Vietnam and Latvia, including the Philippines, Korea, Israel, India, and Afghanistan. This class makeup was unusual for Davis, but advantageous for the course. Due to the unexpected religious and ethnic variety of the students, I modified the assignment of interviewing someone Jewish, instead asking the students to interview members of their own families, regardless of their ethnicity. As preparation for their projects, I required my students to develop bibliographies useful for understanding the individuals they would interview. Thus there was no need to change the reading assignments. But the scope of the class discussions changed. While centering on American life, discussions included comparisons with the experiences of people of other nationalities and with the immigrant experience in general. Instead of a research paper, I required each student to complete two one-hour interviews. For those interviews, students wrote proposals, bibliographies, and outlines. They conducted interviews, transcribed portions of them, and prepared fifteenminute oral presentations that were videotaped. Each week students submitted twopage typed journal entries, including answers to study questions based on readings and paragraphs describing their progress on their oral history projects. Students also

This article focuses on the teaching of oral history in the twenty-first century. The article discusses the importance of educators when it comes to teaching oral history to students. According to this article educators can bring into the classrooms and programs of the twenty-first century a historical process once used by Thucydides to chronicle the Peloponnesian Wars, and use that process to challenge students with learning opportunities. The student-oral historian has many roles to play like preservation, and publication of the past and present for future generations, a revelation that emerges as they consider the variety of oral history projects being conducted at all levels. Classroom oral history projects generally fall into one of two categories: those that focus on individual biographical/life review interviews, and those that deal with a particular period or place following the oral history training method which allows students to understand the challenges associated with oral history as a methodology.

In Australia’s National Library, the acquisition or commissioning of oral histories is accepted as a method by which their representative mission as socially inclusive and culturally diverse institution can be fulfilled. In this goal, oral history projects which focus on underdocumented, minoritised or marginalised individuals, groups or communities commonly stake their value on the claim that such projects can work to fill the ‘gaps’ in the national story, contribute to a more complete historical record, or recover lost, overlooked or hidden histories. Drawing on the NLA’s institutional documentation, this paper develops the findings of an empirical examination of the NLA’s oral history collection. This examination found a significant mismatch between representations of the oral history collection as diverse and the actual number of ‘diverse’ interviews. Using the analytic lens provided by critical librarianship, this paper considers the implications of these findings and argues for greater recognition of the culturally positioned nature of oral history methodology. It is suggested that by re-thinking oral history’s neutrality, space might be found within collections for a diversity of oral literacies and ‘unique epistemologies ways of knowing, languages, and histories’.

Voices in Movement, a sound installation directed by artist Lizzie Thynne with music by Ed Hughes, draws on memories recorded for Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project. Both the installation and oral history foreground family stories as central to feminist politics, though in diverse and shifting ways. As the producer of the installation and director of the oral history project, I explore how these representations of the family emerge, as well as the differences between oral history and sound installation as forms of life story-telling.

As business historians embrace the narrative turn, they would do well to consider the opportunities provided by oral history. For-profit corporate storytellers offer one approach. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s call to action no. 92, however, offers a better one. This article explores the potential impact on business historians of the TRC, using the Petroleum Industry Oral History Project as an example.

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to discuss accessing oral history in building an inclusive archives from communities that once dwelled in the Kruger National Park. In March 2022, in the Daily Maverick, the South African Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Barbara Creecy stated that there is a need for a shift to an Africanised conservation approach that embraces the diverse cultures, traditions and knowledge systems in South Africa. It is, thus, important for wilderness areas in South Africa to undertake projects to collect and share indigenous knowledge that can be captured and used to conserve wilderness areas.Design/methodology/approachThe research methodology that was applied for the purpose of this study is a multimethod approach but is dominated by a qualitative approach.FindingsDuring three interviews, three focus groups of five persons and three onsite visits, several concerns were identified as requiring more investigations and efforts to ensure archives can be publicly accessible.Originality/valueHistory on Africa has largely been written by the global north and kept behind expensive paywalls (Fengu, 2022). The oral history projects being undertaken in South Africa are to be commended in for filling gaps in the historical discourse neglected by the colonial and apartheid dispensations.

"Community oral history" is a protean term, invoked by scholars and grass-roots historians alike to describe a variety of practices developed for a variety of purposes. The term "community" itself is vague and conceptually limited, with generally positive associations and not entirely deliberate implications of commonality and comity. A community oral history project typically refers to one defined by locale, to a group of interviews with people who live in some geographically bounded place, whether an urban ethnic neighborhood, a southern mill village, or a region of midwestern farms. Yet "community" also refers to a shared social identity, and so we speak of interviews with members of the gay community, the black community, the medical community. In fact, many community oral history projects combine the two meanings of the term, focusing on a particular group's experience in a particular place—steelworkers in Buffalo, Chicanos in El Paso, jazz musicians in Los Angeles.

This article uses the oral history project of the Old China Hands collected by the California State University at Fullerton to illustrate how oral history serves as the vehicle of identity-making. The term Old China Hands first referred to long-term British settlers engaged in the commercial, diplomatic and missionary arenas in nineteenth-century China. During the Second World War, citizens of the Allied nations were interned in the Japanese camps, which then became the common memory for foreign settlers in China. Not until the 1980s did those former civilian internees begin to reconnect with each other and share their stories in public; the oral history project of the Old China Hands was one such effort. Focusing on the organization, facilitation and contextualization of the oral history project, this article will discuss how the recollection of wartime experience became a process of identity-making.