By Sarah Mason
Published in The Oral History Review, January 2026.
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Abstract

In oral history, gatekeepers are individuals who facilitate access to interviewees and thus aid in the process of oral history narrator recruitment. This focus on access, however, positions the gatekeeper as a mere recruiter and fails to consider the wider significance of relying on such an individual, as well as how their presence influences and shapes the historical narratives produced. In this article, I therefore seek to proffer a more robust definition of the gatekeeper by analyzing the intersubjective relations between researcher and gatekeeper and the implications of these interpersonal dynamics within historical research. By reflecting on my own use of gatekeepers in West Belfast, Northern Ireland—importantly, a place where I have my own family history but am also an academic researcher—I assess the power dynamics of working in this postconflict space while accounting for my personal and emotional investiture in the research. I argue that, in such situations, traditional understandings of insider or outsider status are ineffectual and subsequently leave the researcher in a liminal space of simultaneous knowability and unknowability. I also argue, moreover, that gatekeepers propagate certain ideas of the past and advance specific forms of historical understanding. Here, I reappraise this post-positivist dynamic and seek to shed light on the additional complexities of intersubjectivity and positionality within gatekeeper relationships. I conclude that in postconflict research, one must center an ethics of care when cultivating relationships within and beyond the interview space.