Dr. Gelinada Grinchenko, co-chair of the Ukrainian Oral History Association, spoke with the ArmyInform news agency about oral history as an academic discipline and how it differs from simply collecting testimonies of the Russian-Ukrainian war through interviews.
“Today, oral history is indeed one of the most widely used methods for documenting war experiences. However, it is important to distinguish between oral history as a form of storytelling through interviews and oral history as an academic discipline. These are not the same. What we see today is largely documentation—recording testimonies and capturing narratives—but this does not necessarily constitute oral history as a scholarly field, which requires specific research methodologies and principles.”
To learn more about the importance of adhering to academic and ethical standards in testimony collection, the challenges of documenting ongoing historical events, and the risks of oral history’s deprofessionalization as a research method, read Dr. Grinchenko’s full interview on the ArmyInform website.