Oral history and the school as a field of research and historiographical innovation over the past thirty years

Abstract

The paper aims, on the one hand, to retrace the consolidation of oral sources as academically legitimate evidence within the historiographical renewal of the past three decades particularly in research strands concerned with material culture, school memory, and public history and, on the other, to present the most up-to-date outcomes of methodological debate regarding their collection, preservation, and public valorisation. The methodological dimension will be a pivotal focus of the discussion, since interviews being at once subjective memory sources and the product of a process of historical reconstruction shaped by the interaction of multiple actors require the adoption of criteria capable of ensuring a robust and verifiable interpretation of the historical record.