Listen and Learn: Familiarity and Feeling in the Oral History Interview

Abstract

For several years now, I have been involved in a number of research projects that have employed, either in part or in full, an oral history approach to the sharing of personal stories. One of these projects, a five-year oral history endeavor based at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, titled Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations, required me, in both interview and interactive theatrical settings, to engage with participants who were often complete strangers to me prior to my initial encounter with them in these spaces.¹ Other projects, namely, my doctoral dissertation project, for which I collected and analyzed oral histories of racialized, ethnicized, and colonized (REC)² allosexual³ activists in Montreal, as well as a more personal project involving an oral history interview with my father, saw me probing the lives of friends and family members. If I were to pinpoint a common theme running through all of these projects, it would be my interest in exploring how marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed individuals overcome adversity in the Canadian context. In pursuing this interest, however, I have also stumbled upon a rather intriguing methodological discovery: how I absorbed and responded to each narrative I heard depended on my relationship with the respective storyteller. Put another way, in an oral history interview context, familiarity often bred content.