For my Students’ Displacement project, I’ve done three interviews with Carleton students who are either staying on campus or staying at someone’s house. Through those interviews, I found some difficulties in conducting an interview online and asking personal and sometimes sensitive questions that mostly pertain to the interviewees’ current situations. Since I knew the three interviewees, it seemed relatively easy to make a setting where they can speak comfortably. I started the conversation by catching up on things and got some recent updates that might include what they would be talking about during the interview. However, once I pressed the recording button and formally started the interview, sometimes they talked less about their personal things than they did before the interview, in our even more casual conversation. Occasionally, I made some follow up questions to dig deeper into their stories, but I was still not sure about how deep I could ask them.
Also, one of the interviewees let me hear a fairy sensitive story that I had never known. I asked more about the story with some additional questions, but after answering all the questions, eventually, she asked me not to use her name–make the interview anonymous. This interview made me re-realize that this interview process was personal and vulnerable to share with the public. I think the interviewing process, especially in interviewing about personal topics, requires an interviewer to make sure how much we can share with the public beforehand, including if we can share the recorded video or not and if the interviewee is comfortable with sharing all the contents mentioned during the interview with the public.
Your experiences remind me strongly of the session that we had last spring in Historians for Hire with Kim Heikkila, the oral historian, and I will share her presentation slides with you as a reminder of some of her valuable lessons on conducting oral histories. She highlighted the same key point that you end with: getting specific, informed consent for the sharing of interviews *after* they have been conducted is essential. Dr. Heikkila also helpfully noted that oral historians may often encounter their narrators’ trauma over certain events, but it is not our jobs to be therapists, or to seek to heal that trauma. I’ll post those slides (which also include follow-up reading suggestions) to the course moodle page now.
Thank you so much for your comment!
I will check the slides out.