As we navigate rising authoritarianism and a “post-pandemic” era marked by collective grief, widening health inequities, climate crisis, and mounting institutional distrust, public health practitioners must expand our methodological toolkit. In the United States, fascist attacks on science, environmental protections, and social services threaten the survival of whole communities and are poised to further entrench longstanding health disparities across race, gender, class, ability, and immigration status. In light of this moment, researchers in the field of public health must ask what kinds of knowledge we privilege in our work, who we consider experts, and how our methods can resist rather than reproduce extraction, epistemic violence, and harm.
Given this, I invite public health researchers to consider oral history, an ethics-driven interview practice grounded in reciprocity and reflexivity, as a critical methodology for our work. In the spirit of the Oral History Summer School, this invitation is also a call to ask better questions, and to honor the full complexity of what we hear.
Though public health has increasingly embraced qualitative methods, especially in response to calls for the field to meaningfully engage with structural racism and the social determinants of health, the vast majority of published, peer-reviewed public health research employs quantitative methods [1]. Even in qualitative studies, tools like semi-structured interviews and focus groups are often used within a paradigm of researcher objectivity, and reproduce extractive research dynamics in the form of inadequate compensation and limited community participation in the interpretation, dissemination, and use of findings. To move toward more responsive, person-centered, and accountable engagement, public health researchers can borrow from oral history’s grounding in ethics and its reverence of complicated narratives.
Though oral history may conjure up images of cold and dusty archives, at its best it is a living practice of deep, relational listening, and can be used to support its narrators in shaping and caring for the communities they belong to. Oral history, put simply, is an interview practice and methodology with an emphasis on ethics, co-creation, and reciprocity [2]. Today it engages a specific set of best practices, and for centuries before the development of these, it has been used across the globe as a way of preserving individual and collective memory within broader social and historical contexts.
My own work at the intersection of oral history and public health began during my undergraduate research on the role of the Queens Memory Project and Queens Public Library in preserving collective memory and cultivating community health during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through interviews with community archivists and library staff, I learned these institutions supported Queens residents–the borough which was referred to as the “epicenter of the epicenter”–in accessing PPE and health information, and held space for New Yorkers to share their emerging narratives of the crisis with an interactive digital archive and virtual listening parties. I returned to oral history this summer, attending the Oral History Summer School’s summer intensive on public intervention, where I learned alongside participants from the fields of journalism, art, archives, medicine, education, and social work. We immersed ourselves in articles and exercises while building toward a public intervention in the surrounding city of Hudson: a project aimed at defending Hudson’s city-funded youth center from privatization or closure. The workshop culminated in more than a dozen oral history interviews with community members and two story circles with youth center staff. Though the youth center’s fate is yet to be determined, the experience affirmed my belief that oral history can play a crucial role in shaping policy and supporting collective action in real time. Rather than solely documenting past injustice, we used it to organize toward action and prevention–a lesson that should resonate with anyone committed to transformative public health practice.
Based on my learning, I offer four principles that public health can borrow from oral history:
1. Shared Authority and Anti-Fixity
At its most insensitive, public health research looks at individual people or entire populations as data points rather than as full human beings with agency and expertise on their own experiences of health and illness. Research interviews, even qualitative ones, can end up extracting answers from research participants that fit pre-existing frameworks and theories, rather than inviting people into a shared process of meaning-making. Even in projects aligned with the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), “community engagement” often consists of tokenized advisory roles or asks select community members to “rubber stamp” researchers’ pre-formulated study designs, without offering them real power in shaping research questions, analysis, or outcomes.
Oral history, on the other hand, recognizes narrators (the preferred term for “interviewees”) as active partners in meaning-making and as experts in the implications of their own experiences. Oral history is grounded in shared authority and anti-fixity–a rejection of the idea that people’s stories can or should be reduced to static truths or data points [3], [4]. Narrators are seen not as numbers or passive vessels of experiences (whether illness, structural oppression, or trauma), but as skilled interpreters of their own lives, capable of offering multifaceted, evolving, and sometimes contradictory narratives that reflect the complex realities of their communities’ struggles and resilience.
Public health researchers can incorporate shared authority and anti-fixity by involving members of communities in which they are conducting research not merely as subjects, but as trusted collaborators with a deep understanding of what is at stake. This means supporting people in shaping the research agenda itself–taking guidance on what questions researchers should be asking, whether research should even be conducted on a certain issue, and what should be done with findings. It also means being open to findings that are difficult to generalize, recognizing that this complexity is not a sign of methodological weakness, but a sign of an ethical and rigorous research process.
2. Reciprocity
It is commonplace in public health research for participants to be asked to share deeply personal, sensitive, even painful information with little offered in return besides a gift card or a nebulous reassurance that their voice might impact future health policy. This extractive dynamic is particularly harmful when research is being conducted on communities whose members have historically been surveilled, pathologized, or exploited by medical and public health institutions.
Oral historians, by contrast, build their interview practice on reciprocity, acknowledging that sharing one’s story is a gift that demands ethical engagement and tangible return, and narrative ownership. Reciprocity can take many forms, including sharing interview transcripts and recordings with narrators, honoring requests for anonymity or withdrawal from the archive, or co-producing accessible products that can be directly engaged with by the narrator’s family or community (zines, books, listening parties, or short films). Oral historians often give narrators another chance to be interviewed, so that they can revisit or amend their story, affirming (in the spirit of anti-fixity) that people have the right to change how they understand and frame their narratives over time.
For public health researchers, the principle of reciprocity can help us ask what we are giving back to research participants and how we can respect not just the generalized findings of what participants share, but how they might want what they share to live in the world.
3. Sensitivity to Identity and Positionality
Public health often fails to account for how researcher identity and positionality shape what questions get asked, what questions get answered, and what remains unsaid. The presumed neutrality of the “objective” researcher obscures power differentials and disparate worldviews that can result from differences in race, class, gender, ability, educational background, or institutional access. This lack of reflexivity can deepen mistrust or lead to distortions in research findings which the research themself may not even be aware of [5].
Oral history teaches interviewers to be highly attuned to insider/outsider dynamics between interviewers and narrators who may or may not come from their same community, and to approach interviews as deeply relational encounters [6] [7]. Interviewers practice reflexivity and examine their own positionality in an exchange, acknowledging that everything that is shared (or not shared) by a narrator is shaped by trust, safety, and perceived intentions [8], [9].
A few tools that public health researchers can use to practice reflexivity include an intentional examination of our own positionality before crafting interview guides or beginning data collection, disclosure of potentially relevant aspects of our identity to research participants upfront, reflexive journalling or memo-ing during data analysis, and collaborative interpretation of research findings [10].
4. Crisis Narratives, Not Trauma Narratives
Mainstream public health tends to isolate trauma as an individual psychological outcome, rather than framing it as a product of systemic injustice. This tendency risks pathologizing individuals instead of highlighting structural harms which need addressing, which can be seen when researchers advocate for individual behavior change rather than for the dismantling of the root causes of a particular trauma (eg. settler colonialism, white supremacy, economic abandonment). Relatedly, terms like “vulnerable,” “high risk,” and “hard-to-reach,” are still routinely used in public health literature to refer to entire populations, flattening complexity, obscuring structural causes, and reinforcing deficit narratives.
Some oral historians advocate for reframing “trauma narratives” as “crisis narratives” by situating personal experiences within broader political and historical contexts [11] [12]. This shift calls attention to collective conditions and away from individual pathology by creating space for survivors to narrate their response to crises in their own words. Public health researchers can adopt this approach by shifting away from deficit-focused labels and toward contextualizing trauma as the outcome of policy decisions, social abandonment, and systemic neglect. In doing so, we can begin to ask different questions about harm, and better honor the agency of people living through, and organizing in response to, health-related crises.
Oral history teaches us that the way we listen is just as important as the questions we ask. In this moment of state failure, disinformation, and deepening inequity, public health must not only continue to generate knowledge, but do so differently. By borrowing tools from oral history, we can move away from extraction and pathology toward collaboration and solidarity, and more liberatory practices of public health.
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To learn more about oral history, and its applications to public health, I recommend the following resources:
Relevant Projects:
- Oral History Summer School
- Queens Memory COVID-19 Project
- ACT UP Oral History Project
- Rosine 2.0
- What Would an HIV Doula Do?
- Voice of Witness
Further Reading:
- The Peculiarities of Oral History
- Allan Nevins Is Not My Grandfather: The Roots of Radical Oral History Practice in the United States
- “We Know What the Problem Is”: Using Oral History to Develop a Collaborative Analysis of Homelessness from the Bottom Up
- Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities
- Oral Histories as Critical Qualitative Inquiry in Community Health Assessment
- Uses of Oral History and Digital Storytelling in Public Health Research and Practice
- Listening In, Listening Out
Authored by Charlie Merrick
Charlie Merrick is reading, organizing, and running late to things in Providence, Rhode Island. Charlie has a B.A. in Public Health & Health Equity from Mills College. Most recently, he has used and interrogated qualitative research methods to better understand substance use disorder treatment, stigma, peer support, and what people are talking about when they talk about “lived experience.”
Art Credit: The Story-Teller: Fez, Morocco by Samuel A. Marx (1925)
