Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement by Steven High (review)

Many of us will have encountered the Montreal Life Stories Project, undertaken between 2005 and 2012 by a large team of academics and community partners based out of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. The aim of the project was never to try to interview all those willing to talk about their experiences of displacement by genocide and war in Montreal; the goals were more modest, and indeed became increasingly so as initial plans for one thousand interviews were scaled down to six hundred. In the end, the project team interviewed 472 individuals, often across a series of interviews. What is striking is that the number of interviewees ended up being almost matched by the number of interviewers and project members: the team grew from around sixty to over three hundred over the life cycle of the project. As the project name suggests, the focus was on collecting—and curating—life stories rather than eyewitness testimony of genocide. People, rather than events, were at the fore, with equal weight given to the full range of life experiences, before, during, and after war and genocide. Across the course of the book, High introduces us to some of those people—both interviewees and interviewers—as he reflects on his experience leading this large-scale, multipartner oral history and digital storytelling project.

What make this book of particular interest to oral historians are two key facets of the project that push the boundaries of oral history theory and practice in important ways. Firstly, a way of working that aimed at sharing authority between academics and community partners characterized the project. These partners worked together to identify the core focus of the research (a mixture of four diaspora groups and three crosscutting themes), to cocreate the interviews, and then to cocurate the stories. Secondly, the project was concerned not simply with collecting and conserving oral history interviews but also with curating and disseminating these with and for a range of audiences.

In the first half of the book, High focuses in particular on the collection of interviews. He moves from the project-wide scale, through a number of the working groups that covered distinct ethnic groups or themes, to the exploration of a single interviewee to discuss some of the key issues that emerged in this process of coworking. What is striking is the way that the normal focus in oral history on the interviewer-interviewee relationship—two people in a room—is radically expanded by a commitment to sharing authority. In many of the working groups, interviewees were also interviewers. Moreover, the usual tug of war between interviewer and interviewee was broadened to include wider working-group discussions over what and whom to include (153). Ultimately, as High shows in a case study of the Rwandan working group, the interview process became part of a much richer process of community history writing through broader engagement under the auspices of group memory workshops.

As this example shows, the project sought to do much more than simply collect and preserve a large oral history archive. Curation through multiple methods for and with multiple audiences was a central aim, and in the second half of the book, High discusses the range of practices that were developed across the project. These included a variety of digital and nondigital storytelling approaches, from coproduced digital stories, through audio walks and tours that encourage “embodied listening,” to a variety of performance methods (224).

Throughout, there are glimpses of important learning about how to undertake large-scale multipartner research. These range from the practical—for example, the decision to adopt nonhierarchical cloud-computing storage to enable all of the project team to access all research data—to the ethical, where the idea of ongoing consent increasingly replaced notions of a one-off signing of a consent form. High shares his and his team’s learning along the way...