Voicing Differences

As a method, oral history's origins lie in a commitment to challenge, reveal and give voice to those disempowered, misrepresented, or simply missed out of official, dominant accounts of the past. In this paper, we link the memories of a group of South Asian overseas doctors, working in an elite profession with a distinctly non-elite group of patients, to an earlier set of archived interviews with the founders of the geriatric specialty. Our analysis identifies muted voices, generates recognition, and acknowledges ways of understanding and using the polyphony of difference. We argue that the value of reusing archived oral history data lies in the possibility for multiple interpretations of old and new data, and with this, new ways of hearing and listening to voices in interviews.  Read the fully story and download the paper here.