Rachel Thomson and Ester McGeeney
With the support of the Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL) we have explored the possibility of using the reanimating data methodology to work with a new body of material. This time our archive is a collection of 150 tape recorded interviews generated in 1979 by feminist researcher Sue Sharpe capturing conversations with working mothers across Britain. We wanted to know whether the reanimating methods that we forged in the RAD project might work with a radically different data set, and to explore what kinds of possibilities for creating new knowledge these encounters might create. To do this we brought together a group of academics, artists and practitioners working in this area for a participatory workshop. In advance of the workshop we listened to snippets of audio and then working together we creatively engaged with the material, talked with original researcher Sue Sharpe and explored possibilities for future connections and ways of working with the archive.
As part of setting the scene for the workshop we briefly shared the core of the reanimating method including a definition of the ‘time-bind’ – an emotionally felt connection between past and present – which we found to be an essential part of connecting current audiences with archived materials. We also shared examples of the playful methods we had developed during the RAD project that allow participants to have fun exploring the words and meanings of conversations long ago. In our work for the RAD project we have characterised these as: reasking, revoicing, recollecting and collaging. For this event we decided to use the collage method given that we found it to be the most accessible of the approaches and with the least ethical risks. This approach invites participants to work with printed materials from archives (e.g. interview transcripts, archived magazine articles, leaflets, fieldnotes etc)- to cut out words, images and phrases that stand out to them, to make connections and create new images, stories and poems. Participants can include their own words but the method doesn’t demand this of them. It allows us to work anonymously, reusing the words and images created by others.
In the working mothers workshop we wanted to work with images as well as extracts from the conversations with working mothers. We looked through copies of Spare Rib from the late 1970s, extracting and copying pages that in some way captured the interest at the time in work, labour and child care. We also transcribed and anonymised extracts from three interviews conducted by Sue Sharpe with working mothers in 1979. Participants were given cardboard, glue and scissors and invited to chop up words and images and to make their own poems inspired by the materials. Those joining online were offered the chance to do something similar working with the blackout tool that we have used in our online reanimating data workshops.https://blackoutpoetry.glitch.me/ .
The activity focussed our attention on the material and its possibilities. The room was full of energy as we all found our own time binds. Several of us read out our poems or displayed our collages. We found we had started to build a collective analysis that spoke to how contemporary concerns resonate and reanimate agendas around working motherhood in the past.
The workshop also provided us with an opportunity to talk with researchers Sue Sharpe who had conducted the original interviews. Sue kindly agreed to respond to questions that we had crowd sourced in advance, using a padlet to collect questions that the group wanted to ask. We were fascinated by how this research – undertaken for a ‘trade’ book commissioned by Penguin – was distinct from an academic social science project. We felt the passion and the politics in the material, but also the friendliness and informality of the tone. We wanted to know how Sue found the women, why she had asked what she asked, what the women understood by their involvement.
Sues’s responses to our questions gave a rich account of the social, political and interpersonal context of the study and the importance of this contextual information was felt in the quality of the discussion that unfolded afterwards. This felt similar to moments in the RAD project where we found that opportunities to meet and interrogate the original researcher (Rachel) enabled a new generation of women to connect with and feel the lived politics of the past.
As Sue reminded us, the interviews were undertaken 45 years ago, and some aspects of Sue’s memory were quite fuzzy. But Sue has her own archive including notebooks, contact details and tapes carefully kept. Together we were able to begin to build a picture of a unique and important project that has enormous value for us today – historically, methodologically and ethically. Moving forwards we are hoping to work with Sue and her archive to find ways of making this collection available to a wider community and to reward the care that she has shown in preserving the precious materials.