Interrogating voices from the past: making use of oral testimony in planning historical research

The International Planning History Society (IPHS) presented an online masterclass on oral history at the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) annual PhD Workshop, which was conducted over two 90-minute sessions on 24 and 25 June 2021. Designed as an introduction to oral history, the event was open to AESOP workshop participants and to PhD candidates and recent graduates who registered through IPHS. Twenty-four people from various parts of the world participated.

Programme overview

Session 1 commenced with a lecture on ‘The What, Why and How of Oral History’ by Dr Anderson, a professional oral historian who is president of the International Oral History Association and lecturer in Indigenous cultures and Australian society at the University of South Australia, Australia. A role play activity for all participants followed the opening lecture. Working in pairs, each person played the part of interviewer and interviewee using questions pre-prepared by the masterclass organizers. After reflecting together on what they learnt, participants were invited to share their observations in a whole group discussion.

Session 2, ‘Learning from experience: reflections on conducting oral histories’, focused on the experiences of three researchers who use oral history in their planning, architectural and urban historical research. Each approached their presentation from a different perspective. John Gold, Professor of Urban Historical Geography at Oxford Brookes University, England, addressed the topic of ‘Lightness and dark: capturing fragile narratives of urban reconstruction’. Dr Beatrix Haselsberger, academic, planning practitioner and co-founder of meraUM, a spatial research and planning consultancy based in Villach, Austria, reflected on ‘The scientific value of subjective oral histories in spatial planning’ using the Encounters in Planning Thought book project as a case study. Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy, Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia, oral historian and joint editor of the journal Studies in Oral History, spoke about ‘The subtle ethics of interviewing: managing sensitive topics and difficult emotions with care’. A discussion involving the speakers and workshop participants followed the presentations.

‘The what, why and how of oral history’

Sue Anderson’s lecture commenced with her own definition of oral history after which she introduced examples from other experts in the field: ‘Technically’, she said, oral history ‘is a lasting historical account of a person’s experience recorded by an interviewer’.¹ Emerging as a sub-discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, oral history creates a picture of the past in people’s own words and allows them to provide their personal perspectives on and interpretations of circumstances and events to which they refer. Through oral history, the stories of people with wide-ranging experiences and from diverse and sometimes marginalized or oppressed backgrounds are recorded using their own voices, allowing us to hear interviewees’ interpretation of the stories that they tell. Consequently, the voice of an interviewee offers researchers a unique source.

The interviewer plays a critical role in the oral history process. Anderson outlined the approach and qualities of a ‘good interviewer’, emphasizing the fundamental importance of having and showing respect for the interviewee (a theme reinforced by the presenters in session 2). A good interviewer spends time getting to know the interviewee before the formal interview. Desirable qualities include flexibility, for example, to accommodate changes in an interviewee’s circumstances; patience, which may be demonstrated by allowing an interviewee to answer a question in their own time even if that leads to periods of silence; strong listening skills; curiosity; and sensitivity to recognize and respond appropriately if an interview elicits unexpected reactions or emotions from an interviewee.

The ‘how’ of oral history has many facets, for which Dr Anderson provided a stepwise overview, covering such aspects as:

1. preparatory considerations such as holding a preliminary meeting to establish a relationship with the interviewee, provide information about the interview process and address administrative matters like consent forms; arranging and checking the recording equipment; and assessing the interview venue to identify and minimize potential distractions.

2. preparing for and conducting interviews, and ways of listening – ‘quietly’, ‘patiently’ and ‘carefully’.² Regarding the preparation of interview questions, she noted factors that contribute to shaping the interview questions, including the aim of an oral history project, the desired outcomes, what the interviewer wants to find out through interviews, and who will be interviewed. She explained that an interview is structured usually into three parts – orientation, common questions, and specific questions. It is important to ask open questions that allow the interviewee scope to speak freely. At the same time, closed questions and leading questions should be avoided since, respectively, they limit an interviewee’s responses and direct them to answer in a particular way.

3. post-interview tasks. Emphasis was place on having time for reflection after an interview and to check on the well-being of the interviewee (a topic later addressed in more detail by Dr Pascoe Leahy). Practical post-interview matters include labelling the interview tapes; recording interview details for future personal reference; transcription and interviewees’ review of the transcript; addressing ethical considerations that may arise from the interview; editing of the transcript, final approval by the interviewee and deposit of the transcript in the agreed repository; and, importantly, thanking the interviewee for their participation and contribution.

After an overview of ways in which oral history is used, Sue Anderson concluded with ‘last words’ from two sources. The first was British oral historian Paul Thompson who noted: ‘Oral history is a history built around people. … It thrusts life into history itself and it widens its scope’.³ The second was an audio excerpt from an oral history interview. The audience heard the interviewee recount a short personal story in her own words. Hearing her testimony, in combination with the expression and emotion she conveyed and the feelings she disclosed, underscored both Thompson’s assertion and Anderson’s point that a person’s voice is a unique research source.

Learning from experience: reflections on conducting oral histories

The three speakers in session 2 enlarged on the ‘what, why and how’ of oral history by introducing and discussing discrete projects and focusing on specific aspects of oral historical practice.

Lightness and dark: capturing fragile narratives of urban reconstruction

John Gold centred his remarks on a project that commenced in 1977 as his PhD topic and continues to the present in terms of a study of modernism and urban reconstruction in Britain between 1928 and 1990.⁴ His presentation provided insights into the emerging appreciation of oral history in the 1970s as well as interviewing practices of the time. At the outset, he explained why and how he used oral history in his doctoral research and later identified three dilemmas pertaining to the use and disposal of the oral history collection he has created over some four decades.

He was initially attracted to oral history because, at a time when primary documentation was in short supply, it provided an opportunity to gather data, but later came to realize that it afforded insights that were not available in archival or published sources. In particular, oral history offered a medium by which he could elicit information and personal insights from his interviewees that probed the ‘emotion’ that underpinned their projects. Such emotion contributed to the working ethos of built environment professions and how they generated their ideas. It also revealed much about the changing ideological landscapes of the times.⁵

The oral history process led to other revelations. He came to appreciate not only the value to his research of his interviewees’ accounts and insights but also the fragility of their information: ‘when the people concerned are gone the narratives that they could potentially have told obviously go with them’.⁶ He realized, too, that recordings of individuals’ oral histories created ‘a resource that others who succeed you might actually value’ and that along with developing such resources came responsibility for looking after them ‘with care’.⁷

His initial approach to recording and conducting an oral history was not guided by a manual or protocols like the ones that exist today. Indeed, given that oral history was then in its infancy, he looked instead to the tradition of field recordings, especially those carried out by ethnomusicologists, for guidance. Thereafter, he essentially learned by experience. He prepared for his study by compiling a sampling list of interviewees from holdings at the Royal Institute of British Architects and from the files of the Architectural Press. He then worked out a broad framework for the interview which was customized for each interview in conjunction with the respondent. Following each interview, he drafted a full written transcript, invited the interviewee to review it and to identify changes. The edited transcript then became the final approved version. At the time of discussing the conditions of the interview, he secured the interviewee’s permission for the approved transcript to be deposited in a public archive, but not until the completion of his entire project.

Professor Gold outlined the three dilemmas that have emerged for him regarding the products of his four-decade long study, namely the transcripts (unexpurgated and amended) and the tapes and voice files.

1. Excising content. During the transcript review process, for various reasons, some interviewees requested that content be removed from the transcript. It was their right to do so. Does removing content from a transcript conceal information of potential importance to other researchers?

2. He often receives requests for access to the oral history interview transcripts. He had advised interviewees that he would deposit the transcripts for public access when the project was complete, but the project is still not finished. Generally, he refuses researchers’ approaches, but in certain circumstances, has granted access. By doing so, is he showing favouritism?

3. There is the question of disposal of the C90 tapes on which the original round of interviews was recorded. The interview tapes contain the full recording of the interview. However, in some instances, the recording differs from the approved transcript which is the edited version of the interview. Can that discrepancy be addressed and, if so, how? Moreover, he has been approached to deposit his interview tapes in a national collection, but interviewees approved the recordings for his personal use and not for public release. Is there a solution to this situation? If the tapes stay in his possession, inevitably they will be destroyed, leading to the loss of an unique collection. Can he ethically allow irreplaceable tapes to be used by future generations when he gave specific assurances as to how they were to be used?

The scientific value of subjective oral histories in spatial planning

Beatrix Haselsberger focused on a five-year project that led to her edited book Encounters in Planning Thought: 16 autobiographical essays from key thinkers in spatial planning.⁸ She provided an overview of the project’s background and phases and analysis of the process in which she and the participants engaged to produce their book chapters. Then, by connecting the concept of collective memory with oral history, she ‘closed the circle’ between oral history and spatial planning.⁹

Encounters in Planning Thought originally emanated from Haselsberger’s PhD thesis and was motivated by two circumstances. First, she was contacted by several of the authors whose thoughts and ideas she cited in her doctoral thesis but, according to them, had misinterpreted. In follow-up discussions, she asked them to explain their ideas and the meaning behind them. Secondly, she found theoretical articles dense and difficult to read; it was challenging to understand the ideas and concepts and decipher the main points. So was born a project involving sixteen pioneering key thinkers in spatial planning. The project aimed to capture, from an autobiographical perspective, each person’s intellectual development and the ideas and concepts that they considered were their contribution to the field.

Dr Haselsberger asked her project participants to respond to written questions as part of the process of writing the first draft of their chapter. She observed that the responses provided information but did not reveal the genesis or historical roots of their thinking or explain their meaning. So, in a week-long workshop and in other forums, they teased out these and other matters. Each author, inter alia, was challenged: to reflect on the origins of their ideas, the context in which they were formed and factors that influenced them, including prevailing planning ideas and trends, historical and contemporary publications and people who inspired and/or guided them; to express their ideas in such a way so that others, and particularly young planners, could understand their meaning and appreciate how to apply them in socio-cultural and/or geographical contexts different from where they had initiated; and to identify what they wanted to communicate to others about what they had learned in their professional life. Eventually, the authors rewrote their chapters armed with the knowledge and perspectives gained from the various interactions with the other project participants and invited audiences.

With her project as the background, Beatrix Haselsberger made use of the concept of collective memory, which she defined as ‘the subjective reconstruction of the past influenced by the present. It is the way a person from today’s point of view remembers what happened in the past’.¹⁰ How their memory of the past is determined and how what they remember is expressed are both shaped by a range of factors such as a person’s cultural background, family values, and their personal and professional experiences over time.

In the case of Dr Haselsberger’s book’s project participants, critical influences that underpinned collective memory were the socio-cultural settings and the formal and informal planning cultures in which they worked. She challenged her authors to identify the roots of their ideas about spatial planning, including by revealing and interrogating the contexts in which they operated and to use their findings to interpret and explain the meaning of their ideas in a readily understandable way. In effect, as in an oral history interview, she invited them to write, in their own words, their story about the origins and evolution of their ideas and to elucidate their meaning not only for the record but also for the benefit of present day and future planners and the research community at large.

As Anderson and Gold had pointed out, gaining an understanding of the socio-cultural context in which an oral history interviewee’s story is set is fundamental to appreciating their narrative and professional contributions. Dr Haselsberger drew out this aspect further in relation to findings from the Encounters in Planning Thought project by identifying a connection between oral history and spatial planning and by referring to how planning ideas can ‘travel’ between places. Spatial planners need to find locally based solutions for a local problem. To do so they should understand the people and the place, in short, the socio-cultural context. If a solution involves using a planning idea developed and applied elsewhere, it is essential to appreciate the idea’s roots and context and to deconstruct it as part of understanding and communicating its meaning and identifying ways in which it can be translated and applied in a new socio-cultural context.

The subtle ethics of interviewing: managing sensitive topics and difficult emotions with care

Carla Pascoe Leahy addressed a crucial aspect of oral history practice: namely, careful, sensitive, and ethical interviewing.¹¹ Her focus was on the specific situation of interviewing where the topics are sensitive and the process of asking and addressing questions may lead to trauma for the interviewee. She noted that because some topics are difficult by nature, there is an opportunity for the interviewer to prepare in advance for the possibility of trauma arising for the interviewee. However, other seemingly innocuous topics may precipitate unanticipated trauma. For example, questions may result in an interviewee recalling a difficult experience or event that occurred in a particular place or situation. When an unexpected circumstance such as this occurs, it may cause distress also for the interviewer.

As well as introducing the advantages and benefits of oral history to both the interviewer and the interviewee, Dr Pascoe Leahy referred to the inherent tensions in oral history research and to dangers and risks in interviewing. Her overview supported the arguments that ‘special care’¹² is needed in preparing for and conducting an oral history interview and provided the rationale for the strategies that she revealed for guarding against harm both to interviewee and interviewer. As she explained, these strategies involve being alert and attentive to the subtle ethics of interviewing.

Reiterating Sue Anderson’s point that oral history affords an interviewer the opportunity to hear an interviewee’s interpretation of the information that they share, Dr Pascoe Leahy also noted that the interview process allows ‘access to meaning, not only facts’.¹³ Beatrix Haselsberger had stressed this point, too, in recounting the rationale and process behind the project that she described. The interviewer is in a privileged position when they hear the personal stories and memories that an interviewee recounts; it is essential, therefore, that the interviewer respects their interviewee and the information that they disclose.

The telling and the hearing of a person’s story benefits both interviewee and interviewer. However, for the interviewee, the benefit has a flip side because the act of disclosure makes them vulnerable through sharing private and personal information; potentially, too, that process may trigger distressing emotions. While it is not always possible to protect against such emotions emerging, Carla Pascoe Leahy suggested that when they do it does not necessarily mean that ‘harm has been caused’ to the interviewee because the process of sharing emotions can be cathartic.¹⁴

Institutions such as universities set down formal and legal requirements regarding the ethics of interviewing; Dr Pascoe Leahy called these explicit ethics. Subtle ethics, however, relate to matters more specific to the interview and to the interviewer-interviewee relationship. Being aware of and implementing strategies underpinned by subtle ethics can safeguard against harm to the interviewee and interviewer. Subtle ethics inform strategies such as: ensuring that the interviewee understands the content to be covered in the interview, as well as what will be required of them, and that the language used in the questions is appropriate; being alert in the interview to interviewee cues – both words and actions – and responding carefully and intuitively with ‘the heart and the head’; following up with the interviewee after the interview to check on their well-being, particularly if they were distressed; interpreting the interviewee’s memories with ‘care and respect’; thanking the interviewee and showing reciprocity by making the interviewee aware of the contribution of their interview to the interviewer’s research.¹⁵

In addition to showing respect towards and care for their interviewee, it is important that the interviewers look after themselves and protect themselves from harm. Carla Pascoe Leahy suggested strategies for de-briefing after an interview including using a personal journal to record notes and observations and speaking with a person such as a supervisor and/or a professional counsellor. She concluded by reinforcing several messages. They included: conducting oral history interviews carries inherent risk because people are at the heart of the process and the telling of personal stories potentially reveals human frailties; it is rarely possible to predict or protect when difficult topics may arise in an interview situation. However, it is incumbent upon researchers to do their ‘best not to cause ongoing harm’ to their interviewee, and to ensure that they are aware of the value of their contribution.¹⁶

Closing remarks

Oral testimonies are a rich and invaluable resource for researchers. An oral history interview provides the opportunity to record, in the interviewee’s own words and from their personal perspective, information, memories and reflections that they choose to share with the interviewer. Moreover, the expression and the emotion in their words is likely to convey how they felt about the circumstances, projects and people to which they refer. In short, then, the interviewee’s voice – the words spoken and the way and tone in which they are said – offers researchers unique insights into their topic of investigation.

The practice of oral history requires the researcher to engage in thorough, careful, sensitive and ethical approaches in all aspects of preparing for, recording, transcribing and finalizing an interview, as well as in collecting and caring for recordings and transcripts. Care for the interviewee and self-care are critical too.

In the case of planning and built environment research, oral history is a revealing, sometimes overlooked, means to acquire information, insights and perspectives from planning and design professionals and from other key personnel, including members of the community associated with the period, places, people and/or projects being studied. Such personal accounts are often the sole or amongst the few contemporary records pertinent to an area of research and are of value not only at the time when they are recorded but also for future generations of researchers. Oral testimonies offer insights into a variety of topics ranging from the socio-cultural, economic, political, planning and design contexts, to the nature and scope of contributions of, as well as the perspectives and the influences upon, individual planning and design professionals and other personnel, and the outcomes of their involvements in particular projects.

To avoid the potential for lapses in memory and for other effects of the passage of time on what and how the interviewee remembers, if possible, record oral testimonies at the time of or close to the time of the interviewee’s involvement. However, if time has passed since their involvement, the value of an oral testimony is not lost. The loss only occurs when the oral record is not created.

Video recordings of the masterclass are available on YouTube and can be accessed through the following links:

AESOP PhD Symposium 2021, IPHS Oral History Masterclass, Session 1, 24 June 2021 available online at https://youtu.be/nQtZZKG_2qc.

AESOP PhD Symposium 2021, IPHS Oral History Masterclass, Session 2, 25 June 2021 available online at https://youtu.be/JIpQbFdQ4E0.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Garnaut

Christine Garnaut is Adjunct Associate Professor in Planning and Architectural History, University of South Australia, and President: International Planning History Society.

John R. Gold

John Gold is Professor of Urban Historical Geography, Oxford Brookes University, and editor with Margaret Gold, of Planning Perspectives.

Notes

1 Anderson, “The What, Why and How”.

2 Ibid.

3 Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 31.

4 Gold, The Experience of Modernism; Gold, The Practice of Modernism.

5 Gold, “Lightness and Dark”.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Haselsberger, Encounters.

9 Haselsberger, “The Scientific Value”.

10 Ibid.

11 Pascoe Leahy, “The Afterlife of Interviews”.

12 Pascoe Leahy, “The Subtle Ethics of Interviewing”.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.