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

This paper describes how sociologists and oral historians collaborated to create, register, and analyze an extensive archive of interviews with New Yorkers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The challenges of framing the project, forming a team of interviewers, recruiting participants, and conducting interviews within the demands and urgency of pandemic conditions led researchers to reexamine their respective disciplinary foundations and methodological approaches. The process of archiving highlighted oral history’s focus on shared authorship in contrast to the sociological norm of maintaining participant anonymity. While sociologists analyze and abstract interview material to answer particular research questions, oral historians work to amplify the complex voices of narrators and democratize access to interviews for diverse aims. These differences brought the researchers into productive dialogue on the ethical complexities of both protecting and disseminating collaboratively produced knowledge. The outcome of the project was an oral history archive which also served as a qualitative dataset amenable to sociological inquiry. In early efforts to analyze the archive, the sociologists on the team learned through trial and error that oral history transcripts can lose coherence when fragmented into coded segments, as typically required by qualitative data analysis methods. Critical and innovative forms of analysis evolved from recognizing interviews as expressions of dialogic and processual forms of knowledge. Interdisciplinary collaboration both challenged and stretched existing boundaries between sociology and oral history. Brought together in a moment of crisis with a common goal of documenting the experience of the pandemic in New York City, researchers reached across their disciplines to build a reflexive, generative, and innovative space for both social inquiry and historical testimony.