Critical oral history
Critical oral history applies a critical theory lens to the collection and analysis of first-person spoken accounts of lived experience. It goes beyond preserving personal memory to interrogate how power, identity, race, class, gender, and structural inequality shape what is remembered, what is silenced, and how stories are told. Originating in the work of Alessandro Portelli and the critical turn in oral history from the 1970s onward, the approach treats oral testimony not simply as evidence of the past but as a site of meaning-making and political contestation.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Portelli, A. (1991). The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press. · ISBN 978-0791405703
- Perks, R., & Thomson, A. (Eds.). (2016). The Oral History Reader (3rd ed.). Routledge. · ISBN 978-0415707671
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.