Taylor Povey

Taylor Povey

In Canada, these regulations have been set out by the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2).^[1] The TCPS2 creates a guideline for researchers to ethically interact with participants.^[2] Oral historians must remain professional while also ensuring that they can form a trusting relationship with participants. In my experience, this was a difficult thing to accomplish. I thought it was difficult to remain professionally distant when the participant trusted me with their story and their history. Collaborating with participants of a marginalized community, the elderly, made this project more difficult. Although the participants were aware of the nature of the project, at times, I thought it was difficult to work through the idea that we would form a relationship with our participant, become entrusted with their history, and then leave. The only thing that made this better was that we were able to show the participants the transformation of their stories into polished oral histories.

Shared authority was another difficulty faced by the researcher and participant dynamic.^[3] Sharing authority is the act of embracing oral history as a collaborative effort between interviewee and interviewer and sharing control.^[4] This was particularly difficult for me because, in my academic life, I am not used to being dependent on another person. The participant’s initial distrust of me and of the perceived notion that her story was unworthy to share made this collaborative effort more difficult. Asked to participate in the project last minute, she said that she did not have a lot to discuss because she did not have a story to tell and that she was “a real plain Jane”. This was difficult for me because I was wholly dependent on her for the backbone of this project. Sharing authority is not only about sharing control in the interview process but in the creation of the final project as well.^[5] We used the final meeting with the participants to present our final projects and to work collaboratively with them to ensure that everything is as they wanted/ hoped it would be. Being able to show my participant the final project and get her approval was my favourite part of the process. Seeing the care and respect that the students had for their stories, no matter how insignificant the participant thought they were, solidified the trust between researcher and participant. I also think that throughout the process the participant had felt that her story was not worth telling, but I hope when she saw the final project, she realized that everyone has a story worth telling.

Another way through which I had to relinquish control to the participant was through what they agreed and declined to consent to. At our first meeting, the participant declined to consent to anything; she did not want her information online, regardless of if it was anonymized, and she did not want our interview to be recorded. At first, this was disappointing, but right before the interview, the participant consented to be recorded. Although her oral history was not uploaded online, I was still able to gain more experience in Powerpoint, making the visual component of this project and on CWRC by posting this reflection. This process was very valuable in teaching and reasserting skills that will be helpful in the workplace, such as reliance on other people and flexibility when things do not go as expected.

It is a big responsibility when someone entrusts you with their own personal history, and one of my biggest fears was not being able to present my participant’s story in a way that they, and I, thought it deserved. Oral history is greatly a subjective field and as a result, I would argue that this fear led to me approaching this interview through a feminist lens (Llewellyn, 2015; Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2016).^[6],[7] Feminist oral historians “stressed the importance of respecting the interview process and acknowledged the complex set of negotiations that were constantly in play”.^[8] The feminist approach also considers the power dynamic between the interviewer and the interviewee (Llewellyn, 2015; Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2016).^[9],[10] This includes “deconstruct[ing] narrative form and from that … [locating] … the multiplicity and individuality of women’s life experiences” (Llewellyn, 2015, p. 153).^[11] This was difficult in the interview process because the idea of femininity and womanhood based on marriage and motherhood was so ingrained in the participant that she did not feel as if her story was worth being told because she had never married or had children. The feminist model was important both during our interview and in the creation of the final project because it helped me to understand the complexity and the nuances behind what the participant was saying. Using the feminist lens, I began to understand that her recollection of her history was shaped not only by what happened but also by social norms, her perception of herself, and how she thought she was perceived by society. The feminist perspective enables ordinary women, who may not feel as if they, as an individual, played an important role in how the past unfolded, to understand that they are still important.^[12]

One aspect of this project that I found very interesting was the differences between the interviewee’s point of view and the point of view portrayed in secondary research. Linda Shopes, who conducted community-focused research in Baltimore, says that the creation of a large community-based project means that the conflict and struggle of individuals are often watered down in community-based projects.^[13] The secondary research that I found painted a very picturesque neighbourhood of working-class immigrants, and although the participant stressed that it was not a bad place to grow up, she also stressed that it was not a high-income area and that, generally, people hoped to one day leave the neighbourhood. Without this insight from the participant, I would have not considered the potential bias in the secondary sources.

Creating the transcript was difficult but ultimately beneficial for creating a deeper understanding of the participant’s story. When I was listening to the audio to create the transcripts, I realized that during the interview, I was listening to answer and not listening to understand. I realized that I had been approaching this interview and the subject of this interview much more clinically than I should have been. I was not thinking of the neighbourhood as a place that was as emotionally important to the interviewee as physically important; I was analytically focused, asking what the boundaries of the neighbourhood were, asking about places in the neighbourhood. The way that I asked the participant to relate to her memories in a spatial sense was unrealistic. People do not relate to their memories in that way. Something I would change about my interview would be to ask the participant about more emotionally important as opposed to spatially important memories.

In conclusion, this experience was very valuable. We were given the opportunity to get hands-on oral history experience, which is very different from other university-level courses. The skills we learned are transferable to our everyday lives and to our future careers. We learned about ethical awareness, the contextualization of history, how to find primary and secondary sources and relate them back to a specific topic, and were given the opportunity to contribute to the CWRC platform which allowed us to contribute to the database as historians.