Theory Two: The Borderline Legitimacy Crisis of Oral History in the Academic System
Compiled by Iranian Oral History Website
Translated by Fazel Shirzad
2026-05-26
Oral history is more than just an accumulation of narratives; it is a field of methodical dialogue between memory, power, ethics, and representation. Amidst this, one of the challenges for researchers in this field is transitioning from mere “interview reporting” to “theoretical structuring” (a question to which every expert provides a different answer based on their experience and intellectual framework).
If we were to feed the responses of 13 oral history experts (who have answered a specific question on the Oral History website) into an AI, what patterns and repetitions would emerge? Does AI merely echo a consensus, or can it derive a theory from the plurality of responses?
To find the answer, we analyzed the experts’ responses using the DeepSeek AI and arrived at several theories. From here on, the theories extracted by the AI based on the experts’ responses will be presented sequentially, opening a new chapter in theorizing about oral history.
Theory Two: The Borderline Legitimacy Crisis of Oral History in the Academic System
The more academics emphasize traditional criteria of scientific validity (the historical age of sources, written authenticity, temporal distance from the event, and quantitative methods), the more oral history (due to its reliance on individual memory, subjectivity, the lack of sufficient temporal distance, and the difficulty of verification) is relegated to a “borderline zone” between science and non-science. Consequently, the reluctance of academics is not rooted in the essence of oral history itself, but is the result of its “institutional legitimacy crisis” within a system that has yet to produce evaluation frameworks, educational structures, and promotion criteria commensurate with this field.
Theoretical Background:
This theory was derived based on the responses of 13 oral history experts (Gholamreza Azari Khakestar, Mohammad-Mehdi Behdarvand, Hassan Beheshtipour, Abolfazl Hassanabadi, Hossein Zanjani, Fazel Shirzad, Mohammad-Mehdi Abdollahzadeh, Gholamreza Azizi, Seyed Mohammad-Sadegh Feiz, Hamid Qazvini, Jafar Golshan Roghani, Mohammad-Mohsen Moshafi, and Shafiqeh Nik-Nafs) to the question, “What is the reason for the lack of academic reception of oral history?”
The repetition of concepts such as “traditional view of written sources,” “lack of an independent academic discipline,” “weakness of methodology in education,” “resistance to change,” “difficulty in verifying narratives,” and “emphasis on a fifty-year temporal distance” in these responses led the AI to the pattern you have studied.
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