In long-term crises like Covid-19, Jennifer Cramer (2020) asserts that changes in oral history fieldwork in inevitable. Therefore, before engaging in any activity that might result in more harm, Jennifer shows that following the law might be the one thing that prevents or minimizes the effects of an ongoing crisis. Relative to Covid-19, the main reason associated with the destructive path that came with the wake of the pandemic, internationally and in the U.S., was familiarity between the pandemic and previously experienced disasters (Cramer, 2020). Moreover, the absence of a comparative baseline with the pandemic in our living memory contributed to the associated destructive path (Cramer, 2020). With oral history being crisis-centered, one layer that must be considered in interviews is the psyche effect of the narrator and the interviewer.
In any traumatic life event, interviews with anyone who has lived through struggle tell a story full of challenges. However, with time, no oral historian can accept and integrate what happened to those that lived through the struggles. From an alternate perspective, oral history serves as a therapeutic program that overlaps historical events logically and naturally. With the willingness of the victim to talk, the narration becomes beneficial, invalidating the interviewee’s traumatic experience(s). Therefore, through the victim’s willingness to talk, oral history serves as a healing process and can be therapeutic if not a form of therapy (Cramer, 2020). In the future, several key points must be considered by oral historians when interviewing victims. They must conduct life narratives to generate context, account for distinguished ways the brain recollects past and recent events, consider the interrelation between trauma and storytelling, and incorporate longitudinal-based designs in their components.
Reference
Cramer J. A. (2020) “First, do no harm”: Tread carefully where oral history, trauma, and current crises intersect. The Oral History Review, 47(2), 203-213, Web.