2026/02/24 by Alfred Freeborn, Hanna Lucia Worliczek · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Biographical and Historical Analysis #History of Science and Medicine #History of Science and Natural History
paper · doi:10.1002/bewi.70011
openalex publication_date 2026/02/24 · openalex created_date 2026/02/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
On 12 November 2024, one of us (AF) received an email from the retired neuropsychologist Rosalind Ridley telling him that the psychiatrist Tim Crow had died two days earlier. AF never met Ridley in person but interviewed her and her husband over a video call in 2022 about their work in the 1970s in Crow's research department. The email was brief and to the point; Ridley finished by wishing AF well with his research.1 It was a few days before an obituary appeared in The Times and many more academic memorial articles would emerge in the coming weeks—Crow was an important and sometimes controversial figure in the field of biological psychiatry.2 AF had interviewed Ridley and Crow along with several of their colleagues over a period of many years as part of his doctoral research.3 His research became slowly entangled in the collective memory of his interviewees, a small community which originated in Crow's department and went on to influence neurobiological research into schizophrenia in Britain. Its members were often keen and reflective interlocutors in AF's attempt to understand the history of the field. Many of us will have heard it said by our colleagues who do not study the recent past—“I am so happy my actors are long dead”—but for those of us who talk to living scientists, technicians, or patients the experience of interviewing is often transformative on a personal and intellectual level, and raises serious questions, opportunities, and challenges for how we write history. The rewards of interview work are well-known: unparalleled access to biographical details, off-record perspectives, networks of social relations, and personal archives. Likewise, the dangers are clear: shaky memories, biased narratives, and co-option into professional disputes. Beginning with the Sources for History of Quantum Physics Project launched in the early 1960s, the interview with a living scientist has become an important method and site for historiographical reflection in the history of science.4 Since the turn of the 21st century, the digital revolution has made the need for reflection even more important. The advent of near ubiquitous audio–visual recording technology (e.g., smartphones), digital storage, and social media have created new possibilities for who creates, owns, and consumes the narrated past—and who features in it. Novel digital archival possibilities have also raised new legal issues, although questions of ethical review, informed consent, and storage have been central to oral history practices for decades. We feel it is pertinent now to ask after the research interview again: What is particular about doing research interviews for historians of science, technology, and medicine? What do interviews do to the historian? How do we make use of them in practice? These are just some of the questions which guide our reflections in this special issue. The practice of interviewing or conversation as a tool in the human sciences has a long and significant history, one beyond the scope of this brief introduction.5 A rough disciplinary genealogy of the research interview's adoption into the history of science might be sketched in four periods: A phase of borrowing from social research and oral historians (1950s–1970s), a period of adopting ethnographic approaches (1970s–1990s), a period marked by professionalization and archival growth (1980s–2000s), and finally our current era of digitalization (1990s–2020s). While not intended as a definitive framework, this basic schema reflects the field's broader historiographical trends, shifting thematic loci, and expanding geographies. The early post-WWII period saw a strong emphasis on the history of physics, the use of formal oral historical methods and the collection of archival materials.6 The shift toward histories of scientific practice and laboratory ethnographies in the 1970s also saw a shift in thematic focus, as the life sciences and biomedicine began to overshadow physics.7 By the 1990s the rise of official oral history programmes funded by biomedical research foundations, such as The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Wellcome Trust, marked a high point in the professional status of the history of medicine.8 In the same era, historians became increasingly interested in sites of knowledge production beyond the laboratory, such as in the field or the workplace.9 Since the new millennium, the digitalization and globalization of the field has massively enhanced the visibility of oral history collections. Especially in these last two periods of professionalization and digitalization, historians of science and medicine have engaged in methodological reflections and substantial exchange on oral history accounts in general and research interviews in particular.10 In 1994, the oral historian Ronald J. Grele made a basic distinction between the “research interview” and the “archival interview,” each aimed at different audiences.11 Although as Lillian Hoddeson rightly pointed out in reply, in practice, “archival interviews” often also serve research purposes, muddying Grele's neat distinction.12 A current understanding of the research interview that makes this distinction productive in concrete terms is provided by Lara Keuck and Soraya de Chadarevian in this special issue: “a form of oral history that does not focus primarily on documenting comprehensive life stories,” but, together with the interviewees, coproduces interviews “that are directed by the historian's research questions regarding, for example, the interviewee's past experiences, the reconstruction of specific historical contexts and networks, and contemporary interpretations of the past.”13 We take this understanding as our foundation.14 Early on in our collective reflections we identified a strong resistance to methodological formalization and standardization.15 The research interview, as we practice it, is productive precisely because it is highly context dependent. Rather than subject the interview to the norms of archival objectivity—where the historian is impersonal, impartial, and socially distant—we understand it as the place where the “official record” is negotiated and complemented with the personal experiences of various actors, always within the particular context of a research project with its specific demands. This reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the history of science, technology, and medicine (HSTM), where scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds enter the field at various points in their career. While those thinking about and working on HSTM can learn much from the methodological texts of other fields,16 the collection of papers in this special issue gravitate toward a view of research interviews as something less disciplined, more messy, but also more particular: historical fieldwork.17 This framing emerged from collaborative discussions between the authors of this special issue and emphasizes the historiographic function of interviews as part of writing the recent HSTM: interviewing means engaging with the living, spontaneous, and practical pasts of patients, technicians, researchers, and other actors; it means leaving the archive and going into the highly unstable tangled mess of collective memories, disputed historical explanations/understandings, and rehearsed narratives, from where a particular historical field of inquiry emerges. As we understand it, the interview is a site of interdisciplinary encounter, in which the historian may speak as scientist, and the scientist as historian, bringing not only new opportunities but also “epistemic anxiety,” what Walsh and Pulkkinen call “an affective response to epistemic risk” in the context of archival work.18 But we suggest historians do not shy away from such risks. To the contrary, as noted several times throughout this special issue, the experience of doing historical fieldwork is excellent training for history writing in general. We invoke the idea of fieldwork with some hesitancy, acknowledging the “field” concept has its own problematic history, but our sense is distinct: we are referring to the work we do when living actors enter the field of history writing. Building on the insights of critical archival studies and recent work historicizing the “field” as a site of knowledge production, we understand the historical field as a web of dynamic social relations between traces of the past in the activity of history writing, including living scientists, patients, technicians, and numerous other historical actors.19 Not only is this dynamic fundamentally absent in the work of historians writing about the dead past, but as oral historians have long argued, it brings with it the possibility to actively shape the archival past by talking to those who might otherwise leave no trace.20 The papers in this special issue deal with the ethics and politics of doing research interviews; with how talking to scientists, patient-campaigners, or technicians makes us more accountable or makes more visible unfamiliar actors and their agencies; how talking to individuals affected by a drug scandal means collaborating and coproducing knowledge; how talking to historical actors is an excellent method for reflecting on the limits of the textual archive and unpicking the methodological assumptions of our own field. While all our papers are reflexive in nature, they diverge substantially in their format, granularity and specific conclusions, with the focus shifting back and forth between general methodological guidance and analytic insights won from particular research interviews. To open the special issue, Lara Keuck interviews Soraya de Chadarevian for their paper “Research Interviews in Historical Practice,” offering a playful reflection on the creative potential of interviews in the research process. Guided by Keuck's questions and snippets of her own experience with research interviews, together they interrogate how de Chadarevian's historiographical practice and reflections on research interviews have developed in the last 30 years, taking her much-quoted reflection from 199721 as their starting point. They address how the “personal” is construed in interview training, the particulars of interview techniques, and whether an impersonal stance is productive or even possible in research interviews in HSTM. Next, they discuss the continually evolving role of ethics committees and the regulatory obstacles for scholarship that might not, in the end, qualify as human subject research. They then shift register to discuss how the practice of interviewing can reveal novel analytic angles and narratives about the unsaid (or unspeakable) when actors refuse to talk about sensitive topics. This leads to the question of the epistemic and social roles of research interviews, how they provide new avenues for research and build trust between historians, interviewees, and other key actors in a research field. But it also raises the specter of their limits. While often highly generative encounters, there are potentially unresolvable methodological blind spots when using interviews. Finally, Keuck and de Chadarevian reflect on historians’ stances toward interviews in HSTM before drawing some conclusions. Most importantly, interviewing (and using interviews) reminds us that history is about people. Moreover, “[t]he fact that we know our actors keeps us more accountable,” in contrast to those actors we only know from written sources, well buffered from personal interactions. These two points, they suggest, help us to build bridges between the history of science and scientific practice itself. Rosanna Dent and Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes with their paper “Controlling the Field: Memory, Labor, and Ethics in Oral Histories of Brazilian Human Genetics” take up the challenge to historians of science and medicine to make more analytic use of their interviews beyond their documentary function. They explore their potential for a deeper understanding of the social, emotional and ethical dimensions of scientific practice. The authors compare how two actors in the field of human genetics in Brazil used their interviews with Dent to control how their careers were memorialized, albeit in very different ways. In 2012, Dent met with the then 83-year-old human geneticist Francisco M. Salzano in Porto Alegre to conduct several oral history interviews, returning the next year to do the same with Salzano's long-standing collaborator, the field technician Girley Simões. Framed from the outset as archival interviews which Dent would use as part of her doctoral research, these recordings and transcripts, along with several others, were later made public in an online collection with the help of historian Vimieiro Gomes and a team of students at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Together, Dent and Vimieiro Gomes carefully analyze these interviews for how they reveal what Salzano and Simões, respectively, found important to memorialize, how the former, well-rehearsed and experienced in interviewing, often deflected and neutralized polemical aspects, while the latter conspiratorially highlighted the social tensions and invisible labor in fieldwork. They also reflect Dent's own learning process through the interviews and the different relationships and interactive flows she established with the two interviewees. Dent and Vimieiro Gomes showcase how meticulous analysis of narratives and the narrators’ agencies, to a certain extent resistant to the questions and epistemic interests of scholars, can be productively conducted in HSTM, and provide ample perspectives to take up this challenge as well for research interviews. In their paper “Learning with Patient Campaigners About a German Drug Scandal,” Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Anja Suter, Edmund Bolger, and Birgit Nemec dissect the potential of deeply engaging with nonacademic stakeholders in contrast to scholarship conducting research on them. These stakeholders (or patient-campaigners) self-identify as affected by Duogynon, a drug that was used as a hormonal pregnancy test until the early 1980s with sustained consequences: The patient-campaigners are affected by congenital disability and, together with their families, experience severe psychological, financial, and social impacts until today, including a lack of legal and public recognition. A recently concluded research project pursued inclusive and collaborative work with patient-campaigners through life story interviews. The campaigners and their families were actively involved in the whole project, ranging from planning, selecting options for interview storage, use, and accessibility, to cocreating the interviews with historians and a filmmaker. These cocreated interviews live a chimeric life, shaped by the epistemic and activistic interests and agencies of all involved. As primary sources for research purposes within the project, they resemble research interviews that, for example, allow identifying patients’ categories to be analyzed in historical scholarship—categories that have been mostly absent in previous work. Yet, the interviews are primarily intended as life story narratives that form an archival depository documenting the lived experience of those affected by the Duogynon scandal. Taking patient-campaigners serious as actors with agency integrates their lived experience as the most relevant counter-perspective to official documents created by powerful stakeholders on medical, state, legal, and corporate levels in historical scholarship—and makes this perspective widely accessible. By reflecting deeply on life story interviews that simultaneously function as research interviews, the authors show how taking ethical principles around inclusion and collaboration seriously works in practice, with all its challenges and opportunities for scholars and interviewed patient-campaigners. In his contribution “Reflections on Fieldwork Around Europe,” Cameron Brinitzer narrates his journey into the community of cognitive scientists trying to study cultural evolution through a series of encounters and conversations with key actors. In a personal and deeply reflexive register, Brinitzer shows how his numerous research interviews, many of which remain un-transcribed, some misplaced or lost, generated a network of social relations that provided a scaffold for constructing a particular field of historical inquiry. In particular, these conversations enabled a richer political contextualization of how an influential research programme into cultural evolution emerged in the 1970s directly from critiques of the possible racial basis of intelligence. Starting in a baby lab in New York, Brinitzer's first steps into ethnographic research led him to France and numerous conversations with the “Paris School” of cultural evolution, before conducting a longer stay at a laboratory in Budapest, then traveling westward to talk with a key figure in the more model-driven “California School” in a small town in Wiltshire in south-west England. Alongside these numerous conversations, some more formal, some more impromptu, Brinitzer explains how he also pieced together, using passing comments as well as more traditional textual sources, the place and politics of another important researcher beyond his network of interviewees. In concluding this journey through a series of research interviews, Brinitzer draws from traditions of historical epistemology and theory to argue for the interview as both an entry-point into the contemporary and spontaneous epistemology of the scientist, as well as a site where the historian's narrative is prefigured in esthetic and ethical ways through its encounter with the living. As a fitting end point for this journey, the paper turns to anxieties about interviews and reflexivity among historians of science, diagnosing this as a lingering attachment to archival objectivity and the scientific which our field has so much to In his paper We on Project and several methodological and regulatory by each with a of These the of about practice, and from regulatory practices deeply by interview from the social that do not for when the particulars for research interviews in HSTM are by these concrete experiences, and methodological practices of other in with but mostly never approaches within HSTM to how challenges interviews in HSTM can be productively up for from within HSTM and makes them productive in two ways. by them with methodological stances from oral historians and the social sciences to allow for methodological by it with the view of interviewing as historical together, the and ethical to historical fieldwork that interviewing, with its primary sources always with other shows how this and to a long of in how taking up this of adoption and to project specific and contexts has always been a central of our work. reflections us to take up the to in interviewing as historical our not only sources, but also methodological In this brief we to have the of our all of which suggest important ways in which those of us who write history can work to and other living actors in our field of inquiry. We these reflections historians something of a field guide to research interviews and a in our methodological assumptions when But the most guide might be practice to open historical inquiry to the insights of lived after Tim Crow his out to to his doctoral and him to a memorial for the new As Lara Keuck and Soraya de Chadarevian write in this issue, to their with makes accountable for their history. We build relations with our interviewees, whether we to or We become entangled in their practical past, even only while for points in our own historical The most personal we can learn from the field of historical inquiry with living sources is that while we the to our own questions, we be to our The authors would to Soraya de Lara Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, and for in the that and informed this special the authors for taking up the challenge to enter a reflexive for to this special issue, and for collective and personal exchange at the the of the the members of the research of in the at the for collective reflections and intellectual and for their and the of for their and The authors no of