Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs

Marella Hoffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351607148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The use of contemporary oral history to improve public policies and programs is a growing, transdisciplinary practice. Indispensable for students and practitioners, Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs is the first book to define the practice, explain how policy-makers use it, show how it relates to other types of oral history, and provide guidance on the ethics and legalities involved.

Packed with case studies from disciplines as diverse as medicine, agriculture, and race relations, as well as many examples from the author's own work, this book provides an essential overview of the current state of the field within oral history for public policy and a complete methodology for the process of designing and implementing an oral history project. The comprehensive How To section demonstrates how to use the practice to advance the reader's career, their chosen discipline and the public interest, whether their field is in oral history or in public policy.

This book is an important resource for oral historians, fledgling or experienced, who are keen to find new applications and funding for their work, as well as for professionals in the public and not-for-profit sectors who want to learn to use oral history to improve their own policies and programs.

Part I
Why Do It?

1
Let Them Tell You What Will Work

How Oral History Can Improve Public Policies and Programs

For a while now, NASA had been using technologies like satellites, remote sensing and weather modeling to track the melting of the ice. Its researchers knew the Arctic was where climate change hit first and hardest, and they were relying on this research to help shape climate change policies worldwide. But there were limits to what the scientific data could tell them about the situation up there. It took some oral history with local reindeer herders to unlock the next phase of NASA’s work.

They found that nomadic herders held vast traditional oral knowledge about pasture lands and migration routes. Once shared, it enabled NASA to map in much more detail the progress of climate change across the northern regions. NASA is calling it ‘co-produced data’ and using it to improve decision-making and policies around climate change. Recognising the narrators as ‘equal partners’, NASA describes their oral history contribution as being of ‘worldwide impact’. The space agency has even drawn up its own ethical standards for gathering oral histories so that they can do more of these collaborations in the future (Maynard & Pogodaev, 2012 and Maynard et al. 2008).¹

Who This Book Is for

The use of oral history to improve public policies and programs is a growing, transdisciplinary practice that is set to keep expanding. So this book is designed to be equally helpful for two audiences:

• oral historians, either fledgling or experienced, who are open to finding new relevance and applications for their work; and
• professionals in any discipline of the public or not-for-profit community sectors, who are new to oral history and want to learn to use it to improve their own field’s policies and programs.

Whichever side you’re coming from, and whatever your previous level of experience, the book includes a comprehensive How To section that will leave you fully equipped to use this hidden gold and do such a project yourself.

The field is wide. By ‘public’ we mean here any aspect of the state, governmental, non-profit, charity or community sectors, and any activity that’s done for the public good, without the profit-making goals of the private sector. By ‘policies or programs’ we mean the services, projects and investments that the non-profit sectors provide. And you will see that nowadays the term oral history covers not only accounts of events from years or decades ago but also contemporary oral history, such as refugee teenagers’ accounts of their experiences over the past six months while fleeing from war in their homeland. So don’t be misled by the term history: the oral histories discussed here could just as easily be called oral ‘testimonies’, as they often express very recent experiences and current views.²

You will see that there are already many successful examples out there where the ‘hidden gold’ of contemporary oral history is being used to improve public policies and programs. But this is the first publication to

• define oral history for public policy as a distinct field, explaining exactly how it works;
• bring together a broad range of case studies from around the world;
• present several dozen examples from the author’s own working practice, showing how and why they were effective;
• provide a complete and detailed methodology for doing oral history for public policies or programs, whether your background is in oral history, in public policy, or you’re new to both; and
• situate the practice within a theoretical and socio-political framework.

This first chapter introduces you to the practice and shows why it’s so valued by policy-makers. Chapter 2 shows how oral history for public policy relates to other types of oral history. Chapter 3 gives an exciting flyover of successful case studies from around the world in disciplines as diverse as medicine, agriculture and race relations. The four ensuing chapters—almost half the book—comprise the How To section, walking you through every detail of doing your own project, big or small. And in the final chapter we’ll review all that you’ve learned, seeing how best to apply it to advance both your own career and your chosen discipline, whether that’s in oral history or in public policy.

Before we embark on this journey together, I’ll mention my qualifications for being your guide to this transdisciplinary subject. Raised in rural Ireland where oral culture remains central, I became a university lecturer on literature, then moved into social and political science. I’ve written two other books about oral history, one on ecological agriculture and the other on refugees. Those books were also about oral history ‘for public policy’ because for the past two decades, I’ve worked on public policy—internationally, nationally and most of all at city and regional levels.³ Across my time with city government, I was responsible for an overall budget of £1.5 million for involving the public in shaping policy. And for over a decade, I was chief editor of a public policy magazine in Cambridge, England, communicating policy to the communities affected by it in over 40,000 copies per year.⁴ (I’ve spent most of my working life in Cambridge, first researching and teaching at its famous university and then working for political institutions based there and elsewhere: you’ll see the city emerge like a living character across this book’s many case studies.⁵)

Chapter 3 brings you colorful case studies from around the world, but most of the book’s ‘teaching and learning’ moments are down to earth examples from my own experience of using oral history for public policy, and most are at city and local levels. I feel this is important because they show you that whoever you are, wherever you are, once you’ve absorbed the techniques in this book you could start doing your own oral history for public policy right now. You’ll see that to influence public policies and programs, you don’t have to be elected as a politican, employed by government or on the staff of a campaigning organization. This book will show you that ‘hidden gold’ opportunities lie all around you in your immediate community. As one commentator has explained, ‘democratic governments can only move when they know that the move will be widely accepted. As a result, the directions of change often come from outside the parliamentary system […] from people like us’ (Handy, 2015).

Addressing Concerns about Using Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs

Oral history for public policy is like traditional oral history except that it goes two steps further: after the interviews, it extracts narrators’ relevant insights, needs and recommendations, and it presents them to policy-makers in a convincing way. Some might feel this defiles a certain purity in oral history, which should remain archived in museums and libraries as a version of official history, not tampered with or ‘applied’ to anything. Others might feel it’s dangerous to ‘use’ oral history at all, because it could then be mis-used to serve the agendas of a particular group.

Rest assured that the chapters of this book are thoroughly girded with the ethical and professional restrictions that have to be observed around this kind of work. One of the purposes of the book is to provide these ethical guidelines so that the practice—which is already happening anyway all over the world—can be defined and taught to recognized professional standards that protect the interests of all concerned, especially those of the most vulnerable.

For oral historians who want to focus entirely on ‘pure’ oral history, that work still needs doing. But this book is for people who also feel drawn to help deliver applied, transdisciplinary projects for the public good. And we don’t need to apologize for this: it is now a driving ethos for most funders, who require applications to demonstrate measurable engagement with, and impact on, the public good.

But the concern about narratives being misused to serve the interests of the powerful is a real one and has been a driver in my own working life. In this book you will see how the private sector—in market surveying, product design, advertising and lobbying—deploys formidable skills in interviewing, empathy and narrative to increase their profits. This book is about moving that powerful lobby aside and using oral history to build the resources of civil society so that the voices of the less powerful can take their place too at the decision-making table. I moved from pure academia to also working with policy when I saw how relatively easy it is to (a) get access to decision-makers, (b) have your voice heard by them and (c) influence them with convincing arguments, once you know how … This book shows you how to do that for and with your own oral history narrators.

A Methodology That Engages with the Socio-Political Context

In this time of fragile, volatile politics and economics, this book is not calling for any sort of utopia. Today, we are surrounded by at least four alarming currents, namely,

1. the widening inequalities between rich and poor;
2. governments’ inability to resolve even current crises like those of the banking system, refugees, wars in the Middle East and climate change—not to mind the crises ahead;
3. a public increasingly alienated from the political process and distrustful of political leaders; and
4. populist movements rejecting the knowledge-base of elites, giving rise to a ‘post-truth’ society manipulated by vested-interest media, commerce and other forces (Flinders, 2016).

Manifestations of all this in the past year alone include Britain’s ‘Brexit’ vote to leave the European Union, the campaign that carried President Donald Trump to the White House and the epoch-defining announcement to the press by Britain’s minister for education that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ (Menon & Portes, 2016). So is this book about restoring the ‘Vox Populi’—the voice of the people? If the voice of the people had to mean the ‘post-truth’ populism that produced the outcomes just mentioned, you might well feel like running a mile from it and bolting the doors of universities and parliaments behind you to seek refuge in unbiased, truthful research and the ideals of democracy. But it doesn’t have to mean that.

The methodologies proposed here for involving community intelligence in decision-making do not empower or facilitate:

• mob rule, where the masses get to make decisions that are neither wise, ethical, sustainable nor good for the overall collective;
• the ‘post-truth society’, with its baying denial of expertise and any form of objective truth; and
• what’s called ‘NIMBY ism’, where small, empowered lobbies from the public get to say ‘Not In My Back Yard’, foisting undesirable outcomes onto others’ back yards instead.

The fact is that genuinely independent expertise and democratic decision-making will be even more important in the future, not less so. But the wake-up call that we must heed from the alarm bells of recent events is the need to close this chasm between expertise and political authority on the one hand and the world’s public, on the other—not to widen it further by running away. In its own enraged way, the public is rightly calling for dialogue and decision-making to be rebalanced in more egalitarian, round-table collaborations between power, knowledge and the people.

Avoiding mob rule, anti-intellectualism and ‘NIMBYism’ are routine challenges of the democratic process whenever experts consult with communities. As preparation for my own work as a local government official, I received extensive training in managing and screening out those distortions. But distortions exist on both sides: consultative processes must also rein in the superiority complex, vested interests and camouflaging jargon that can be wielded by elites. These are the challenges when bringing any stakeholders together for decision-making, but they’re not a reason not to do it. This book shows how oral history processes can help strengthen decision-making methodologies for the future and how you can contribute to this corrective, democratising movement.

Because, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Why Do It?
• PART II Doing Your Own Oral History to Improve a Policy or Program—The Step-by-Step Guide
• PART III Twenty-First-Century Solutions
• Appendices
• Some Key Concepts in This Book
• Index