Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines ethical issues and methodological challenges that revolve around conducting oral interviews for research purposes. Students will also design and complete an oral interview project.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course explores oral history as both a method of historical research and a means of representing the past. Historians have long relied on written archives, but oral history challenges and expands that record by centring lived experience and memory as legitimate historical evidence. Students learn how oral testimony can recover silenced voices, complicate dominant narratives, and reveal the intersection of personal and collective histories.

The course begins with an examination of the intellectual and methodological foundations of oral history, tracing its development from postwar historical initiatives to contemporary community and digital projects. We will read classic texts alongside recent scholarship addressing memory, subjectivity, power, and ethics. Students will analyse how historians interpret oral sources, how narrators shape their stories, and how issues of race, class, gender, and identity influence the production and preservation of memory.

In the second half of the semester, students will apply these principles through hands-on practice. Each student will design and conduct an oral history interview on a topic connected to a historical theme—such as migration, labour, social movements, or local history. Instruction will cover interview preparation, recording techniques, informed consent, transcription, and archiving. Workshops will provide opportunities to practice interviewing skills and to reflect on the dynamics between interviewer and narrator.

By the end of the course, students will produce a final Oral History Portfolio that demonstrates their ability to collect, interpret, and contextualize oral testimony as historical evidence. The portfolio will include a recorded interview, a polished transcript, and an analytical essay situating the narrative within broader historical scholarship.

This course fulfils upper-division credit in History and is suitable for students interested in historical research methods, public history, social history, and cultural memory. No prior experience in oral history is required.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING NOTES: