Hybrid Epistemology: Insights From a Crisis Collaboration Between Oral Historians and Sociologists

Introduction

Between March 2020 and October of 2022, our team of oral historians and sociologists at Columbia University collaborated on a longitudinal, mixed methods study of New Yorkers’ experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. We conducted three waves of interviews between 2020 and 2022, which produced over 400 hours of testimony from 180 New Yorkers. In addition, we collected over 900 written chronicles from 91 individual participants. The interview recordings, transcripts, and written materials are publicly available through the Oral History Archives at Columbia (OHAC). This paper describes the lessons we learned by crossing disciplinary boundaries to create an archive that is an unusual object: simultaneously a social-scientific dataset and an oral history collection.

Our team’s unique experiences and our institutional context were crucial factors shaping this project. The collaboration was facilitated by our shared affiliation at Incite, an interdisciplinary social science and humanities research institute led by Peter Bearman who, with Mary Marshall Clark, has been a pioneer in using oral history in sociological research. Bearman and Clark led the September 11, 2001, Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Archive. That project in many ways served as a template for this work, as both were funded by the National Science Foundation, were longitudinal, and used a team of interviewers with assigned “beats” (Clark, 2002). Clark and Bearman had leadership roles in our Covid project. Amy Starecheski served the 9/11 project as the lead interviewer and director of research, and co-directed the present project. A cultural anthropologist by training, she researches oral history as part of a larger landscape of social processes through which people make sense of the past. This means that her oral history practice already diverges from that of historians using oral history as a primary source: she is less interested in what happened in the past than in why people care about it. Also co-director for the present project, Denise Milstein is a sociologist specializing in multi-disciplinary collaborations and qualitative research. Her interest in how innovation emerges under structural limitations was well matched to the circumstances under which the project developed, which were also the circumstances we were studying. Ryan Hagen, a third co-director, trained as an organizational and historical sociologist, and had defended his dissertation in 2019, an ethnography of disaster risk managers in New York City.

While on the surface there seem to be significant overlaps between qualitative sociology and oral history, the epistemological assumptions of our fields are sharply divergent. The exceptional circumstances under which we worked and collaborated opened us up to testing our disciplinary boundaries, which we found marked real differences in our approaches to gathering narratives, analyzing interviews, and disseminating our findings. This paper shares some of what we learned and how we innovated as we explored this interdisciplinary space together.

Existing literature on the intersections of oral history and the social sciences emphasizes the practical and ethical dilemmas that arise when working in this multi-disciplinary space and the challenges of archiving oral history interviews produced within a qualitative research framework. In a process similar to ours, while framing her oral histories about motherhood as qualitative research, Carla Pascoe Leahy found that she had to address both the formal ethical demands of the IRB and the more informal or “subtle ethics” required before, during, and after the oral history interview (2022). Similarly, an interdisciplinary team of Belgian scholars doing research with former residents of orphanages found that while researchers studying childhood were excited about the potential of oral history, they generally failed to prepare for the ethical complexities of this kind of intersubjective work (De Wilde et al., 2020). Working in socio-legal studies, Anna Bryson found that, while “many social scientists engaged in qualitative interview research may with some justification consider that they are also ‘doing oral history,’” the actual practice of preserving qualitative interviews as oral histories required significant changes to typical social science research practices, including the investment of surprising amounts of time in archiving interviews (Bryson, 2021, p. 78).

Through the frictions and learning of our particular interdisciplinary conversation, we found that while the ethical and practical issues represented in the literature certainly did arise — the sociologists on our team were just as shocked as Bryson by the time it took to process the oral histories for archiving — some of the richest insights came from examining the underlying epistemological premises of both our fields, in particular regarding interview authorship and the relationship between the knowledge contained in interviews and the knowledge produced by scholars (Calabria & Bailey, 2021; Gałęziowski & Kaźmierska, 2022). Our collaborative work illuminated tacit assumptions within and between our disciplines and made us grapple with them.

This paper considers what we learned through the process of framing and planning our project, in carrying out interviews and gathering data on participants, and through the early stages of sociological analysis of the material in the archive. The knowledge we gained about the relationships between interviewees and interviewers, and how to generate ideas and findings from the resulting co-created archive, will be illuminating to both oral historians and social scientists working with qualitative data. We also contribute to conversations about open data in social science research.

Framing and Planning a Project in the Context of Crisis

Crises can provide researchers opportunities for exploring new avenues and styles of practice (Sendroiu, 2023). In our case, the acute crisis of the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York provided practical constraints, uncertainty, and a sense of urgency that facilitated cross-disciplinary collaboration by energizing us to sidestep disciplinary norms we might otherwise never have questioned, or even recognized. While we had a sense that the pandemic would be a long-duration event, we saw that conditions were changing extremely quickly from week to week, and we knew we needed to move swiftly to begin our interviews before memories of pre-Covid social life and the early unsettled weeks faded (Caruso et al., 2020; Cave & Sloan, 2014). The speed imperative meant we focused on resolving practical challenges instead of getting caught up in disciplinary differences that arose over issues as fundamental as the nature and purpose of the material we were producing in our interviews. Retrospectively, we are better able to recognize the generative but difficult project we took on as we negotiated the sometimes contradictory goals of producing material for the use of expert researchers generating abstracted, generalizable knowledge, while also creating a collection of publicly accessible documentary material created in collaboration with oral history narrators.

The project was a hybrid at the start. On the one hand, the initial design was laid out by the two sociologists with the intention of securing a rapid-response grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the work. On the other hand, a large share of the work of carrying out the project, from formulating the thematic guides for the interviews to the interviewing itself, would be carried out collectively with oral historians. Meeting the expectations of the NSF grant committee required that the project design reflect the norms of positivist social science. The grant proposal was rooted in the sociological literature on crisis and disaster, proposing to enrich our understanding of community and organizational resilience and patterns of individual outcomes in disasters across categories of social difference. The research design centered on the use of oral history interviews and participant written chronicles of daily life as a method that would allow the researchers to collect “thick descriptions” (Geertz, 1973) of life under the pandemic, capturing information on social interaction, adherence to public health guidelines, and meaning-making in the crisis. We proposed to interview a sample of 200 New Yorkers three times over the course of the pandemic, and to create an archive of chronicle submissions from participants who wished to write about their experiences. The interviews would be accompanied by a quantitative survey collecting demographic data, rudimentary social network data, and a panel of questions on stress response. We planned to use the survey as a tool for refining our sample over the period of recruitment, to ensure diversity in the respondent pool.

We continued to navigate the project’s sometimes awkward hybridity as we undertook the processes of formally beginning research. Grant eligibility required that the project be certified by our university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) — a standard requirement for sociological research but not for oral history which, because it does not typically produce generalizable knowledge, is not considered human subjects research and is usually exempt from active IRB oversight (Larson, 2025). Simultaneously, we had to develop IRB-approved consent forms as well as oral history legal releases for participants, so that we could include their narratives in a public archive. The process of securing IRB approval required us to develop a set of questions we meant to ask in the interviews, and it was here that our first disciplinary differences began to manifest. Sociological convention calls for the development of standardized sets of questions asked consistently of participants in a study, derived from analytic concepts and categories linked to a foundational research question. The theory here is that by holding questions somewhat constant over a set of carefully sampled, diverse interviews, the variation and similarity between answers will reveal abstract patterns that point to general social forces or phenomena (Gerson & Damaske, 2021, pp. 67–73). Oral historians, meanwhile, tend to base interviews on more loosely structured documents that elicit themes or biographically unique experiences that should be covered in the conversation between the narrator and interviewer, leaving enough flexibility for narrators to shape the agenda and how it is addressed through the interview (Morrissey, 2007). Sociologists tend to consider interview data as constitutive of cases amenable to analysis or comparison in the interest of understanding a more general social problem. This approach highlights the particular social roles or positions of interviewees in broader networks or social worlds. Social contexts, rather than the individuals who inhabit them, are usually the object of study. Oral history more fully involves the individual as a co-creator of a specific narrative, expressing their unique experiences and perspectives, as shaped by a particular historical moment and social location. The difference between these approaches may seem subtle but the epistemological gap between them is vast.

The disparate perspectives of sociology and oral history on their objects of study leads to divergent views on authorship of the interviews they create, and different strategies for conceptualizing and managing the risks interview participants may face. While in oral history each interview is understood to be a unique, co-authored, public document, the sociological interview is understood as one measurement among many, the record of an interaction meant to be abstracted from, and which should be held confidentially by the researcher for the protection of the interviewee (Rinaldo & Guhin, 2022).

Oral historians try to protect their interviewees from the harm of their words being taken out of context or their insights being appropriated by researchers by publishing the entire text and recording of an interview, under the names of the interviewer and narrator. When oral histories are quoted in publications, the narrator is typically named and cited. While these forms of transparency can be generative for both narrators and researchers, they also produce significant limits on the uses of oral history methods. In highly politicized environments or when working with narrators who are particularly vulnerable, producing publicly archived oral histories as a research outcome can increase risk or make it impossible for some people to participate, and for some stories to be told (Jessee, 2011).

Sociologists also work to protect research participants, but generally accomplish this by the opposite means and seeking to prevent different harms — the participant’s unique identity is shielded from the view of readers so that their responses can be used to illustrate general social patterns or types without doing violence to the individual’s sense of unique personhood, and to protect them from potential social sanction for the ideas, language, or actions they share with the researcher. Transcripts from sociological interviews are, as a rule, kept confidential in perpetuity. Published work only reveals quotes of varying lengths as evidence to support claims about social life, usually presented anonymously or under a pseudonym. In oral history, exposing full interviews to public scrutiny honors the agency of both the interviewer and the narrator as individuals. The exchange between a sociologist and a research participant is held private, and the professional discretion of the researcher guides disclosures. In contrast, oral historians typically decide how to publicly share oral histories in dialogue with the participant.

Because oral historians see the interview as co-authored, they tend to avoid prescriptive interview guides. Because sociologists seek to abstract from their interviews, they prefer standardized questions that produce readily comparable answers. We settled on a compromise, formulating an interview guide that would broadly induce narratives that moved from past to present to future across all interviews. A few specific, standard questions embedded in each segment of the interview acted like waypoints or gates through which the narrative thread should pass no matter where it went in between. In the first of three waves of interviews we carried out, we wanted to capture the last vestiges of pre-pandemic culture, so we asked narrators to introduce themselves in some depth, and then to describe when they first encountered news of what would become known as the Covid-19 pandemic. Opening with life history, even in an interview focused on a specific topic, is typical of an oral history approach, because oral historians are interested in how a person’s subjectivity shapes their experience. To access daily life in the pandemic, we asked them to describe how they were living in the present. We concluded by asking what they expected to happen by the time we returned to interview them months in the future. While we followed the oral history practice of giving interviewers latitude within the framework of the guide, our specific questions were meant to facilitate sociological analysis down the line. These addressed how narrators’ work had changed, what shifts they had noticed in their community, how they were following or not following public health guidelines, and what prior experiences in their lives were similar to what they were experiencing in the pandemic.

As we prepared to conduct our interviews, the next practical question was what to do with the recordings. Due to public health restrictions, our IRB barred us from conducting any interviews in person, so they would all be conducted remotely over the Zoom platform. This software would generate video and audio recordings that could be sent off for transcription. In sociological research, audio recordings of interviews are generally treated as an intermediate step between the interview itself and the end data product, which is a written transcript. As such, researchers usually discard audio recordings once transcription is complete. For oral historians, audio recordings are a central outcome of the documentation process and so merit special attention to the technical details of audio recording, preservation, and presentation. For our project we decided to preserve the audio and carry out audit editing to polish the transcripts. While the oral historians took these methodological steps for granted, for the sociologists they were major departures from standard practice. We decided to make both the recordings and transcripts available to the public at the conclusion of the project, in collaboration with the Oral History Archive at Columbia (OHAC), as a resource for scholars and lay-people alike. We notified all narrators at the start that their recordings would be publicly available at a future date. We also gave narrators the option of using a pseudonym, which would mask their identity to some extent, and offered to publish only their transcripts in the archive, to conceal their recorded voices. Oral histories are so detailed and personal that even a transcript with a pseudonym remains identifiable to someone who knows the narrator. So, for the narrators most concerned with privacy, we offered to keep all of their material confidential, making them available only to the researchers on the project.

While in the end only a small fraction of narrators opted for maximum confidentiality, working with sociologists and learning from their experience with and openness to anonymizing data allowed us to record stories that would have been impossible to include in a traditional oral history project. Oral history as a research practice was incubated in libraries and archives, grounded in a basic assumption that knowledge should be public, the more public the better. Oral historians have increasingly grappled with the risks of putting life histories online, the limits of oral history to record the most sensitive stories, and the lessons learned from Indigenous communities about the power of keeping some knowledge private (Baik, 2022; Gluck, 2014; Mahuika, 2019). Lack of experience with methodological tools that allow for sharing knowledge while protecting privacy sometimes hinders oral historians in the effort to expand beyond traditional approaches. Collaboration with social scientists who habitually work with these tools – focusing on transcripts, implementing pseudonyms, and maintaining a separation in recordkeeping between a person and their testimony -- facilitated their use in our project.

In accordance with an oral history practice of ongoing consent, we checked back in with narrators before their oral histories became public and gave them another opportunity to reaffirm or change their decisions about access and identification. Knowing in advance that they would have multiple opportunities to both edit their interviews and revisit their choices regarding access allowed participants to be as frank as possible in the interviews, even though their accounts could be shared publicly. The public release of all of our material for this project presented a generative departure for sociological research. ¹ At a time when sociology is fiercely debating the risks and benefits of bringing the “open science” movement to ethnographic research (Khan et al., 2024), the collaboration with oral historians led us to adopt an open data architecture for the project from the start.

An Intersubjective and Dialogic Research Process

We put our emerging epistemological stance into practice as we built our team and began learning together. An oral history approach, which understands that knowledge is produced through intersubjective dialogue (Portelli, 2018), informed not just our fieldwork but our work to build and to collaborate as a team. Along with our narrators, our team of interviewers shaped the project in deep ways, from recruitment of our sample to the interview guide.

Because oral history is an explicitly intersubjective practice, it matters who the interviewers are. In part for budgetary reasons, we knew that about half of the oral histories would be conducted by the core research team. We decided to split the remaining hundred interviews among a team of twenty interviewers. We did this in part because we knew from our experience documenting 9/11 and its aftermath that this was emotionally challenging work, and we wanted to spread the impacts around rather than concentrate them in a small group (Clark, 2002; Cramer, 2020). We also knew that this was a big story, with an almost infinite number of perspectives. So, we decided to recruit interviewers based on skills and formal training as well as their lived experience and social networks. We first reached out proactively to people whom we thought could access interesting and important stories, such as Emma Tsui, a public health professor who researched home health aides; Ann Cvetkovich, a scholar with deep roots in the queer and HIV/AIDS organizing worlds of New York City in the 1980s; Jennifer Dohrn, a nursing professor whose previous research examined the role of nurses during pandemics; and Nicole JeanBaptiste, an oral historian and doula who interviewed Black birthworkers.

We also put out an open call to our network of sociology and oral history colleagues, students and alums, inviting them to apply to be part of the project. We shared our planned areas of focus but we also asked applicants to tell us who they might interview for this project. From this pool we selected oral historians with deep personal ties to, among others, communities of homeless New Yorkers, medical researchers and doctors, Spanish-speaking immigrants in Queens, and Native Americans. We assumed that the perspectives of our core project leadership team would be limited, including in ways we could not predict or perceive. By inviting a diverse network of interviewers to pitch groups of people whom they thought should be included in the archive, we created a collection of oral histories that transcended our own capacity to perceive the range of stories within the city that make up this larger account. For example, we would not have thought to recruit an interviewer specifically to talk with Black churchgoers in Brooklyn, but when potential interviewer Janée Moses pitched that as her “beat,” we agreed that this was an important piece of the story, and hired her to pursue it.

At the very beginning, in recognition of the unsettling climate of the early pandemic, we made a conscious decision to have members of the interviewing team reach out to narrators with whom they already had relationships. This type of approach is antithetical to sociological methods, which warn about the biases that result from too much proximity to study participants. We made this choice because we hoped conversations built on a foundation of trust and shared experience might be less liable to cause harm as we talked with narrators experiencing significant trauma and upheaval (Caswell & Robinson-Sweet, 2024). Still unaccustomed to interviewing over Zoom, we also worried about building rapport from scratch, which was another reason to shy away from interviewing total strangers. Asking interviewers to reach out to potential narrators in their networks also served two goals: recording stories that were not already being told in public, and connecting with people who might not respond on their own to a broad public call for participants. The challenge of building trust remotely spurred more reflexivity and openness to disciplinary heterodoxy.

As the project grew, we used the intake survey to regularly monitor the demographics of our participants, and instructed interviewers to adjust their recruitment accordingly. For example, we prioritized people with less formal education and who lived outside of Manhattan as we realized those groups were under-represented in the sample. As the project continued, we broadened recruitment, reaching out with flyers, ² emails, social media, and other public recruitment tools, as well as using snowball sampling. For those who volunteered to be interviewed, we invited everyone to share written chronicles with the project. However, knowing we had a limited number of interview slots, we carefully selected oral history narrators from that pool based on demographics and experience. While hired interviewers focused on their beats, most of the volunteer narrators were interviewed by the project’s co-directors.

The idea that knowledge is created through active dialogue also informed our approach to training and teaching, beginning with a decision to interview the interviewers from the earliest days of the project. As a teacher of oral history, project co-director Starecheski has always believed that a critical step in learning to interview is experiencing being interviewed oneself. While thinking about how to share our skills with each other, we decided that the oral historians would interview the sociologists and vice versa as a first step in our fieldwork. This served several purposes. It helped us to create and refine our interview guide. It allowed us to train the sociologists in oral history interviewing by showing rather than telling. And it allowed all of us to tell our own stories before we took on the responsibility of listening to others. For us, this was a crucial way to address the fact that everybody involved in this project was living through the pandemic we were documenting. Once we had been listened to, we found we were more able to listen to others. We better understood the challenges of articulating what we were experiencing and the kinds of time and space needed to formulate those thoughts. Seeing how much we had to explain to each other, we realized how varied the perspectives we would encounter might be. Being interviewed helped us to develop our emerging analyses of the crisis we were living through, which in turn shaped our approaches to future interviews.

In terms of the project process, we felt that it was ethical, and a critical piece of our practice of reciprocity, to ourselves be vulnerable in the way that we were asking of our narrators. Our own interviews went into the archive alongside those of our interviewees. In this way, interviewers experienced every step alongside their narrators: getting copies of their first interviews and having the choice to review them before a second session, having the opportunity to review their recordings and/or transcripts, and receiving updates about the project. Being asked to tell our emergent stories of the pandemic while in the midst of it helped us to anticipate the kinds of experiences our participants might have when being interviewed. ³ It helped us to prepare our narrators for the interview and to support them afterwards. For example, Amy Starecheski noticed that after she was interviewed her mind kept going all day, thinking about things she should have said but didn’t, worrying about whether she had overexposed herself, and mulling over insights she had gained through the interview. After she interviewed other people for the project, she would share that this had been her experience and let them know that they might prepare themselves for something similar. She would encourage them to try, if possible, to give themselves some space and time to reflect on and process the experience in the following hours and days.

As our interview team expanded, we decided to continue this practice. Before they began interviewing other people, each new interviewer was interviewed by a member of our core team. This allowed us to introduce them to our interview guide, demonstrating how to organically raise questions and topics by following the threads of their narrators’ account rather than using the guide in a rote, linear way. The practice of interviewing the researchers and including their transcripts in the corpus also unsettled standard sociological procedure, which, while valuing researcher reflexivity, generally hesitates to blur the line between researcher and participant. The pandemic context contributed, among the sociologists on this project, to realizing that serving doubly, as researchers and participants, was only natural given that we were a part of, rather than apart from, the broader experience we were documenting for analysis.

We also wanted rich biographical accounts of the interviewers to be part of the public archive as a way of providing additional context to future users of the collection. It is clear that the process of creating oral histories is deeply intersubjective and dialogic: a co-creative process. However, oral history archives rarely include the information future users would need to make sense of or analyze the interviewer’s role in this process. They might include brief professional bios of interviewers but rarely anything more (Gallwey, 2013). Anyone using our collection in the future will be able to get to know the interviewers at the same level of messy complexity that they can get to know any other narrator. To enrich the intersubjective understanding of future users, and inspired by the sociological practice of creating field notes as core research documents, we also asked interviewers to submit field notes which they would feel comfortable including in the public archive for each interview. These field notes include information about how the interviewer and narrator knew each other or how they connected, the interviewer’s impressions and experience of the interview, and anything else that the interviewer wanted to share with the public about the conversation.

Finally, this practice of interviewing the interviewers helped us to build connections and relationships among the team of interviewers, which supported our longitudinal engagement in this difficult work. Through conducting, processing, and reflecting on the interviews with interviewers, we got to know each other more deeply as people, not just as researchers. We also started each interviewer team meeting with check-ins to hear what our team was personally experiencing. For many of us, these regular interviewer meetings became an important space of connection and even support as we got sick, lost loved ones, were displaced, lost jobs, homeschooled children, and navigated all of the challenges of pandemic life (Baik et al., 2022; Kelly, 2020). At the same time, these meetings sometimes became spaces of intense discussion about disciplinary differences and the challenges of understanding each other across our diverse identities, immigration statuses, and experiences with racism. Our full team never met in person, and while there were many overlapping relationships among us, many of us had never met before.

While the complex subjectivities of our interviewers were an asset to the project, as project co-directors we were also responsible for making sure that all interviewers were using the interview guide as intended. In addition to reviewing transcripts, in each phase of interviewing we listened to at least one oral history conducted by each interviewer and provided detailed feedback. Unsurprisingly, we found that some trained sociologists tended to treat the guide more like a questionnaire, following it in order and missing opportunities for follow ups that might deepen the conversation or unearth surprising lines of inquiry. In addition to giving detailed feedback, we also corrected for this by creating interview guides for the second and third waves that were explicitly intended to be used flexibly in the context of a narrative flow. Some trained oral historians would neglect to address core thematic areas that did not come up organically in conversation, or follow interesting threads so completely that they departed from the waypoint sequence of the interview guide altogether. In response, we noted places in their interviews where opportunities had been present to insert a question that would bring one of our core areas of inquiry into focus. All interviewers grew in their practice through exposure to new approaches and personalized feedback.

At times, however, this disciplinary divide in relation to the balance between organic flow and structured guides led to hard conversations. For example, in June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests and cultural shifts, some interviewers felt strongly that we should ask all narrators to discuss this political moment. Others disagreed. We worried that if we did not mention it, narrators might feel that these topics were beyond the scope of a project explicitly focused on the pandemic. Indeed, when we did bring it up, some narrators expressed surprise that they could speak about the protests in this context. At the same time, we worried that if we raised it too forcefully, narrators might feel pressured to speak to a topic that was not in the forefront of their mind, or to spontaneously articulate connections between the pandemic and the protests to meet the expectations of the interviewer. After much discussion with the full leadership and interviewing team, we settled on advising interviewers to ask an open question about how narrators were experiencing or being impacted by the current political moment. Indeed, while most narrators referenced the conversations happening around race and racism when asked this question, for some these topics did not come up, and that silence was equally important data.

The interviewers were not just instruments to execute the vision of the leadership team, they were collaborators with us and co-authors of the interviews they created for the project. ⁴ Many of them planned to use those interviews in their own research and creative projects, in fields ranging from Public Health to History of Medicine to English. Our regular interviewer meetings became critical spaces to address ethical, methodological, intellectual, and emotional issues. Through interventions from interviewers we made many significant changes to the project design, including translating all of our invitation and consent materials into Spanish and Chinese, creating FAQ documents for participants, offering honoraria to narrators who needed them without means-testing, bringing in an expert in inclusive research to evaluate our survey for bias, and inviting in artist and oral historian Nyssa Chow as a fifth Co-Director to help us think about public curation of the collection. We co-created the interview guides for the second and third rounds of interviews with the team of interviewers, and all of our interview guides were shared as interactive google docs which interviewers annotated with insights and suggestions throughout the project.

Where traditional social science approaches to the interview might focus on how to minimize the impact of the researcher’s subjectivity and agency on the interview, in our hybrid oral history and sociology project we treated the researchers’ subjectivity and diversity as tools to help us elicit richer accounts of the Covid 19 pandemic. This contributed to the collaborative creation of a multivocal archive/dataset which resisted certain kinds of abstracting analyses while opening the door to a more holistic case-based analysis. Our approach yielded new research questions and sociological insights about the breakdown of ontological security and the ways in which individuals and communities attempt to repair it through building knowledge and taking action. In the following section, we describe our challenging path through data seldom used by sociologists, and how it shaped our analysis method.

Conclusion

This project brought together sociologists and oral historians during the Covid-19 pandemic. We gathered over four hundred hours of oral history interviews and 900 written chronicles from a diverse sample of New Yorkers during an exceptionally difficult moment for carrying out interview-based research. From the perspective of sociology, the project built an empirical data set amenable to examining the social effects of the pandemic crisis. From the perspective of oral history, the project built a publicly accessible archive which has already been and continues to be used to create not just research but many forms of art and knowledge. For example, the Yogi Berra Museum used some of our interviews about the Bronx to contextualize an exhibit on Covid and Major League Baseball (Iannarella, 2024). A journalist immersed himself in the archive to write a long form New York Times Magazine piece reflecting on how people were making meaning of the pandemic (Mooallem, 2023). Oregon artist Lynda Bourque Moss drew on the archive to create “Grace,” a multimedia project combining prints made with masks and audio clips from the oral histories (Moss, 2023).

Throughout the framing of the project, our team negotiated to find an approach in concordance with our different perspectives. In this space between disciplines, we all came to new insights and approaches. This involved creating interview guides that facilitated consistency without limiting the agency of interviewers and narrators. The collective work of developing the guides, as well as the piloting and training work involved with interviewing the interviewers, created a space for sharing and negotiation that solidified (though not without challenges!) the interdisciplinarity of the project. In our recruitment process, typical concerns with objectivity and the avoidance of bias were laid down on behalf of the trust that comes from shared social networks and contexts. The result was a heterogeneous, though not quite representative, sample of New Yorkers, rich enough in variation to meet the requirements of sociological research processes. Through work with the Columbia IRB and OHAC, we allowed for narrators to claim authorship or remain confidential.

Our initial attempts to analyze the material sociologically used traditional parsing and aggregating techniques. This approach gave way once we recognized the interviews themselves as sites of collaborative knowledge production. Through preserving the integrity of the narratives and narrators, we were able to identify patterns that connected knowledge and action in the experience of crisis and in the repair of ontological security during the pandemic. The sociologists’ willingness to dive into the archive, take things apart, and abstract from people’s stories, opened up insights that may not have been accessible to oral historians, whose approach to working with interviews can tend towards excessive deference and fear of overexerting authority.

As an interdisciplinary methodology used across the humanities, arts, and social sciences, oral history can be a generative tool for unsettling disciplinary conventions and bridging disciplinary divides. For example, Amy Starecheski introduces tools and ideas from anthropology to help oral historians understand their work as part of an expansive cultural landscape of history-making practices and to move beyond the seated, one-on-one life history interview as an assumed methodological norm (Starecheski, 2026). Scholars working in and on archives, such as Michelle Caswell, have used social science methods to study the oral history process (Caswell, 2021; Caswell & Robinson-Sweet, 2024). Their research on oral history and collaboration with oral historians is a key part of a larger project of inverting traditional hierarchies in archiving by developing robustly supported community archives. Similarly, public historians have mined the long tradition of shared authority in oral history as they seek models for deep collaboration between professional historians and laypeople rather than simply disseminating knowledge produced by credentialed scholars (Meringolo, 2021). Our collaboration highlights how interdisciplinarity can challenge and stretch existing boundaries in ways that make space for overlapping interests. Our experience also led us to strengthen methods and theories within our disciplines by testing their underlying assumptions and clarifying priorities with respect to knowledge production.

In “settled times,” (Swidler, 1986) the project might have run aground on debates about the nature of the documents and knowledge we were producing, or about how and whether the resulting interview materials should be made public. Along with so many other people, our personal and professional routines were profoundly disrupted in March 2020. While we changed how we taught our students, shopped for groceries, and interacted with neighbors, we also changed how we collaborated with colleagues. The openness presented by the crisis helped us arrive at hybrid and innovative approaches drawing on elements of both sociological and oral history methods. While the crisis context forced us to quickly overcome differences for the sake of efficiency, we expect that the lessons expressed here will also be useful to future projects in non-crisis contexts.

On the surface, oral history interviewing and qualitative interviews for social science research may look very similar. This superficial similarity served as a foundation for a collaboration which unearthed profound differences in our practices. Seen through the eyes of our colleagues, many of our standard practices and, most profoundly, our epistemological assumptions became ethnographically strange to us.

In this context, sociologists taught oral historians how to learn from and with our narrators while protecting their privacy, and shared new ways to think about how our collections are representative and reliable. From working with sociologists, oral historians can learn to take more confident ownership of our intellectual authority, making active use of the oral histories we record rather than letting them sit in archives.

We also discovered places where we wanted to stay grounded in the core values of our disciplines. While the sociologists developed innovative approaches to analysis through their engagement with oral histories, they still chose to write up their findings in a way that created some distance between the experiences of individual narrators and the arguments of sociologists. While the oral historians appreciated the opportunity to document the experiences of narrators who could only speak under the conditions of anonymity, the vast majority of the oral histories were shared in a public archive for open use.

A moment of extended crisis broke open our disciplinary boundaries and norms enough for us to come together, but our relationships and collaborations have endured beyond that moment. We not only worked together as scholars on this project, we also listened to each others’ stories, learned about each others’ families and hobbies and worries. It was indeed risky for us to jump into this work together, but we found that it was a risk worth taking.