Self-Reflective Oral History Practice
I want to underscore this memory as one that continues to help me think through the consequences of interviewing a group of people with which I share a significant portion of my identity: alumnus of the University. Interviewing alumni as an alumna has required me to reflect on how the other aspects of my identity as I have laid out in the introduction to this project--white and female, an oral historian and digital historian, current student of the University as well as former, and, at moments, a participant in activism--affect my oral history practice. This, in turn, has required me to take up a conscious self-reflective practice as I look towards extending this oral history project, evaluating and critiquing each portion of my identity and its relationship to this project. I understand self-reflective practice as the process of learning through and from experience towards gaining new insights of and in self and practice. It involves the individual practitioner being self-aware and critically evaluating their own responses to practice situations so as to improve future practice. Moreover, it involves a critical locating of each aspect of the practitioner's identity in relation to their practice.[1]Interviewed David Kiel, class of 1968, today, and it went great even though I’m sick as a dog. We had so much in common, which is so strange considering, and it stopped being an interview at some point and we just talked about Bob Powell and Dickson like I actually knew them or even knew how politics in student government worked or like I knew his fraternity brothers or anybody. Don’t I now, though? Will I talk about my friends, my classmates in the same way some day?...After the tape, he asked me what I did on campus and I didn’t quite know what to say. It’s different now. I worry I vacillated in my opinions in the interview and after.
Conducting oral histories can be one method of creating a mutual space for reflection. As an interviewer prods an interviewee not just to remember, but often, to reconsider, it also requires the interviewer consider their own process in the moment of the interview, negotiating the terrain of conversation in an attempt to enhance their capacity to achieve what Michael Frisch as described as “shared authority.”[2] While I am not necessarily interested in collaborative oral history as Frisch defines and negotiates it in his work, I am interested in a parallel process in which both people in the interview can take on the role of interviewee and interviewer and why that might work best when both individuals share a significant part of their identities.
This kind of role-reversal has been attempted by journalist and oral historian, Michael Riordan, in his book, An Unauthorized Autobiography of the World: Oral History on the Front Lines, which presents oral histories with almost a dozen different communities of “passionate people who gather silenced voices and lost life stories” across the world. “Is it possible that I hide behind the oral-historian mask, to avoid showing my own writer’s face?,” Riordan asks of himself, in a self-reflective mode. He then adds, “This is the kind of question I wanted to explore in looking at my own work. But given the focus of this book—the gathering of people’s stories through interviews—it seemed only fair that I should go through the same interview process as others did who agreed to share their stories with me.”[3] Riordan then suggests that his interviewees might rectify the power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee by taking on the role of the other. Riordan asks one of his interviewees, a fellow journalist, to interview him, and reports that the process left him with performance anxiety and overwhelming disappointment. Scholar Alan Wong, in his analysis of Riordan’s chapter, “Turning the Tables,” argues that Riordan’s experiment had been a failure because of his inability to connect with the interviewee’s experience in a meaningful way. Further, during the role-reversal interview, it becomes apparent that Riordan has dislocated the distinction between his identities as an oral historian and interviewee.[4]
In reading Riordan’s explanation and Wong’s critique of the role-reversal, I wonder how the challenges of “power, authority, and subjectivity” are mitigated if first, the oral historian shares a significant part of their identity with the interviewee, and if second, the oral historian locates other self-identifiers closely and critically, before, during, and after the interview process.[5] It stopped being an interview at some point and we just talked, I wrote after my interview with Kiel. What might have happened if we had dropped the formality of interviewing? Could we have even done that? What might have happened if we had formally switched roles? I might have my answer in my subsequent scribble: After the tape, he asked me what I did on campus and I didn’t quite know what to say. It’s different now. I worry I vacillated in my opinions in the interview and after. I am distanced from these interviews and my memories of them now, but as I extend this oral history project, interviewing activist alumni and current students, I hope to experiment with the intersection of active, sustained self-reflective practice and an oral history practice in which both people in the interview can take on the role of interviewee and interviewer in an effort to experience a mutually mediated shared authority.
[1] Dewey, John, How We Think, a Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process, New York: D.C. Heath and company, (1933), ix.
[2]Frisch, Michael H., A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
[3] Riordan, Michael, An Unauthorized Biography of the World: Oral History on the Front Lines, Toronto, Ontario: Between the Lines Publishing, (2004), 226.
[4] Wong, Alan, “Conversations for the Real World: Shared Authority, Self-Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Volume 43, Number 1, (Winter 2009), 242-3.
[5] Wong, Alan, “Conversations for the Real World: Shared Authority, Self-Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Volume 43, Number 1, (Winter 2009), 240.
