Cultivating Supports while Venturing into Interviewing during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

As the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified structural inequities worldwide, the field of oral history and its practitioners are reexamining established best practices. The pandemic has heightened awareness of underlying issues in oral history with the challenges of social distancing, financial collapse, privacy concerns in an increasingly virtual world, and the uneven impacts of the pandemic. This article calls for shoring up and expanding support structures when conducting interviews during and about the pandemic, including supporting oral historians and narrators, designing project supports and creating supportive interview formats, and supporting humanity in and through our work. There are no easy answers to the issues that oral history has been and continues to grapple with, but the pandemic offers an opportunity to reflect on how we engage in this work and create more inclusive and equitable practices moving forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Interviewing
• methodology
• informed consent
• project design
• technology
• pandemic
• best practices

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Fanny Julissa García initiated the calls and support for OHMA alumni and students, coordinating with Sarah Dziedzic and Cameron Vanderscoff on March 23, 2020, to hold a virtual check-in with regard to the financial impact of the pandemic on oral historians. After contacting OHMA director Amy Starecheski, the meeting was held on March 27, 2020. In attendance were Crystal Baik, Fanny Garcia, Erica Fugger, Cameron Vanderscoff, Allison Tracy-Taylor, Amy Starecheski, and Sarah Dziedzic. Cameron Vanderscoff and Lynn Lewis had met one-on-one and discussed the role of memory workers in the current pandemic, and this topic became a focal point of the subsequent convening on April 3, co-facilitated by Cameron Vanderscoff and Anna F. Kaplan. Participants created a spreadsheet for alumni to volunteer to interview one another, and/or volunteer interviewing services to other alumni-led COVID response projects.

2. The “Documenting Difference” session was a roundtable with Katherine Anne Scott, Kathleen Blee, Troy Reeves, and Abigail Perkiss as the chair, on October 1, 2019. See Oral History Association, “Pathways in the Field: Considerations for those Working In, On, and Around Oral History,” 2019, https://www.oralhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-Complete-Program-Reduced.pdf.

3. More information on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Oral History Projects is available at https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/ccoh/digital/9-11.html; Mary Marshall Clark, Peter Bearman, Catherine Ellis, and Stephen Drury Smith, eds. After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed (New York: New Press, 2011). Mary Marshall Clark, “Oral History of Disasters and Pandemics” (Oral History Master’s Program Workshop Series, Columbia University, April 16, 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbyRhAcj5Sg.

4. Clark, “Oral History of Disasters and Pandemics.”

5. Amy Starecheski and Clark discussed this methodological choice in “Oral History of Disasters and Pandemics.” Starecheski developed a phone tree as emotional and mental care for herself as an interviewer working on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Oral History Projects. The NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive is a project of the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics and the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, co-directed by Peter Bearman, Mary Marshall Clark, Ryan Hagen, Denise Milstein, and Amy Starecheski. More information on the project is available at https://incite.columbia.edu/covid19-oral-history-project.

6. Teresa Bergen’s Transcribing Oral History (New York: Routledge, 2020) offers advice for oral history transcribers, including a section on self-care.

7. Scott Neuman, “CDC Adds 6 Symptoms to Its COVID-19 List,” National Public Radio, April 27, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/27/845321155/cdc-adds-6-symptoms-to-its-covid-19-list; Pam Belluck, “New Inflammatory Condition in Children Probably Linked to Coronavirus, Study Finds,” New York Times, May 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/health/coronavirus-children-kawasaki-pmis.html.

8 Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, “Calling Me A Hero Only Makes You Feel Better,” The Atlantic, April 18, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/i-work-grocery-store-dont-call-me-hero/610147/.

9. Denise Phillips, “‘To Dream My Family Tonight’: Listening to Stories of Grief and Hope among Hazara Refugees in Australia,” in Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, eds. Mark Cave and Stephen M. Sloan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 48–9.

10. For example, see Lauren-Brooke Eisen and Lauren Seabrooks, “COVID-19 Highlights the Need for Prison Labor Reform,” Brennan Center for Justice, April 17, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/covid-19-highlights-need-prison-labor-reform.

11. Oral history best practices typically include not paying narrators; however some point out that this can place more of a burden on a narrator that receiving a copy of the interview does not alleviate. Valerie Raleigh Yow discussed this question in Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 106–07. Also see the H-Net H-OralHist thread “Payment for Interviews” in May 2015: https://networks.h-net.org/node/16738/discussions/70916/payment-interviews; Sady Sullivan and Maggie Schreiner acknowledge this tension in “If You’re Thinking about Starting an Oral History Project,” in The City Amplified: Oral Histories and Radical Archives, eds. Allison Guess and Prithi Kanakamedala (New York City: The Center for the Humanities, 2018), https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/untitled-1102e586-8f09-4b60-835f-78634ad473dd/section/83e46635-d139-42f9-a16f-253401e9baab; and although it is not directly speaking to oral history, there are applicable points in Jeremiah Bourgeois, “Formerly Incarcerated People Should Be Compensated for Telling Their Stories,” Truthout, May 17, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/formerly-incarcerated-people-should-be-compensated-for-telling-their-stories.

12. For more critiques of archives, see Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (June 2008): 1–14.

13. Mary Marshall Clark, “A Long Song: Oral History in the Time of Emergency and After,” in Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, eds. Mark Cave and Stephen M. Sloan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 254–56. Presumably the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has corrected this silence in their collections, but its “Oral Histories” webpage did not mention it: https://www.911memorial.org/learn/resources/oral-histories.

14. Sam Robson discussed his work on this project in the OHMA alumni and students conversation on April 15, 2020. He granted the author permission to include these descriptions in this article. For more on the CDC Museum’s project documenting the Ebola epidemic, see the “Global Health Chronicles” website: https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/ebola.

15. Mary Marshall Clark personal communication with the author on May 20, 2020.

16. I have to thank and credit Lynn Lewis and Cameron Vanderscoff for reminding me and others about these possibilities and uses of oral history, especially when communities are threatened and/or destroyed.

17. The From Me to You: A Covid-19 Oral History Project is run by the Humanities Truck, which is a project through American University and made possible with funding from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: https://humanitiestruck.com/frommetoyou/.

18. On the non-recorded aspects of the interview, see the “Everything but the Interview” sessions at the 2019 OHA Annual Meeting were the “Part I: Pre-Interview” roundtable with Danielle Dulken, Harrison Apple, Sam Prendergast, and Jess Lamar Reece Holler as chair; and the “Part II: Post-Interview” roundtable with Nikki Yeboah, Jen Standish, Andrew Brown, Heather Menefee, and Fanny Julissa García as chair. See Oral History Association, “Pathways in the Field.” Sam Prendergast also argued for transcribed but unrecorded interviews to be considered oral history in her article “Revisiting the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System,” Oral History Review 44, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2017): 19–38.

19. Examples include Daniel Kerr’s work with oral history and homelessness and the Marian Cheek Jackson Center Oral History. See Daniel Kerr, “‘We Know What the Problem Is’: Using Video and Radio Oral History to Develop Collaborative Analysis of Homelessness,” in The Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 485–94. Della Pollock, Hudson Vaughn, George Barrett, Kathy Atwater presented on this project and collaboration at the 2019 Oral History Association Annual Meeting, session “Oral History and Community Economic Development: Co-creating Community Justice in Historically Black Neighborhoods.” Their work used oral histories to engage with and to support local neighborhoods fighting against “studentification,” their term for a form of gentrification. Information about the oral history project is available on the Marian Cheek Jackson Center Oral History Trust website, https://archives.jacksoncenter.info/.

20. Alice Wong, Disability Visibility Project website: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/.

21. The Oral History Project of The Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University: https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/oralhistory/. This Center and Archive uses the name “Vietnam War” as opposed to “Vietnam Conflict.”

22. Zara Richter, project director, Psychiatric Survivor Oral History Archive DC, an oral history grant project supported by the DC Oral History Collaborative’s Partnership Grant for New Oral History Projects, 2020. The DC Oral History Collaborative is a partnership between the DC Public Library and HumanitiesDC: https://www.dcoralhistories.org.

23. Sarah Dziedzic, “Immunodeficiency and Oral History,” Medium, April 6, 2020, https://medium.com/@sarahdziedzic/immunodeficiency-and-oral-history-85695925dd43.

24. Recommendations for and reviews of equipment, software, and recording techniques are proliferating online. A few examples are: Transom.org posts “Recording during the Coronavirus Pandemic” by Jeff Towne (https://transom.org/2020/recording-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/) and “Voice Recording in the Home Studio” by Yowei Shaw with help from Jeff Towne (https://transom.org/2013/voice-recording-in-the-home-studio/); the Texas Oral History Association “Oral History Technology” webpage (https://www.baylor.edu/toha/index.php?id=944634); and the Vermont Folklife Center’s “Listening in Place” resources (https://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/listening).

25. Maggie Lemere shared with the author a draft of the article “Listen to Your Mother: Tips for Honoring (and Recording) Your Mom’s Life Story.”

26. Author’s personal communications with Benji de la Piedra, April 22 and 24, 2020.

27. Beth McMurtrie, “Secrets from Belfast: How Boston College’s Oral History of the Troubles Fell Victim to an International Murder Investigation,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/belfast; Donald M. Beaudette and Laura Weinstein, “Why a 1972 Northern Ireland Murder Matters so Much to Historians,” Washington Post, November 6, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/06/what-northern-ireland-legal-case-means-historians/.

28. Hannah Gill, Jaycie Vos, Laura Villa-Torres, and Maria Silvia Ramirez explain the risk of law enforcement accessing individuals’ documentation status and border crossings through recorded oral histories, which calls into question the “professional ethical standards that mandate ‘doing no harm’ to informants.” See Gill, “Migration and Inclusive Transnational Heritage: Digital Innovation and the New Roots Latino Oral History Initiative,” Oral History Review 46, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2019): 284.

29. Starecheski and Clark discussion in “Oral History of Disasters and Pandemics.”

30. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, “Slowing Down to Listen in the Digital Age: How New Technology Is Changing Oral History Practice,” Oral History Review 44, no. 1 (2017): 106.

31. For the pandemic’s impact on dreams, see Theresa Machemer, “Insomnia and Vivid Dreams on the Rise with COVID-19 Anxiety,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 23, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/insomnia-and-vivid-dreams-rise-pandemic-anxiety-180974726/.

32. Anne Valk comments in “Oral History of Disasters and Pandemics.”

33. Julian M. Simpson and Stephanie J. Snow, “Why We Should Try to Get the Joke: Humor, Laughter, and the History of Healthcare,” Oral History Review 44, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2017): 77–93. While her article focuses on laughter as separate from humor and as a marker of acculturation for her narrators who were Cuban healthcare professionals working in an international program and currently living in the United States, Stephanie Panichelli-Batalla discusses analyses about how narrators employ humor in “Laughter in Oral Histories of Displacement: ‘One Goes on a Mission to Solve Their Problems,” Oral History Review 47, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2020): 73–92.

34. Although her narrators did not refuse to talk about the genocide, Selma Leydesdorff found that they could not describe their experiences of Srebrenica and instead told stories about life before and after it, thus giving a sense of the atrocity and what/who it destroyed: “When All Is Lost: Metanarrative in the Oral History of Hanifa, Survivor of Srebrenica,” in Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, eds. Mark Cave and Stephen M. Sloan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25.

35. For more on grief during COVID-19 and particularly on grieving “normalcy,” see Kirsten Weir, “Grief and COVID-19: Mourning Our Bygone Lives,” American Psychological Association, April 1, 2020, https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2020/04/grief-covid-19.

36. Rachel Schnalzer, “Is Time Flying by Oddly Quickly during COVID-19? Here’s Why you may Feel that Way,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2020-05-01/does-it-feel-like-like-time-is-flying-by-during-coronavirus-quarantine-heres-why.

37. See Leydesdorff, “When All Is Lost,” 26.

38. Clark, “Oral History of Disasters and Pandemics.”

39. Robson discussion with OHMA alumni and students.

40. Ann Cvetkovich, “AIDS Activism and the Oral History Archive,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 2, no. 1 (Summer 2003), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ps/printacv.htm.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna F. Kaplan

Anna F. Kaplan is a Consulting Oral Historian for the DC Oral History Collaborative and an adjunct professor at American University, specializing in African American history and race in the post-Civil War US. She serves as vice president for Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region and on the Diversity Committee for the Oral History Association. Kaplan is completing her first manuscript, Left by the Wayside: The Struggle over Control of the Memory of the University of Mississippi’s Desegregation. Her next project seeks to re-center African American women in the history of institutional oral history programs. Email: [email protected]