Oral History’s Deadlocks

Gholamreza Azari Khakestar
Translated by Mandana Karimi

2025-8-27

Today, oral history is regarded as one of the research tools attracting the attention of contemporary historians and even interdisciplinary studies. Just as these sources can be trusted, the opposite is also true. Oral history researchers face challenges during their investigations that sometimes lead to dead-ends in analyzing events. Although some oral historians, after years of interviewing, do not consider oral history data alone as fully accepted, they strive to present accurate and compelling narratives by clarifying and documenting the accounts.

Researchers conclude in their studies that oral history sources alone cannot provide the full historical truth. Of course, oral history productions are never meant to present a comprehensive account of history because historical reality is not explicitly expressed. In fact, oral history narratives are puzzle-like fragments of an event. Collecting the hidden layers behind history is difficult and requires targeted interviews, sometimes remaining as a mystery tucked away in the archives of history.

However, misguided policies regarding the vision and goals of oral history projects create deadlocks for researchers.

The vast volume of narratives and raw oral history data, each requiring specialized verification, poses a challenge. Biased analyses and partisan or factional considerations can also produce prejudiced narratives. This issue is the greatest challenge for researchers in oral history studies.

Decisions and opinions made by non-experts lead to the recording of less accurate narratives and fail to define the correct path and understanding in oral history projects.

The gap between experience and theory is the biggest problem in the field of oral history. Generally, theorists and empiricists are distant from each other. It seems that theory must emerge from experience. Simply looking to foreign studies is not a solution, and each oral history project is credible only within its own social and political geography.

Despite three decades of activity by oral history centers, oral history departments have still not been established inside the country. Numerous academic outputs from oral history centers have also not been produced.

Competing interests over who to interview and which topics to highlight have taken away the researcher’s initiative, resulting only in the recording of aligned narratives.

Conducting interviews and archiving them without purpose or planning, merely hoping that these interviews might be used in the future, is itself a deadlock for the researcher.

Not publishing interviews and only archiving them—stemming from a traditional “archive-centric” viewpoint—is the biggest challenge in the field of oral history. Because the collected sources are not exposed to audience critique and review, the data gradually lose their real value over time.

Focusing solely on statistics and conducting interviews with any ordinary individuals under any title can fatten oral history archives but challenge the quality of their content.

Currently, despite social networks and advances in artificial intelligence, traditional approaches are not very effective; rather, updating equipment and software can greatly assist oral history researchers.