I had published a co-edited book with Oxford a decade ago, my first book actually. Years later I found myself having lunch with Lori Stone, who was an editor at Oxford at that time. We connected at a conference and over the course of lunch she told me about a wonderful new series she had just developed called Understanding Research.

People must be able to use their voice, tell their stories, have their experiences recognized and their voices heard.

As audiences, when we are exposed to oral history projects not only do we learn but in some ways we also bear witness to that which we have not experienced personally.

Oral history is a research method. It is a way of conducting long, highly detailed interviews with people about their life experiences, often in multiple interview sessions. Oral history allows the person being interviewed to use their own language to talk about events in their life and the method is used by researchers in different fields like history, anthropology and sociology.

My book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research is about how researchers use this method and how to write up their oral history projects so that audiences can read them. It's important that researchers have many different tools available to study people's lives and the cultures we live in. I think oral history is a most needed and uniquely important strategy.

There are always challenges with books , deciding what to include and what to omit.

I may be biased, but I think the cover art is stunning.