Sebastian Hutton
Sebastian Hutton is a fifth-year theatre and history student at the University of Guelph.
Click here for Sebastian's interviewee's* page, and a link to the audio file of the full interview.
*The interviewee will be addressed by the alias, "Participant B" for anonymity reasons.
I conducted my interview at the Norfolk Manor with an anonymized subject on March 13th 2019.
The goal of this project was to be able to present an oral history based on an interview with a resident at the Norfolk manor. The interviewee would provide us with stories of their lives and experiences and we would take those and present them in a historical context. Because of this the work presented too you was a collaborative effort that has to narrators, first the Interviewee who tells the history, and me the interviewer who presents the history.[1] This is one of the ways that makes oral history unique and useful, it helps to convey the process of history from a human perspective.
In terms of the process for this project, it began with a rocky start. The first subject that I had been selected to interview was within the early stages of Alzheimer’s and as a result of that I was unable to obtain any information that would work for an interview. Because of this I had to come in at a later date, setting me behind the rest of the class.
The idea of trying to continue the project with the initial interview subject does raise questions on the nature of how one may approach an interview with someone is suffering from memory issues. However, on top of the lack of information I was able to obtain, the participant did feel uncomfortable with the interview because of their memory problem and being pushed to remember certain things which would have been questionable in relation to the ethical considerations that need to be made when interviewing someone.[2],[3]
When I had met my new interview subject, Participant B, the topics of discussion we had were a lot broader and I was able to construct a full interview around them. Participant B has chosen to remain anonymous throughout this process which is why they are referred to as Participant B. this is one of the most prominent ethical considerations I have been required to confront within my project and it was no problem to enact.[4] The first iteration of the interview was centered around the idea of the jobs he had worked at in Guelph and the projects he had been involved with. However, once had sat down to do the interview proper and we had begun talking, I had gone off script and decided to pivot my interview. Much of the interview itself was spent discussing Participant B’s memory of Guelph growing up and how the town had changed within that time. This is what had given me the idea to have side by side comparisons of the what the town had looked like during the 1960s and what Guelph looks like now.
My process with that was to look through the archives at the Guelph Public Library and go through their image collection, which held images of Guelph throughout the decades. I then tracked down the locations where the photos were taken and then took a phot for the comparison. There are other stories we discussed as well that did not necessarily fit to the topic I had pivoted too; however, they were interesting and I decided to keep them within the contextualized history the example of the story of his travels out west was something I felt would add to the history.
If I had the chance to do something differently I would have liked to focus more on Participant B’s family and have an interview that included more personal details, after reading some of the other contextualized histories written by the students, I saw how illuminating details like that could have been. The reason why I had decided against this initially was that I had felt uncomfortable in presenting a personal history with emotional details and did not wish to accidentally insult the participant. However, I see now that that was an unlikely scenario and that some more personal details about family may have added more to the contextualized history. Another misstep I feel I made was possibly being too analytical within the contextualized history. I maybe should have stuck more to just the presentation of the history and not try to add my own subjective commentary, however by that same token the history I feel I have presented is not one that is specifically about one person’s life but that life in a town that grows and change and there is some commentary to be made by a third party on that change.[5],[6]
Another struggle that was had within the contextualized history was trying to figure out when it would be appropriate to bring in outside sources into the contextualized history. This is another reason I had chosen to have a more analytical aspect to the contextualized history as well as it gave me the opportunity to interweave the history with concepts that we had discussed in class as well. This speaks to a broader struggle to relating the discussions I had with Participant B to a more conventional approach to paper writing that I have learned throughout my university career. The readjustment that occurred with this project is one that made really have to consider what the relationship between where one person’s memory may end and where history begins and how written and oral sources interact with each other.[7]
To summarize, the process for this project was troubled. Setbacks such as the delays due to weather and trouble with the initial interviewee not being comfortable with the interview process where a struggle, however once I was able to have a proper meeting between me and Participant B and be given ideas as to which direction I would like to take this project. After that was decided, there would be the change where I altered what I wanted the focus of the project to be, however I feel as though that was a change for the better. all and all, I am glad that the project was able to come together despite the numerous hurdles.
Endnotes
[1] Zembrzycki, Stacey. “Sharing Authority with Baba.” Journal of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.43.1.219.
[2] Wenger, G. Clare. “Interviewing Older People.” In Handbook of Interview Research edited by Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, SAGE Publications, 2001.
[3] Field, Sean. “Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject ed. by Joan Tumblety (review).” Oral History Review 42, no. 1 (2015). https://muse-jhu-edu.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/article/580907.
[4] Janovicek, Nancy. “Oral History and Ethical Practice after TCPS2,” in The Canadian Oral History Reader, eds. Kristina R. Llewellyn, Alexander Freund, and Nolan Reilly (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).
[5] Portelli, Alessandro. “The Peculiarities of Oral History.” History Workshop Journal 12 no. 1 (1981). https://doi-org.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96.
[6] Zembrzycki, “Sharing Authority.”
[7] Swain, Donald. “Problems for Practitioners of Oral History.” The American Archivist 28 no. 1 (1965). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40290448.