The purpose of this article is to explore moments of shared authority when working with archived interviews and to suggest how the use and understanding of shared authority as an analyticalconcept might be advanced and elaborated in conjunction with the concept of intersectionality,borrowed from another research field (in this case, gender studies). We aim to hear and acknowledgethe different voices, dialogues and silences of those who documented and those who aredocumented. We listen to their archived voices and dialogues to find moments of shared authority andanalyse how the shared authority plays out during the interviews through intersectional analyses of the archived interview narratives.

At the end of the twentieth century, Michael Frisch coined the term shared authority. Frisch focused primarily on the shared authority during the interview and constructing the interview narrative when he wrote about how oral history can be practiced and used. Frisch underlined the importance of protecting and preserving the interviewee’s authority to interpret as well as describe the past. He argued that the working class, migrants, ethnic minorities, and other marginalized groups are often limited in the extent to which they are allowed to interpret the past or their experience, while researchers or people in other different positions of power are allowed to comment on or interpret the meaning of their experience. With the archived collection Migration Finland-Sweden at the Nordiska Museet in Sweden as an example, this keynote, will delve into the possibilities to hear or practice shared authority when collecting and working with (archived) oral history interviews and interview narratives in the future.