ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the unique contribution that an oral history interviewing research methodology can have in studying industrial illness in working-class communities. The argument advanced here is that listening to those who bore witness can add other important dimensions and insights on the history of illness and that this approach could fruitfully be deployed more systematically in working-class studies of illness. This is discussed here with reference to some of the literature and some of my own work in the field on occupational illness. Workers’ oral narratives inform us about the dynamics of violence within industrial workplaces and of workers’ own understandings of how processes such as work, deindustrialization, plant closures and neoliberalism directly impacted on their bodies, increasing illness and disability levels in their working-class communities and hence widening health inequalities. They tell also of agency and action, of those who shaped advocacy and the building of injured and diseased workers’ movements. Whether interest lies in the narrative discourse or lived experience, oral testimony is revealing at many levels.
