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Published in 2023 by the journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau, Rikers: An Oral History tells the history of the prison complex at the Bronx island of Rikers, New York City. This century-old institution, previously the city garbage dump, has been known as a place of violence, abuse and neglect towards the women, men and teenagers incarcerated there, most of them being Black or Hispanic, either convicted or waiting for trial. Relationships amongst the imprisoned and between those and the officers are treacherous and ambiguous, echoing in both of their relatives’ lives, and reflecting the reality of the public power oversight regarding non-white communities to the margins of society.

The book’s goal is to present points of view of the role and effects of Rikers within the city that surrounds it. Therefore, not only former and current incarcerated people were listened to, but also their families, officers and high staff, lawyers and activists of public policies. From the 130 interviews made, the authors selected common themes and transformed those in chapters: starting from day one in the prison, they address racial, gender and sexuality experiences and the quotidian dealing with constant and multiple forms of violence, perpetuated both from the state, the prison administration and the imprisoned.

Overall, it is a great book, especially if you are into criminal studies, and an easy read if you take in account the structure and organization (the toughness of the subject can make it hard to digest, though). Each chapter starts with a brief introduction from the authors, followed by excerpts of the interviews – always with a prior indication of the narrator, but rarely with the question made. I struggled with some of our readings through our class because, in my point of view, there is little justice being done when authors use chopped fragments of OH in their writings. After reading Rikers, I understood my preference for longer statements, since they provide more a line of reasoning from the interviewee’s speech; and personally, the absence of the authors’ mediation between different stories is not a problem. Actually, Rayman and Blau did an ingenious work on showing content patterns and chronological perceptions by combining narratives from varied people in a logical order with a beginning and an end at each chapter.

A lot of the choices made by the authors lack explanations, like the reason why only Linus Coraggio (artist, detained for one night, not in Rikers), Amin “Minister” King (today personal trainer and body guard, imprisoned at Rikers in the 80s), and Michael Jacobson (correction commissioner) have their own exclusive chapters, the latter two with other appearances too. Also, and the profile of Corragio illustrates it, it is not clear why people incarcerated in other institutions figure in the book and how they were chosen amongst others (as another example, Sandi Sutton was detained in Greenwich Village at Women’s House of Detention). To be fair, I appreciate their inclusion, because it provides a statement of how there was and is little difference between carceral institutions across the country. The authors never said they were going after this, though; from the preface and additional contents (such as the book flap), the idea for the book is to be about the effects of Rikers on people’s lives. At last, there are a few interlocutions between two narrators that are unclear if they are artificially juxtaposed together or if they were actually together at the time of the interview.In the end, as it happened with a lot of other readings we did this semester, it may be difficult to encounter projects that fulfill all the paradigms and rules posed in the OH manuals or by the OH Association. It has to be valued, for example, the authors’ concern with the material availability for the general public; after all, the Rikers Public Memory Project is collected at The New York Public Library, and anyone can require an in-person research appointment through their website. At the same time, interviews were sometimes made in cafes or cars or even inside the prison, where a few interviewees were still serving time – this adds a safety layer that I see as a limit being challenged, with possible negative outcomes. In my personal view, the book should be considered as part of a broad tradition of Oral History works, but it should also have its methods and choices questioned in the light of a system that is still overlooked by historians.

On May 1st of 2024, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul decreed a state of emergency affecting the southernmost state of Brazil. A heavy and unprecedented rain, along with a sequence of infrastructure problems, caused damage to 478 of 497 Rio Grande do Sul’s cities; 184 deaths were registered, and 25 people are missing until this day; more than 200,000 people had to leave their homes (some estimates up to 600,000). If you lived in the capital of the state, Porto Alegre, it was virtually impossible not to know someone who left their home rescued in improvised boats, during the 14 days that an expressive part of the city was submerged. Fortunately, my parents and I were not directly affected, but I cannot say the same for my whole family and friends.

Reading Perkiss’ Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s forgotten shore brought all of these memories back in a way I cannot explain. Although it is not (or should not) be the purpose of history as a discipline, it is impossible to not be caught in emotion sometimes. As I was going through the genealogy of Hurricane Sandy, I thought the whole time about how difficult it must be to conduct oral history interviews not only right after it occurred but also doing the follow-up and stating that there was still so much left to do years later. I cannot stress how emotionally strong someone has to be to join a OH project like that, but this challenge seems to be easier when you articulate such external forces as Perkiss did, especially on preparing her undergrad students with former oral historians. I actually felt really welcome about her later descriptions about organizing the project, gathering students and going back to handbooks, mostly because it shows that no matter your experience as a historian and teacher, there is always more to learn.

But, again, what caught me off guard was trying to imagine conducting a similar project in my hometown and reviving all of those memories again. Most readings and conversations we had so far about emotions were regarding the narrators, their trauma experiences and how the environment and questions of an OH interview might bring these up. On the other hand, I don’t feel we addressed enough about how it may have its own effects on the interviewer and how to deal with that. My feeling reading Perkiss was that no matter how much I could prepare myself before an interview like that, I could not assure anyone a hundred percent that I would not break into tears hearing the people’s struggles during and after the flood of 2024. The thing is: can anyone predict that at all? I imagine that if a person knows they have a chance of getting emotional and have trouble keeping it together, it would be smart and ethical to step back, but what if you truly believe you are able to handle it? How could we prepare interviewers to deal with this scenario and what are the implications it may have in the segment of the conversation? In comparing community volunteers that have “an advantage in researching the subject matter and in establishing rapport with interviewees” and “the ‘clinical’ interviewer from outside the community [that] may be seen as more neutral and discreet”, Richie (p. 55-56) is writing with big scale and/or funded OH projects in mind – which are not the reality for most of those historians entrepreneurs. From a superficial research, I have found only an OH project about the flood of 2025 in Rio Grande do Sul regarding the memories from Public Administration; as this is a recent and meaningful event, there are undergrad and grad students developing individual studies about civilian memories, but they usually work by themselves. How is it possible, then, if a big part of this history is being written in these roots, to think about the limitations of an interviewer in dealing with a collective memory they also share?

In preparing myself for our oral history interview, I am first concerned with being well aligned with my partner, Tamar. Most of the readings we did do not deepen into dividing the task between two interviewers, but this certainly interferes in the room’s dynamic. As we talked before, as a journalist and having English as her primary language, Tamar will take the lead and help me feel comfortable too. Both of us must be in syntony, which means for me having a clear understatement with Tamar about the structure of the questions and our approach; guaranteeing that is not only good for the project outcome but for the environment, as it makes all involved more confident about their roles.

Before the interview, it is also essential to provide a statement about what is the project scope and its goals, as clear as the interviewee needs it to be. By doing that, we are creating a safe and honest space, where the person feels empowered from the beginning about what she might have to say and offer. In addition, I have to study more about the narrator’s professional career and the history of both the institution and the Philadelphia History Museum, gathering practical information to bring with me to the interview day (Sommer & Quinlan, p. 46, 48)

When it comes to the questions, there are a few issues that must be reflected in the final sketch. 

• The list of questions will be used as a start and/or guide to the interview (where we come back when a topic is closed, for example), but should not be “hard” as a formal questionnaire, since we aim for a fluid conversation. Abrams points out that adopting “an open, informal and semistructured approach to the interview, encouraging creative, discursive and lengthy replies” (p. 124) helps in promoting a coherent narrative.
• Open-ended questions are the best option to get more information, because it allows the narrator to identify what she believes it is more important to say (Sommer & Quinlan, p. 59). Although I don’t believe in an interviewer’s capacity to be neutral, I agree with the idea that people are susceptible to suggestion – and open-ended questions mitigate the possibilities of controlling the narrative (Abrams, p. 85).
• The first questions should be about her personal life, for at least three motives: to create her biography for the project (Sommer & Quinlan, p. 67); to both set the tone and break the ice right on the beginning of it; to provide context for me and Tamar about how the narrator’s interests, experiences and struggles overlaps with her passage in the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
• Together, Tamar and I should point out “must be asked” questions, or at least topics. Of course we want to know it all, but there are issues that are more important than others – such as understanding the plan to save the institution on the verge of early 2000s. 
• I am assuming a position that our narrator knows more about the theme than me, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. Her experience and the fact that I am new to the city and its cultural institutions makes me even more, in a perspective of creating a collaborative endeavour, a facilitator for the interviewee to produce what is called a recognisable structure and going for a balance of information and reflection (Abrams, p. 10-11, 42).

On the day of the interview, we must remember to take:

• an informed consent to be signed by the narrator (Sommer & Quinlan, p. 22);
• an interview information form to the project’s archive (Sommer & Quinlan, p. 68);
• the questions’ list;
• the background list with important names, dates and events;
• the audio equipment (must be tested at home and on the site before starting the interview);
• a notebook to follow up (I don’t like the idea of tablets/computers because it is too easy to take our attention away).

When we are all ready to start, we should begin with an introduction about the practical information of the interview (date and hour, name of the interviewers and interviewee, name of the project) and the personal background questions. Then, at least for me, it is all about reading the room: it’s necessary to be open to adapt the questions and the whole course of the interview, understand sensible moments or needs for a pause, or even be able to lead or step down if I see my partner struggling with an issue. We must go for the big questions with confidence, but also recognize boundaries and be respectful if the person insists that she won’t talk about a specific topic; the more comfortable and heard our narrator feels regarding me and Tamar, I believe we should have more opportunities for her to reciprocate.To be an active listener, I believe it is crucial to make constant and empathetic eye contact. There’s two outcomes from that: first, I portray myself as an interested and engaged interviewer even when I am not talking; secondly, it helps me to be focused on the narrator’s body language too since, as the chapter about performance on Abrams book makes the case, it is equally essential to pay attention to how things are said, the silences and the gestures. Before wrapping the interview up, we must remember to reserve time to give the narrator a space to add anything she might want to (new information, correct a misunderstanding, provide feedback).

After reading Brecher’s article a few weeks ago, I was left with a lot of thinking about how the reality of an Oral History project can become distant to what someone has planned in its early conception. I took that as if the author was giving me personal advice on what I should give up if I was ever adventuring myself in this enterprise: maybe do not care so much about what people may think about the project, understand that only practice will improve interviews, and be open to change schemes. Mostly, what kept me wondering was how they imagined that doing a group interview could actually work. Later on, when I randomly chose an article from Hamilton and Shopes’ book on Oral History and Public Memories about memory workshops, I was confronted with a successful group experience headed by Riaño-Alcalá, a Colombian-Canadian anthropologist, in Colombia, 1996. I come back to it now, questioning the validity that it has as a proper OH project, after Abrams and her Oral History Theory (2016, 2nd ed.).

In a superficial analysis, the definition of memory workshop does not collide with OH’s one, since it “consists of a series of guided and facilitated activities in a group format. A question is posed to the entire group, seeking to activate participants’ memories of a specific event, place, or time in their lives. Each participant narrates his or her memory, and then the group reflects on what they have heard” (Riaño-Alcalá, p. 272). As Abrams points out, we should look to “oral history interview as a means of accessing not just information but also signification, interpretation and meaning” (p. 2), and that appears in the core of Riaño-Alcalá project interview on attempting to make sense of the past creating a collective memory from the shared experiences of internal displaced people in Colombia during the 1990s and 2000s (p. 277). On a deeper level, Riaño-Alcalá does not seem to be interested in accessing an information and analysing its significations, interpretations and meanings (Abrams, p. 1) – rather, she specifically used a format that would “allow individuals to recognize social suffering and that encourage collective mourning” (Riaño-Alcalá, p. 286). According to Abrams, this construction of a common ground and a healing process could only be a great surprise, not a value inherent to the project itself. If there was to be a concern with future psychological outcomes, it should be specially with the harm it could endanger by gathering 10 strange people in a room to bond over recent trauma of being forced to leave their homes.

Despite acknowledging that the consequences of the internal Colombian war were still being discussed in peace negotiations between the State and the paramilitary forces, Riaño-Alcalá did not worry about possible negative implications on civil people talking about something that was reverberating in the country’s politics. Abrams makes a necessary statement about our role: again, not only we cannot assure that an interview is going to be helpful (p. 190-191), but also we must keep in mind the safety and security of our interviewees (p. 192-193).My key question this week brings back the theme of sharing authority, a Frisch’ concept that is all about collaboration and redistribution of power between both the interview and the interviewee. Although extensively approached by Abrams (p. 167 onwards), there’s not, in her book, a proper discussion about that in the context of a group of more than three people. The Colombian-Canadian anthropologist points out how her “expertise in facilitation and popular education methods has been crucial in my experience, as these sessions require knowledge of group dynamics, conflict resolution skills, and a deep awareness of the researcher’s power to control the group” (Riaño-Alcalá, p. 274). This statement pretty much synthetises her work and my difficult to qualify it as being OH. Once one (in her case were two ‘facilitators’) have a large group to mediate, it seems to be very difficult not only to maintain the power equilibrium but for the interviewer to engage within the group and everything that this involves. Is it impossible, though?

was born in Mãe Luzia, a small rural region in the interior of Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 1956. He was the middle child of nine, and since his parents, Thelma Spritze and Horizonte Venzon, struggled to provide the best conditions for their family, he started working informally at 9 years old. By the age of 12, the family moved to Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul state, motivated by the possibilities discovered by his older sister. He was the first (of two) of his nuclear family to attend a university, and he graduated from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul with a degree in Physical Education in 1981. Pursuing his goal to work with professional soccer, he started as physical trainer at Sport Club Internacional; in his career, Hércules won regional and national championships, accumulating passages also as assistant coach in teams such as Cruzeiro Esporte Clube and Clube Atlético Mineiro, while conciliating a tenured position as a civilian physical teacher in a military school. His focus on promoting the idea that physical training exercises have to integrate at the same time technical, tactical and psychological values resulted in a book published in 1988. Years later, in 2013, he became a Master in Language, Discourse and Society from Unirriter with a dissertation that explored soccer matches as a non-verbal language, therefore demanding a reading and interpretation of its concepts, meanings and signifiers. Hércules retired from the fields in 2010 and from Colégio Militar de Porto Alegre in 2018, after 34 years teaching and competing in amateur juvenile championships. Although he spent a great time abroad, he always cherished the love for his family. Today, he lives in Porto Alegre with Ros Mari, his spouse and the mother of his two daughters, Graziela and Elisa.

After lots of reading and discussion about what oral history is, its possibilities and limits, Tucker’s reading for this week made me realise how difficult it is to manipulate an OH product in order to publish it as a book.

A few years ago, I read Svetlana Aleksiévitch’s The Unwomanly Face of War (first published in 1983), an astonishing book that presents the experiences of the Soviet women that fought in World War II collected by the author in OH interviews. Aleksiévitch’s work was structured in way different than Tucker’s: the Belarusian chose to start each chapter with a personal reflection either about her goals, what she heard, how she felt during the interviews and writing about them, and then transcripted a few long excerpts of the interviews, without a mediation in between. I did miss something else when I was reading it: what were her questions to those women? Did all of them start to talk and never stop or Aleksiévitch at some time needed to intervene?

I remember this now as I finished Swing Shift with a bunch of other questions: how did she choose those little quotes she decided to transcribe? Doesn’t the idea of creating a narrative comparing all the experiences make justice to the individuals and the hours spent talking about themselves? Translating a speech from an interview to a third-person objective narrative does not subvert the idea of the interviewed own agency?

That is not to say I dislike the book, even because the position assumed by Tucker seems to be a good example of how to successfully develop a OH project. If she wasn’t open to acknowledge misconceptions, shift her motive and to expand the project scope, she might have found herself “producing a separate history of skilled women instrumentalists” (p. 7), instead of addressing both gender and race as elements of power embedded in the swing discourse. The author’s focus in the 1940s provided national and international context to the women’s strategies and experiences during that time, and makes it possible for the reader to find parallels and ruptures between the life of black and white women in other roles.

My doubts are far from being critical; rather, I am just trying to figure out which way is better to present an OH interview in a commercial product, or what are the obstacles to each one of the strategies established. For me, it’s a paradigm: at the first sight, I would definitely say that using long quotations allows me to feel present to an extent, as if I could almost be a third person in the interview room and make the narrator feel seen and heard. After reading Tucker’s work, though, I believe it is safe to say her narration provides a meaning that would otherwise have been forgotten or taken as granted.

The Centro de Memória Sindical (Trade Union Memory Center) is a Brazilian inter-union institution organized in order to preserve the memory of workers, their life stories and its intersection with union struggle. Founded in 1980, when Brazil was still under a military dictatorship and unionized workers were conscient about their role in fighting for both better work and payment conditions and democracy, a group of journalists had the idea of recording their testimonies about the strikes that took place in the metropolitan region of São Paulo from 1978 to 1980. Although academic researchers played important roles in the project, the board of presidents is constituted by representatives of affiliated unions. The CMS collection houses historical documents about clashes, strikes, achievements, union campaign propaganda and oral history testimonies, in addition to offering seminars and producing specialized literature.

For this week’s assignment, I watched the testimony of Geraldino dos Santos Silva, interviewed by Carolina Marina Ruy in 2015. Before talking about the interview itself, it is important to point out that CMS was very active until 1990’s and then mobilized again in 2010. Some of the OH interviews were collected by the sociologist Carmen Evangelho in the 80s, but the most recent are those from the 2010s, mediated either by the journalist Carolina Marina Ruy or the historian Maíra Estrella. The difference between them is that the first ones are accessible only through transcripts, and the second may have been recorded in video (that is the case here). Each one has their own way to publish the transcripts: Carmen does not position her questions with interrogation marks, but as reflections with three dots; she certainly does revisions to alter the interviewed speech to a formal Portuguese; and there is no proper end to the dialogue. Meanwhile, although Carolina states that there are no cuts, her voice does not appear either in the transcription or the video (in Geraldino’s testimony, her voice sounds much lower that you have to make an effort to hear), and the text form is sectioned by themes and no questions at all. Finally, Maíra does present herself as part of the first interview question, and her transcript appears to be the closest one to what usually happens.

With that being said, Geraldino worked in the metallurgical industry and, by the time of the interview, he was executive director of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Paulo and secretary of the Força Sindical Nacional. By watching his testimony, it becomes visible that they both have a good acknowledgement of each other’s work and have previously established some friendly relation that made Geraldino comfortable enough to speak his truth about being an unionized worker and militant. For a black man coming from the Nordeste region to São Paulo in 1974, he believes that his trajectory is an exception because of the acceptance in the society and the promotions he received in Probel despite being unionized. Although the testimony focuses on the Metalworkers’ Union, the one he has been affiliated with since 1979, the interviewer asks about his personal life too, promoting some personal insights about his leadership skills since the infancy. Ultimately, he reflects about how respect, sense of collectivity and mobilization shaped his experience and made others rely on him as their representative at the union, even by accessing his faults and limitations.

Since our first conversations in class, it has become clear that Oral History (OH) has had both a huge appeal and concerns regarding its reception by historians. This week’s authors lead ourselves through this path, helping us to identify tendencies and contextualize the intrinsic nuances that come within.

Once we begin with Nevins (1966) and Starr (1977), the idea of Oral History as a potential revolution in historiographical work seems to have prevailed in the face of the supposed obstacles overseen. Besides the issue of financial aid, which should not be ignored or minimized, Nevins points out a growth of new OH products – exponential volumes of interviews and transcripts – and works beyond the United States borders. These statements are corroborated with the quantitative work presented later by Starr, with a first peek of American programs and articles on OH in 1970, a few years after the establishment of the Oral History Association. In order to be institutionalized as a valid product within the pairs, practice guides and manuals were written, serving as promotional material but mostly as a way of creating basic standards.But there was an issue back then, which we should be familiar with: whenever something new comes up, people tend to either discredit all of the efforts or romanticize it as the solution for all of their problems. This may be the case of OH as its own method was still being developed during the 70s and the 80s; what seems to have happened is that people were so amused by the idea of being closer to the truth that they understate the difficulties of implementing the use of oral sources in a human science so attached to the writing. Although someone could argue that the next were only ways of saying, or attempts to make oral histories appealing to funding institutions, statements about how OH “saved from death’s dateless night”¹, how a good interviewer may help someone to “stuck closer to the path of truth”² or how oral histories allows someone “to bring to light a genuinely subterranean history”³ probably influenced the avant-garde in taking a step back. This is not saying that our authors believed that there is a truth, even because all of them emphasize the need of crossing-evidence and bibliography, as well as the importance of pair review to enhance the practice of OH. On the other hand, this certainly helps to crystallize the idea that the past can be discovered by an objective and neutral historian. Well, this is the key question I would like we could discuss: does it make sense to worry about those statements or is it merely a linguistic problem or a figurative type of language? Did you feel the same once reading it or it comes in a natural way? Are there any implications to our work by addressing those or not?

Portelli’s work made me feel welcomed in these matters. If OH is capable (and I believe we all agree with it) of filling lacunae left by a historiographical tradition based primarily on writing, understanding its limitations is equally important for our work. After all, our professional education does not train us to reveal the past as it really happened, but to give it meaning in a cohesive narrative through a critical analysis of the inherently subjective sources that we have at our disposal. Not only are our sources produced and preserved by human action, but our interpretations of what they say and mean are also shaped by our individual and collective experiences in the time and space we occupy today. Rather than being a bad thing, acknowledging this emphasizes our capacity to be responsible for our historical production.