Reflections on Remote Interviewing in a Pandemic: Negotiating Participant and Researcher Emotions

This article explores the authors’ experiences of conducting remote oral history interviews during the Covid-19 pandemic for a project that had started in 2017. We consider differences in interviews conducted before and during the pandemic, the emotional impact of remote interviewing during a global public health emergency, and potential reasons for the heightened feelings of researchers and participants. We attempt to disentangle those effects attributable to the circumstances of lockdown, and those likely to be experienced by oral historians conducting remote interviews in more usual contexts. We end with some reflections on negotiating remote interviews, a challenge that increasing numbers of oral historians are likely to face in a post-pandemic world of changed work and communication practices.