Chapter Cultivating vulnerability

Abstract

This chapter is a personal reflection on the author’s doubts, whilst leading an oral history project, about power dynamics within the interviewer–interviewee relationship, the risks of abuse of power and of paternalism, the ‘ownership’ of stories, and the potential consequences of the reuse of interviews in unanticipated contexts. It explores an experiment in voluntarily cultivating vulnerability as an oral historian, in the pursuit of a different kind of emotional engagement that might enable continuous and productive unsettling of ethical commitment to participants. This experiment was for the author to be interviewed herself, using the same schedule as the oral history project used to interview its participants, with the aim of archiving the interview. In doing so, she tried to make herself vulnerable and to constantly trouble her own sense of ethical practice. The chapter concludes that to fulfil their responsibilities to participants as fully as possible, oral historians generate reflective and dynamic ethical practices that respond to all the different ‘life stages’ of the interview, from first contact to archived recording.