Seminar Katariina Parhi: What is the place for oral history in the history of science and knowledge?

In this co-organised seminar between Cultural History and the Descartes Centre, Katariina Parhi (University of Oulu) discusses how oral history and personal memories can contribute to understanding the social and emotional sides of scientific practice. How can historians of knowledge and science use oral history in their research?

Oral history and emotion in science

Science is often portrayed as a succession of remarkable inventions that have modernised society, saved lives, and addressed global crises. However, scientists are human – guided not only by rational inquiry but also by emotions, social ties, and impulses that are often far from scientific.

Oral history provides a valuable means of accessing these more personal and contingent dimensions of scientific practice – those aspects of knowledge-making that, especially in modern contexts, are rarely captured in written records or institutional archives. Yet memory is inherently unstable: dates blur, events overlap, and the trajectories of discoveries often appear ambiguous or contested.

Memory-based accounts in the history of science

In her presentation, Parhi reflects on the role of memory as an example for understanding the social and emotional dimensions of scientific work. While the history of knowledge examines how various forms of knowledge are produced, legitimated, and circulated, oral history offers a particularly valuable methodological approach for uncovering dimensions of these processes. How can oral recollections be integrated into the field of the history of knowledge, and further, to the history of science? 

Parhi pursues two aims: first, to explore how memory-based accounts can be linked to broader developments in the history of science and knowledge-making; and second, to consider more generally how experience has been conceptualised in the historiography of science. The ultimate question is: what kinds of knowledge does the history of science need?

This presentation is based on research of the History of Science in Finland project, which explores the scientific life in Finland from 1918 until today.