Oral Histories and Futures: Researching crises across the life‐course and the life‐course of crises

Abstract

This paper showcases Oral Histories and Futures interviews as an approach and series of innovations for researching crises with qualitative methods. It presents new possibilities for methodological innovations to embrace the multi‐directional and longitudinal temporalities of crises across the life‐course and the life‐course of crises. As an exciting avenue for methodological enhancement, I build on and bring together techniques across Oral Histories and creative biographical interviewing. Developed as part of a recent study exploring reproduction, economic crisis and the life‐course, with this approach I aimed to elicit people's experiences and opinions about their pasts, present and futures by innovating with traditional qualitative methodologies. I outline five areas of innovation—and associated observations, opportunities and obstacles—including a focus on younger generations, on the future, the inclusion of reflexive activities, interviewing in the midst of crises, and remote interviewing. Conclusions highlight what can be learned from an Oral Histories and Futures approach for thinking about socio‐temporal horizons.

Qualitative longitudinal methodologies for crisis times: Against crisis exceptionalism and ‘helicopter’ research

“…As van Santen (2014, p. 24) echoes, in 'many disciplines we may set out on a longitudinal study at the beginning of a fixed period of time and make clear from the outset what changes we are looking for', yet 'this is hardly possible … [and] we should deduce that we-professionally and otherwise-are part of these changes'. As our paper shows, and taking inspiration from Hall's (2024) observations, understanding the lifecourse of QLMs translates into a concern for their varied impacts on participants, researchers, participant-researcher, and researcher-researcher relationships (into the future) too.…”

“…Such insights over the lifecourse would not be possible with 'helicopter' research. Nor is this the case for Hall's (2024) research showcased in the Special Section which focuses on the importance of QLMs for understanding the experiences of younger people's reproductive decision-making in the contest of living with austerity. She argues that QLMs have a dual function, to reveal experiences of the life course, and to show the life course of crisis itself.…”

“…We ask, what can geographers and other social scientists achieve in the study of crisis through QLMs? Brought together, the authors work variously with individuals, groups and communities to explore this question in geographically diverse contexts, including the United States (Cuomo, 2024), the United Kingdom (Carruthers Thomas, 2024;Hall, 2024;MacLeavy, 2024), Spain (Di Feliciantonio, 2024, Singapore (Yea, 2024), Cambodia (Brickell et al, 2024), Ghana, DRC andZimbabwe (van Blerk et al, 2024). They harness a range of methods as part of QLMs, with a particular onus on diaries and in-depth interviews, multiply collected or conducted, over an extended time horizon to intentionally enable temporal understandings and readings of crisis.…”