Constructing collaboration, collaborative constructions : a Holocaust survivor, her interviewer and their relationship / by Jennifer Lynn Shamrock.

A desire to counter hegemonic research practices and reinvest research methods with a sense of collaboration requires an estrangement from research and writing practices manifesting hierarchy and power. An authentic commitment to collapsing researcher/researched distinctions and framing interactions as occurring between collaborators may occur only when researchers willingly acknowledge the hazards of dominative ethnography and endeavor to reframe the social relationship they occasion from a perspective of equality, mutuality, and cooperation. Chapters One and Two of this text represent, in both form and content, an endeavor between a researcher and her participant, a Holocaust survivor, to document their singular relationship and the types of interactions and products that are possible through collaboration and shared interpretive authority through all stages of the research process. Chapter Three presents a critique of the interviewing practices of one of the largest projects to interview survivors and document their testimony on film, Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Through an analysis of one survivor's filmed testimony, it becomes evident that the methodological perspective informing an interview situation greatly influences the researcher and his/her participant, the interview experience, and the resultant text. Chapter Four is a reflexive text, allowing the researcher to critically assess issues concerning the research relationship described in Chapters One and Two, such as researcher subjectivities, friendship, disclosure, reciprocity, and interpretive authority.