100 Questions / 44
What theoretical gaps does Iranian oral history face today?Machine Translation edited by Mandana Karimi
2026-08-24
We asked several researchers and activists in the field of oral history to express their views on oral history questions. The names of each participant are listed at the beginning of their answers, and the text of all the answers will be published on this portal by the end of the week. The goal of this project is to open new doors to an issue and promote scientific discussions in the field of oral history.
In this project, a question is asked every Saturday, and we ask experts to present their views in the form of a short text (about 100 words) by the end of the week. All the answers will be published together so that the audience can compare and analyze the views.
The content is the opinions of the senders and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Oral History website. Although the answers are supposed to be based on about 100 words, in order to be polite and not to leave the discussion incomplete, in some cases, more than this amount of answers will be accepted.
This time, we asked the experts to send their answers to the question by Sunday night so that all the answers will be published on Tuesday.
From the interweaving of these answers, using artificial intelligence, we have arrived at theories about oral history that will be published in the near future.
Question 44:
What theoretical gaps does oral history in Iran face today?
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Answers to Question 44:
Gholamreza Azari Khakestar
Oral history in Iran faces two fundamental problems. First, activists in this field conduct oral history in an empirical and experience-based manner. Second, theorizing in this field is less based on local experiences and more influenced by the translation and adaptation of theories produced outside Iran. As a result, a gap has formed between experimental oralists and academic theorists. On the other hand, theoretical discussions are taking place in scientific centers, but the weakness of these structures has caused a gap between theory and experience. In addition, Western theories have been formulated according to the social and political conditions of Western societies and do not necessarily fit the characteristics of Iranian society and the experience of Iranian interviewees. Therefore, it is necessary to formulate indigenous theories based on Iranian field experiences.
Hassan Beheshtipour
The most important theoretical gap in Iranian oral history is the explanation of the fact that increasing the number of interviews should not be the criterion. The theorist must say how to move from the accumulation of narrative to the production of historical knowledge. Oral history must go beyond treating the interview as a “document,” study memory as a dynamic process, analyze the interview as an interactive and constructive relationship, see relations of power and exclusion, and critically apply existing theories in the historical context of Iran. In theorizing oral history, we do not answer whether to use oral narrative to reconstruct the past or to study the narrative itself as a historical subject. The approach of reconstructing the past is problematic for narrative analysis. Which theory explains why the approach of interview as document is obsolete and interview should be viewed as narrative?
Abolfat’h Mo’men
Oral history is one of the new methods of collecting historical data and has many custodians, which can be both an opportunity and a threat. We do not have internal theorizing in the field of history, which is why theorizing is one of the problems of oral history. The way to achieve theorizing is to be careful in the text of interviews with different classes and fields, which professors and students must ponder and cultivate. Therefore, theorizing in the first step requires the collection of documents and experiences. The second step is the entry of academic centers into this field to arrive at a theory through study and research. It is hoped that this will be achieved by going beyond the production and accumulation of numerous interviews, with the consensus of relevant centers and the participation of scholars.
Mohammad Mehdi Abdollahzadeh
Out of necessity, after the two important events of the victory of the Islamic Revolution and the Sacred Defense in our country, a significant number of people became active in the field of oral history in order to be able to record and record these events; while they were not familiar with the theoretical foundations of research, research in history, and oral history. People who are active in this field, including teachers, administrators, and administrators, should be somewhat familiar with the foundations of research in behavioral sciences, especially history and oral history, and since this is an interdisciplinary science, they should also be familiar with related theories in the fields of psychology, social psychology, and sociology.
Hamid Qazvini
Theoretical frameworks will help formulate issues and will guide action, and will save oral history activists and research projects from repetition and being burdensome in every direction. I think the most important theoretical gaps are what oral history is, where its limits are, and what Iranian society needs from it. Of course, this issue is subject to theorizing in the two fields of historical science and its relationship with Iranian society. In fact, oral history can only overcome its theoretical shortcomings when the theoretical gap in the relationship between history and Iranian society is closed. What is most relevant today are the methods of implementing oral history, which do not have sufficient and deep theoretical knowledge and rely on the experience of activists in this field.
Gholamreza Azizi
The answer is embedded in the question. The biggest theoretical gap in Iranian oral history is the lack of theory and theorizing. If we consider the translation movement as the prerequisite for the stages of acquiring knowledge, proposing topics related to that knowledge in the context of our culture, then analyzing the topics and discovering relationships, and finally extracting theory from the studies, it shows that oral history studies in Iran have not yet sufficiently eliminated the first stage, namely external studies. The main theoretical topics that have not yet been sufficiently addressed include: the intellectual and theoretical structures of oral history, the relationships of oral history with social psychology and historical sociology, its relationship with autobiography, memoirs and narrative history, the issues of memory, credibility and the sociology of narrative, methods and techniques for assessing interviews, and the role of temporal and environmental factors on interviews.
Seyyed Mohammad Sadeq Feyz
Perhaps the most important gap or deficiency is the lack of academic education among the activists of this field. Because oral history also entered the country without an introduction. This field also has tools and requirements that are largely ignored. Those tools and requirements also require the acquisition of specific education and knowledge, and if we enter from the middle of the road and away from the stages of learning, the shortcomings of the work will accompany us until the end.
The medium-term and long-term quasi-academic education that is popular in some countries, university centers and colleges in this field, as well as the education offered at high school levels, fills the needs and scientific gaps in this field.
Abolfazl Hassanabadi
A study of the status of oral history in Iran shows a growing trend in conducting interviews and producing books, but in the field of theory-building, despite access to good foreign sources such as the book Theory in Oral History, insufficient research has been done. Issues such as how the interview narrative is formed, how it is interpreted, its relationship with memory, identity, power, place and time, and how it is transformed into historical knowledge, as well as the transition from the interview as a tool for collecting information to deeper issues such as subjectivity, narrative, the relationship between the interviewer and the narrator, the philosophy of oral history, oral tradition, and memoir, should be given more attention by oral historians in order to fill the information gaps by writing theoretical and methodological works.
Artificial Intelligence
Despite its limited growth, Iranian oral history faces a serious theoretical gap. The most important challenge is the lack of attention to its ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations in the academic environment, which has led to the neglect of fundamental differences in concepts such as the place of memory and interpretation. This theoretical gap has threatened the credibility of this field and distanced it from its status as an interdisciplinary science with approaches such as functionalism and structuralism. (Deepseek)
Today's oral history in Iran, rather than facing a lack of data, faces a lack of coherent theorizing and methodology. First, there is still no sufficient consensus on the definition and status of oral history, its boundary with memoirs, and its relationship with traditional historiography. Second, methods of analysis, validation, and comparison of narratives have not been developed systematically. Third, the role of the interviewer, power, memory, forgetting, and narrative reconstruction in data production have been less theorized. In addition, the dominance of political topics, revolution, and war has led to less attention to everyday life, gender, ethnicity, social classes, and interdisciplinary studies. (ChatGPT)
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