Guest Editors' Introduction

Drawing on Daphne Patai's observations about the ethical problems of oral history interviewing, Valerie Yow has argued that "we cannot go about research without questioning ourselves, our biases, our purposes, our reactions to the narrator and the process, and the effects our research have on the narrator."¹ Lynn Abrams, too, has pointed out the necessity of acknowledging "the intersubjective relationships that are present within the interview situation."² Intersubjective exchanges, which often take place at a subconscious level, "trigger responses of empathy and antipathy, expansiveness and defensiveness, trust and mistrust, remembering and forgetting, and shape the stories told."³ Since the 1970s, feminist theorists and oral historians have focused new attention on intersubjectivity, and scholars in a variety of research areas have increasingly come to accept the value of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the oral history process. Questions related, for example, to the similarities and differences that impinge on the interpersonal situation or the impact of one's own ideology have become more important in the reflexive process of production and interpretation of oral history sources. Consequently, the "deep exchange" between interviewer and interviewee has moved from the sideshow to the center in discussions about oral history research.⁴

During a number of seminars and conferences the Warwick Oral History Network organized between 2011 and 2013, similar questions arose about the kind of relationships that make interviews possible and the interviewer's ambiguous position within the interview process.⁵ In particular, we discussed how a focus on the "inside"—defined in terms of the interviewer's personal and cultural predisposition towards interviewees, the dynamic interaction of the interviewer-interviewee relationship, and the different factors that determine this relationship—can change our perception of oral history.⁶ At more or less the same time, scholars on the other side of the Atlantic engaged in similar debates, resulting in the publication, in 2013, of Oral History off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice, edited by Stacey Zembrzycki and Anna Sheftel.⁷ Oral History off the Record focused on the interview experience, the oral historian's own practice, and the overall implications of the oral history relationship. Its approach was ground-breaking, not just because of its provocative quest for honesty, inviting contributors to analyze the complexity of their role as interviewers, including shortfalls and discrepancies between theory and the reality of oral history practice. It also advocated a holistic approach to oral history that makes self-reflexivity and the interviewer's background and subjective predisposition in approaching, experiencing, and interpreting the interview crucial factors, intrinsic to the product of oral history.

Several journal articles in recent years have dealt with related issues such as shared authority, intersubjectivity, and ethics; Zembrzycki and Sheftel, for example, continued their reflection on ethics and intersubjectivity in their contribution to the Oral History Review's anniversary section on the history of oral history, in 2016.⁸ It is clear, then, that scholarly research is engaging more and more in discussions about the practical challenges of oral history research. These challenges include, among others, the complexity of the relationship between individual and collective memory; the appeal for a humanistic approach to oral history—that is, an approach centered on the humanity of two human beings with their different cultural and social backgrounds and their reciprocal (sometimes conflicting) agendas; and the ambiguity of the interviewer's own position as either insider or outsider in terms of age, nationality, ethnicity, or gender.⁹ Oral history is also increasingly understood as "processual"—that is, a product that does not end with the experience of the interview but includes, and is intrinsically affected by, what happens before, during, and after the interview and the impact of these experiences on the interviewer and the interviewee and, eventually, their relationship.

This humanistic and processual approach to oral history is relevant also because of the risks that oral history research potentially poses as oral historians engage with human participants and often conduct their research outside of the academy. Who has not heard of Giulio Regeni, the Italian doctoral student tortured to death in Cairo? Egyptian intelligence services appear...