Organizational Sponsorship: An Ethical Framework for Community Oral History Projects

Drawing from the experience of managing an oral history project as part of a digital archive built following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, this article seeks to unpack questions of ethics in terms of how we actually create our oral history projects, which includes the relations of power that extend beyond the interview and take into consideration the various organizations involved in such projects. More specifically, it uses the concept of "organizational sponsorship" to examine how stakeholders benefit from such research practices and asks oral historians to consider their own institutional, community, and personal contexts and what those relations of power may include and exclude.