Methods and Reflections
We invited all living directors of Women's and Gender Studies, Women in Learning and Leadership, and LGBTQ Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn to be interviewed. Between 2025-2026, we did 15 interviews with 12 directors and former directors. One interview has two parts because we lost a portion of the original audio. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as Fatima al-Bedany did the second interview and brought an important student voice to the archive. Other additions were with people who wanted to add to or amend their narratives after listening to the original audio.
Coming from sociology and anthropology, I thought oral history interviews would be similar to the qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork I had previously done. (Historian friends, forgive me!) I found them, instead, to be quite different.
Oral history interviews introduce another layer of vulnerability. The person being interviewed has agreed to share their story publicly, including, in this case, with the institution and people it is about. For many of us, that institution remains our employer. We are being interviewed in an era when programs like ours are being politically targeted and shuttered (see, for example, this report ↗ by Paige Jones on program closures across the country). The political moment made this project feel all the more urgent and necessary. It also made the choice to be interviewed - and to be candid and vulnerable - higher stakes for some.
Knowing this, we gave every interviewee the opportunity to edit their audio and transcript before sharing it with others. Some people made no changes. Some cut a little, and others cut a lot. As a researcher, the cuts pained me. As an interviewee myself, I appreciated this option. I do believe it was the right thing to do, even though we gave up content in the process. For the most part, these cuts will be invisible, thanks to the audio editing skills of the student researchers who handled them. But in some cases, a close listener can still hear them - a sudden shift in topic, an emotion that seems out of place. These subtle ruptures remind us that an archive is made up of what is said and not said; of narratives, silences, and omissions intertwining to tell a story.
Another difference, for me, was the labor between the interview and analysis: I learned just how much time it takes to manually time stamp and meticulously edit a transcript; to verify every name, place, organization, and event, including from decades past; to segment the interview and create an index; to choose excerpts, write synopses, and add keywords. At some point, Fatima, Lyla, and I knew the interviews so well we could quote them back and forth to each other. I told my friend and colleague Rose that I found myself quoting from the interviews in faculty meetings. She said, "It's almost like those retired directors are in the meetings with you."
Where will the project go from here? This, of course, will depend on how people choose to engage it. For me, one story worth telling is the affective, interpersonal, and day-to-day experience of neoliberalization in higher education from 1994-2026. There are countless other stories too: Generational changes in how we think and talk about work. The ethical challenges of feminist leadership. The impact of COVID-19 on collabortive work. The unfinished project of decolonizing Women's and Gender Studies, and our attempts and failures at inclusion. All of these and more are questions to explore in and through this archive. I am excited to see the streams of inquiry it will generate, and I hope it inspires us to better serve our students and communities.
- Amy Brainer, June 2026