Abstracts History

The Third Screen: For a Dialogic and Participatory Oral History

by Veronica Mockler

Many researchers and artists turn to the field of oral history as an ethic and research practice because at its core lies the principle that we can better understand the world through listening and speaking to each other. By its very nature, oral history upholds the experience of someone who is not the researcher as being epistemologically worthy. Even within the academic setting, oral history maintains that those who know best are those whose knowledge has not been institutionalized. While through its very practice, oral history winds up institutionalizing what was voiced by participants, it understands that it must safeguard, through the record, their original voicing so that the subsequent institutional interpretation can be brought into question if need be. A video-documented research-creation project with four individuals who interviewed each other on their life experiences further deepened my thinking around this institutional interpretation and accountability. Through a three-screen video installation practice, informed by postcolonial theory and oral history’s popular education roots, I was able to directly include participants in the institutional interpretation of their interview. Articulating meaning from the interview and presenting results to a research audience are processes I achieved in dialogue with participants, rather than monologically. In the following text, I explore this multi-screen video practice and the dialogic opportunity it provides to oral history practitioners who believe in the epistemological significance of speaking and listening to other people.