An Ethical Framework for Interviewing in the Aftermath of Disaster
The OHL utilizes antiracist and decolonial methodologies, is grounded in trauma-informed approaches, and adheres to the best practices of the Oral History Association. In addition to these principles, we have developed the following framework to ethically guide us in our work in the aftermaths of disaster:
- Naming: We understand that naming individuals and organizations according to their preferences in all project outputs is an important part of co-creation and participatory design, especially when situating these practices as decolonial methodologies. Naming also includes sharing credit for our projects with all of our collaborators, offering name recognition, and promoting their organizations whenever we can. Furthermore, within the contexts of recording oral histories in the Puerto Rican archipelago and through the Oral History Lab @UPRM, we recognize the importance of naming the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez—the public university of a historically underrepresented and colonized space that is on the frontline of the climate emergency—throughout all projects.
- Terminology: Resilience and other terms used by disaster prevention, mitigation, and recovery agencies may not accurately reflect the lived experiences, needs, or priorities of local populations. We suggest an alternative framing around creative responses and other cultural practices that highlight the individual and institutional capacity and/or strength of local communities to adapt to climate change, respond to disasters, address environmental racism and other sociopolitical structures intertwined in the climate crisis, and build/leverage social capital under these circumstances.
- Needs assessment: Discussion with involved communities is required prior to interviewing in order to ensure that our projects and interview questions serve the community’s needs and that our work is collaborative and mutually beneficial. Further, we will work with the community to develop interview questions and test them with community partners to make sure we are working in a respectful manner.
- Non-extractive work: We will work to redistribute grant funds so that narrators and/or community organizations will receive financial compensation for their collaborations whenever possible. Independent of financial contributions, we will work to collaboratively create representations of the projects—and stories recorded in them—that will stay in the community with attention to high-tech, low-tech, and no-tech needs. In other words, all projects will include an interrogation of what dignity of access looks like for participants, even if these interviews are one part of a larger project that we might not see final results from for years. This is represented in our commitment to dissemination as an essential aspect of our process.
- Compensation: We recognize that we may need to be flexible and creative in identifying mechanisms to compensate community organizations. This includes, when appropriate, going beyond financial payments and providing other forms of support to participants, such as: charitable donations, capacity-building opportunities, support on other projects, small tokens of appreciation, and networking opportunities, among others.
- Informed consent: We recognize that we may need to go above and beyond what is required by accepted academic best practices as many of our narrators may not typically engage with digital content and/or may not have a sense of national or international dissemination. For us, this also includes a commitment to protect narrators in any way that we can from the risk of repercussions from sharing aspects of their lives and work. Based on this principle, we adhere to a model based on rolling consent, where narrators may ask for digital outputs that feature them to be taken down at any moment. We are committed to honoring all such requests.
- Disaster porn: While representation is an issue that is always coming up in new and different ways, we try to avoid positioning people as victims in favor of demonstrating and celebrating their strength and creativity in the face of adversity. For example, we will avoid recording/photographing/disseminating emotional breakdowns, instead highlighting narrators’ resourcefulness, their resolve in times of distress, the mutual support networks they collectively develop, and the reflections they engage in to ultimately make sense of their experiences.
- Translation: All of our projects are fully bilingual—including metadata and project outputs—and we work exclusively with Puerto Rican translators in order to respectfully reproduce language variation to the best of our abilities. We also use footnotes in favor of full translation when appropriate and work towards maintaining language as identity.
- Post-custodial archiving: We believe that storytellers are the owners of their life stories and therefore allow narrators to approve their narratives prior to archiving and to remove part or all of their narratives from digital archives at any time, even months or years after the conclusion of the project. We also return to narrators each time we would like to share their story in a new way to ask for new permission, understanding that such contact is not always possible.
- Flexible timeline: In the years since Hurricane María, we have been unable to work throughout the year without interruptions. Electric grid and communications breakdowns combined with resurfacing trauma responses tied to climatological events continually push us off course. Part of our work ethic is that we give people the time they need to work with us, provide support however we can, and are upfront that anyone can leave the project at any time they need to without repercussion.
This ethical framework was developed by Ricia Anne Chansky at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez with other members of The Oral History Lab / Laboratorio de Historia Oral: Jaquelina Álvarez, Marci Denesiuk, and José Morales Benítez; members of the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico / The Archive of Emergency Responses in Puerto Rico: Christina Boyles, Michigan State University; Mirerza González Vélez, University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras; and Nadjah Ríos Villarini, UPR Río Piedras; and members of Incite at Columbia University: Cristian Capotescu, Ryan Hagen, Liz Strong, and Ariam Torres Cordero of Columbia World Projects at Columbia University.
If you would like to participate in an online conversation about the ethics of working in post-crisis spaces, please click here to access this statement of ethics in a Google Doc.