In this paper we will discuss and critically reflect how oral history can be used both as method and a source to investigate different authorities in knowledge production at cultural heritage institutions with oral history collections, with the case study MigTALKS as one empirical example.

MigTALKS was initially a so-called communication project instigated by the Swedish Migration Board with the purpose to put a face on the “immigrants” and to counteract a discourse about migrants as “poor refugees”. The project collected 100 life stories from migrants, which were donated to the archive of the Nordic Museum after the communication project was finished. 

Using methodologies previously progressed for investigating the authorities in the knowledge production processes at cultural heritage institutions (Thor Tureby 2013,2015; Thor Tureby & Johansson 2020) we explore the different actors’ understandings of MigTALKS as an oral history collection (the Migration Board, the Nordic Museum and the migrants). The concept shared authority (Frisch 1990) is central and used to challenge Laurajane Smith’s (2006) theory authorized heritage discourse (AHD) for analyzing the authority in the cultural heritage sector. In the presentation we will discuss how this methodology can be used to analyze not only how the authority of the migration board and the cultural heritage institution framed the interviews and the knowledge production, but also how the persons who contributed with their stories are expressing their authority, knowledge, and interpretations of and as migrants on migration.