Mission - Incite at Columbia University

We are a central part of the intellectual community of Incite, where oral history is a core tool for producing knowledge, building relationships, and creating change.

We see oral history as a critical space for conversations about the past, happening in the present, and oriented towards the future.

What is Oral History?

We see oral history as a critical conversation about the past, happening in the present, and oriented towards the future.

As a conversation, it is dialogic. In an oral history, people are producing knowledge together, actively, socially. Oral histories are co-constructed in the intersubjective space between a narrator and a listener. They are built through questions and active listening.

This knowledge production is critical. We show our narrators respect and treat them with care, and we also ask them hard questions. We invite them not only to tell their stories but to make meaning of them, to theorize, to reflect.

Oral histories concern themselves with the past. This may be the recent past, as in our work on September 11, 2001 or the Covid-19 pandemic, both of which began within a month of the start of those historic events. It may also be the deeper past, even the ancestral or mythic past. We are interested in people’s first-hand experiences during their lives, and we are interested in handed-down stories.

However, oral histories are not transparent windows into the past. They are shaped by intersubjective dynamics – who is asking, what they are asking, who is speaking, what they care about - as well as by the demands of the present moment from which they are being recorded. This is part of what we value about oral histories. We are interested in what happened to people and we are interested in how and why they remember it.

Oral histories are different from most journalistic or qualitative social science interviews in large part because of the ways that they are oriented towards the future. The intimate conversations of an oral history are often intended for a large, future, public audience. They are not just raw materials for a book or an article. They are shared in their entirety for others to use, and they are intentionally preserved. This might look like passing on a story in a family from generation to generation, telling it over and over again so that it is remembered. In our work, we support social memory and we also typically preserve oral histories by placing them in public institutional archival repositories.

Interviews and beyond

We specialize in a life history approach to interviewing. While the balance of life history and project focus will differ from project to project, our oral histories always seek to understand a person’s specific experiences in relationship to their subjectivity. We want to know who is speaking, what shaped them, and why they made the choices they did in their lives, not just what happened to them. Our oral histories are carefully researched and guided by detailed project designs, but they are not narrow or scripted - they are also improvisational, open-ended, and responsive. This approach is essential for the critical, active processes of knowledge production we support.

We also teach and use methods that go beyond the one-on-one, seated life history interview. Sometimes it makes sense to talk with people while they are walking through their neighborhood, looking through a document or photo album, or demonstrating a dance. Sometimes we may mix shorter, focused conversations with in-depth life histories. Sometimes convening a group to reflect on a shared, past experience may surface insights that would otherwise be inaccessible. For each oral history, we find the most appropriate and effective methodology within the oral history toolkit.

Ongoing Consent

Sharing one’s personal experiences in public, for future and present audiences, is a vulnerable act. We practice ongoing consent so that our narrators can have control over when and how their stories are shared. Narrators sign a legal release at the time of the oral history, allowing the interview to be archived and used. They get a copy of their recording and transcript and can make changes or request closures before the interview is shared. Our legal releases allow for narrators to revisit their consent decisions in the future, while recognizing that once an oral history has been shared in public it is difficult to retract.

Archiving and activation

When planning an oral history project, we identify an archival partner to serve as a long-term repository for the collection. We are open to the possibility of closing interviews, or an entire collection, for a period of time, to allow narrators to be as open as possible in deciding what to share. Our projects also typically include a plan to activate, as well as preserve, the oral histories we record. We do this through lively, interactive websites, events, and publications.