Reusing Oral Histories

Reusing Oral Histories is the first comprehensive guide available to scholars and students looking to analyse or reanalyse archived oral history interviews.

Oral history scholarship to date has been primarily concerned with the analysis of oral histories conducted by the interviewer, despite the proliferation of archived oral history interviews. The reuse of interviews, some of which have been in the archives for years, poses specific challenges for researchers and offers many rewards. Across four chapters, this book furnishes readers with a detailed overview of the literature on oral history reuse, as well as discussing practical, methodological and ethical considerations, and the emotional challenges involved in reusing archived interviews. Based on international case studies, the book explores relationality, narrativity, and aurality of archived interviews. Reusing Oral Histories suggests three complementary modes of analytical listening – empathetic, active and relational – in order to understand both the interviews themselves and the memories and narratives they contain.

The book provides readers with the tools, methods and theoretical frameworks to engage fully in reusing oral histories. It will be of interest to students, archivists, and other practitioners of oral history as a practical guide and theoretical companion.