Mary Larson

chapter author of “The Medium is Political and the Personal: Feminist Oral Histories Online” in “Beyond Women's Words Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century”

February 12, 2019

Mary A. Larson is the associate dean for Special Collections and the Puterbaugh Professor of Library Service at the Oklahoma State University Libraries, and she is a two-term past president of the Oral History Association (US). She has worked as an anthropologist and oral historian for more than 30 years, and much of her research has focused on ethics in oral history, particularly relative to evolving technologies. A second area of emphasis, going back to her early days as an archaeologist, has been gender bias in the interpretation and representation of the historic, and pre-historic, record, and this has carried forward to her current work with digital media.

When the book “Women’s Words” was published almost 25 years ago, personal computers were still fairly new and the world wide web was less than a year old. The terrain for research and dissemination of oral histories has shifted significantly since then, and this chapter in “Beyond Women’s Words” revisits a feminist practice of oral history through this particular frame. Since multimedia, online presentations became possible in the mid-1990s, there have been considered discussions within the oral history community about the ethics of placing interviews online.

These conversations are even more important when discussing feminist oral histories, given the way that women’s words have previously been silenced, appropriated/misappropriated, and otherwise mediated. Oral historians have tried to use evolving digital technologies to address a number of ethical issues that were originally raised in the chapters of “Women’s Words”--from concerns about inadequate representation of the oral history performance, to the mediation of women’s voices by others, to the inability to make meaning from uncontextualized interviews. This chapter discusses those attempts and also addresses unasked questions about the changing nature of media and mediation and activism in politicized online platforms.

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2019-honorees/mary-larson

Last Updated: 12 February 2019