Oral History, Interrogating the Method

Abstract

The objective of this chapter was to obtain detailed first-hand information of how African immigrants living in Australia perceive their representations in the media. Second, how these representations influence how they believe they are socially recognised and what bearing this has on their everyday lives. Aforementioned in the previous chapters, there tends to be an objectification of African immigrations in Australian media. Hence, in this chapter, I want to position African immigrants as the subjects of discourse in documenting their experience. The oral interviews that form the key component of this chapter gives this immigrant group the space to answer back to what is written about and for them. In my role as a researcher in this book, I am not just writing about the African experience in Australia as an external phenomenon of which I have no connection to. Instead, my research and writing to a degree also capture my lived reality. In my inclusion of the transcripts collected from the interviews as well as the digital audio files, this adds reflexivity to the data in the ways in which it is accessed in conjunction with reading this book.