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Tiny little gestures

Rachel Thomson

Just back from Leicester University on the hottest day of the year where we held an event on ‘Making & Using Sociological Archives’ supported by the British Sociological Association’s early career network fund. I was lucky to work with Laura Fenton and John Goodwin to shape the event – which brought together great speakers and included two hands-on workshops, one from the Mass Observation and Archive and one by the RAD team. Preparing for the event I knew that I had just 1 hour. Influenced by reading Hannah Charnock’s (2025) Teenage Intimacies and her interest in the gestures and practice of the erotic life of youth, I thought why not gather together material on Dancing for this exercise in data sharing and secondary analysis? A few word searches later I had enough material – a diverse set of extracts from data capturing different experiences and levels of maturity as well as capturing the moment of 1989.

DANCING EXTRACTS from FAYS archive

At first you think he’s quiet but once he gets going he’s actually quite … not wild, but he’s very outgoing. You know, he likes clubs and things and he doesn’t mind dancing on the dancefloor on his own, sort of thing but he doesn’t look like that when you look at him. Fatima 20-1, British Turkish, mc 1989

A. I’d known him for a couple of years, for the same time I’d known my boyfriend, and I was ever so close to him, such good friends; like I’d tell him everything if I was having problems with my boyfriend, he’d tell me about his life and that, and we were always close, we mucked about and whenever we went out together, us two’d slide off and have chats and laugh and joke. And one night we had a party, we both had a little bit to drink; we weren’t absolutely out of our heads, just very very relaxed, and he started to – it – it just sort of happened, he started to stroke my arms and we were dancing, and then we all stayed at this person’s house, and it just carried on. He started to kiss me when everyone had gone to sleep, and we just went outside and it happened. It was like really – it just happened. It wasn’t like planned or anything. Claire LJH40 18, white British, lm 1989

No, but in his own way he’s got looks. And at the disco on Saturday there were all the girls staring at me, no not at me, at him, well they were looking at me because I was going out with him right, and I goes “why you …and so aren’t you going to do something like go and chat them up or something”, because some boys do do that, and he goes to me “look there is only one girl I’m going out with, and the only girl I’m going out with is you”, and he goes and “you’re not moving and I’m not moving”. So I said “alright then”, and he goes “what are you looking at” and they are all looking at me and giving me dirty looks and I’m giving them a smile and he goes, “the only girl I want to go out with is you and no one else”, and he is quite good looking. Rachel LSFS1213 16 white wc

A: – Well, it affects your brain, you feel completely different in, you know like, like if you dance or something you can’t feel – like say if I ran down the road now, I’d get to the end of the road and I’d be puffed, you know, I’d be going (gasp), my legs might hurt or something, I could feel all my bags, but when you’re like on an E you an’t feel the – your heavy bags, and you can’t – so you could run like – that’s – that’s why it’s associated with the dancing, ‘cos you could dance all night and not feel it until the next morning when your muscles are killing [..] like they say the music’s got nothing to do with the drugs, but it has; the drugs and the music, the rave music, like even some of it’s in the charts, makes your heart wanna go – you know, your heart goes at the same speed as the music so that’s why you really really enjoy it Lucy LSFS36 18-19 wc 1989


it was just a trip one night into the gay strip cos it was all like on the one street and it was quite sort of spectacular and exciting compared with, sort of, life in the suburbs. And a bloke at school … cos I sort of had a girlfriend at school at the time and he, you know … he was an enemy of mine at the time and he’d been watching me, you know, with this woman and he saw that we were getting quite close and then at school camp we sort of came out together in a little tiny gesture and we were dancing together at the school dance and things like that. We got loads of flack and ridicule and he came over to me, sort of on the quiet, and sort of said, you know, ‘Come out with me one night’. So he took me and this girl out in his car and we drove away and he showed me the gay bars and I never looked back from there. I think I went every night after that – it was just brilliant!
Justine LJH7 20-21, Australian, mc 1989


I was dancing with my friends the girls, I mean I don’t particularly need anyone to dance with me, I was dancing away. I was Acid dancing; I don’t like Acid dancing music! I cringe if it comes on the radio or the television, I cringe. My mum loves it. And I was Acid dancing, I think I was, if there’d have been a competition, I’d have won. I was doing the lot. And at the end of the night, this, I think he was Arabian or Asian, man, and when I say ‘man’, I say 40-45, like my dad’s age, he just grabbed me. And swinging me around, I’ve got my chin on his
shoulder.. And this lad that, this lad had been smiling at me all night, and I’d been smiling back…. dancing away and he’s smiling again. And I wasn’t having no go with this lad. I mean it just didn’t click with me what he was actually smiling at me for, because it never entered my head, anything like that. It didn’t click with me that he’d actually like to, you know, treat me as a come-on! It was a come-on what he was doing now…dancing away. So this lad’s got me in a grip like this, this fella. And this lad’s sat down, just next to the dance floor, and he says – Come here, come here. I couldn’t hear him. I said – Excuse me? I disentangled myself, you know. And I went, he said – Sit down here and wait until that fella’s gone. What for? He said – Do you want to dance with him? I said – No, you’re alright. He goes – Alright. And when this fella had gone, he said – Right, would you dance? I’ve been smiling at you for nearly two hours and you’ve not asked me to dance. I said – Why would I ask you to dance? He said – Haven’t you heard of women’s lib? I said – No, I don’t believe in that. EDD135 Michelle, white British wc 20.


It did not take me long to gather together some images from the pages of City Life (one of the other archives consulted to complement the WRAP data). Armed with coloured paper, glue and scissors I sincerely hoped that I would be able to deliver a meaningful yet speedy workshop with the help of Kate Watson and Niamh Moore. The first 10 minutes were dedicated to the approach. Then participants sitting together at tables were invited to create their own collages using data extracts and images shared. As ever, the workshop helped us understand the method and I wanted to use this blog to capture some of the learning:

Dancing as a topic was a breath of fresh air. Approaching the data side on – rather than through the focal themes of sexuality, sexual health and power in relationships allowed us to be playful and to see the original young women at play. It also encouraged us to see the what the space of the dance floor might have meant to these young women in 1989 – a space of erotic possibility and excitement. A space of display and of being watched and watching other. But also a dynamic and contingent space where norms move quickly or where we need to find those other dance floors that might be more welcoming and fulfilling.

Tearing data: We found we didn’t have enough pairs of scissors. The group all needed the scissors at the same time so some participants resorted to tearing their transcripts to capture their chosen words and phrases. One who had previously taken part in a similar RAD workshop explained that tearing the transcript made her feel more involved and connected to the material. It seems that breaking the wall of formality around ‘data’ is essential for this method. Whether that involves throwing pages of data into the air or tearing, re-voicing or rearranging – some kind of physical entanglement with the words of others brings liveliness to the process. Another participants reflected that she underlined and cut out words that captured the tone of the data extract. Yet when she rearranged these on the page she began to also tell her own story. This is something we see happening often with reanimating practice.


The time bind is something that we explain during the introduction to the workshop, but which came alive in our discussions. The time bind is a felt connection with the material. We don’t know what that will be in advance. It is almost as if the research questions only emerge in the encounters that are staged between data and participants and that these may be diverse and personal. For example, for one of the participants this day, the date 1989 could only mean the Tiannamen Square demonstrations and he worked with words cut from the text to write a poem to connect his feelings about this historical juncture.

For another participant it was the name ’Fatima’ that drew her to the material and the idea that she could have so easily known this young women, arriving in Manchester the following year. Perhaps they moved together on the dancefloor. Her collage spoke of a longing for a friendship missed – using contextual material yet none of Fatima’s words.


Titles: As part of the workshop we ask people to name their collages. We have found this to be a valuable stage in the process of collaborative analysis as participants reflect on and condense meaning for what has been an exploratory – and often rather hurried – process. In this collage a word is taken from the text used, yet in doing so sensitises us to something particular – the sensation of being synchronised or at the ‘same speed’ as others – a prerequisite for intimacy and for dancing together.

The title ‘Slide off’ also sensitises us to the embodied and relational dimensions of romantic and erotic interaction – as the young couple ‘slide off’ the dance floor to find somewhere quiet to be together. Something that both chimes and undermines the loud and brash.


The title ‘Hip Joints’ appears to play with the language of the popular culture (with certain club nights characterised as hip joints rather then ‘hoover halls’) while also directing our eyes and minds to the literal hip joints of dancers and exercisers as they move their bodies. I can’t help thinking about how those dancing with ecstasy in 1989 may well be suffering for sore hips joints in 2025.

It is interesting to look at the collages together and to ask what they tell us as a body of material. We might focus on the specificity of the participants – for example ‘the work produced by a group of academic researchers interested in active methods’. Looking at this selection I was interested in how queer dimensions of the archive were amplified in the re-use with several picking up in the idea of coming out.

I was also struck by questions about how and where the erotic potentialities of the dance floor have moved within youth culture if the dance floor is not long what it was. We spoke in the room about where it might have gone – online, into fan cultures, gaming intimacies, sports, gym culture…?

I am also struck by how the WRAP project was itself an intervention into a culture where doing/being rather than saying /explaining was the norm. As a feminist sexual health project the study incited a ‘speaking out about sex’ that was part of a wider belief in talking that can be see in the advice of agony aunts and health educators (Gahnstrom et al. 2024) Could sex education do a better job of engaging with the gesture, the euphemism, the look-taking seriously the non verbal dimensions of sexual cultures? But should we draw our attention back to the potentialities of the dancefloor – could these be reanimated. What would that look like and whose work would it be?


References
* Gahnstrom, R., Robinson, L., & Thomson, R. (2024) Is sex good for you?, reward, and responsibility for young women in the late 1980s’ in Froom, H., Loughran, T., Mahoney, K, & Payling, D. (eds) Everyday Health, Embodiment, and Selfhood since 1950. Manchester University Press.


* Charnock, H. (2025) Teenage Intimacies: Young Women, Sex and Social Life in England 1950-80. Manchester University Press.

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Sexy Pigeons: New directions

Sophia Rosen-Fouladi and Ottilie Nye

The Sexy Pigeons are a sex positive collective hosting workshops for women and non binary people. You can read more about their work with the RAD project here.

An interactive exhibition

On the 22nd March 2025 we (the Sexy Pigeons) facilitated our 6th workshop of the year at the Deptford Lounge, which took on the form of an interactive exhibition. The exhibition was in part a culmination of all the work we produced throughout the year so far – from previous data poems displayed on the walls to a communal timeline hanging in one corner. It was also an opportunity once again for us to experiment with structure and form as ‘the idea behind this was to create a freer structure to the day’. We wanted visitors to wander around the exhibition in their own time, and contribute towards the various exhibits they were drawn to – allowing for a more personalised journey through sex education. 

‘It allowed visitors the freedom to engage with the work more on their own terms, which encouraged more introspection. As much as bringing the conversation outwards is still vital, sometimes we can find empowerment and build confidence through quieter self-reflection and deep thought.’ (Sexy Pigeons, 2025)

The exhibits included a recording booth, a vulva painting stand, an interactive timeline, a ‘things I wish I’d known’ board, a data poem activity, a WRAP informational section pieced together with previous participants’ work, and a table all about the Sexy Pigeons/Cum on Down project. 

You can find out more about each of the exhibits here!

Sexy Pigeons on Film!

The interactive exhibition day became a very exciting catalyst for a collaboration between the Sexy Pigeons and Carwell Casswell productions: a multi-award-winning creative studio specialising in documentary and experimental film. Following on from a conversation with producer/director Stefania Silvestri, we were fascinated by a recent short film entitled ‘Vulva’ produced by Carwell Casswell, as it investigated themes of insidious genital shaming and vulva diversity – topics very close to the Sexy Pigeons’ hearts. 

This initial conversation led to consultations at Carwell Casswell’s studio, a participant call- out, a deep dive back into the WRAP archive and finally a filming day on the 31st May 2025 at Hoxton Hall. 

The idea behind this day of filming was to select four individual participants for an hour-long interview, with the aim of capturing a much deeper, honest, personal experience of someone’s sex education from school to its impact on their present-day life. 

‘We were able to explore such a huge variety of topics from important relationships to kink, queerness, neurodivergency, drag, sex education, familial relationships, female friendship, constructs of ‘first times’ and virginity and so much more beyond that’ (Sexy Pigeons, 2025)

We chose to reanimate the WRAP data through ‘re-asking’ questions from selected the interviews – with questions carefully selected for each participant. Participants were sent their interview to read and familiarise themselves with before the filming day. They were each given the opportunity to request the omission of any content/questions and alternatively content they found of particular interest. We then devised our own set of questions in response to the WRAP interviews – drawn from areas we felt were either lacking, or entirely non-existent such as an exploration of queer identities, gender-expression, pleasure and the kink community.

Questions from the WRAP archive, curated by Sexy Pigeons.

These interviews are in the process of being reviewed and edited by the Sexy Pigeons, with the aim of eventually adding them to the Reanimating Data archive – building on the RAD project research into the changes and continuities in intimate lives, as well as making their own call to arms for the improvement in the quality of sex education in the UK – calling for creative, playful, intersectional and compassionate sex education. 

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Sexy Pigeons: A sex positive collective hosting workshops for women and non binary people

Sophia Rosen-Fouladi, Ottilie Nye and Ester McGeeney

In 2019 the Reanimating data project worked with a group of young women at the University of Manchester who creatively workshopped three interviews from the WRAP archive and created their own live performance: The Reanimating Project. Led by the young women, the group used poetry, movement, performance, creative writing, music and dance to connect with and reanimate the interview data and share their own stories of sex, sexuality, gender, love, loss, pleasure, discovery and transformation. 

One of the young women who took part in this project was Sophia Rosen-Fouladi. For Sophia, taking part in the reanimating data project was personally and professionally transformative, offering her the opportunity to talk about topics that she rarely had the opportunity to explore.

‘The Reanimating Data Project helps encourage discussions that are so open and encouraging for young women to see they aren’t alone in their circumstances….Sophia’s involvement in [the reanimating data workshops] has gone on to define parts of her career as well as her own confidence in her personal life. She was struck by how little she had previously talked about sex and sexual experiences before the workshops. The workshops offered her a space to learn, grow and discover tools that have improved her personal relationships and her confidence as an adult in many aspects of her life.‘

Several years later, Sophia dreamed up the idea of recreating similar kinds of creative and transformative spaces for others. Together with friend and fellow creative Ottilie Nye, Sophia founded Sexy Pigeons – A sex positive collective hosting workshops for women and non binary people in London. Sexy Pigeons first venture has been to develop the Cum on Down workshop series – imagined as a series of playful, creative spaces where women and non-binary people could come together to be creative, find new communities, build confidence and learn together about sex and sexuality.

Cum on Down!

Between April 2024 and January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons hosted 5 creative workshops in London. You can read about each of them in their own words on the Sexy Pigeons website.

Workshop one: The start of something special…

In April 2024, Sophia and Ottilie facilitated their first workshop with 15 women and non-binary people at the Albany Theatre in Deptford, South London. The focus of the workshop was VIRGINITY, which was explored using a mix of silly games and energisers, focussed discussions, mind maps, exploring WRAP data extracts, creative exercises and zine making.

This was an opportunity ‘to experiment with ideas. To try things out, be bold, and see what sticks’. You can read more about this workshop here in Sexy Pigeon’s own words:  Focus Group: Virginity.

Workshop 2: The Sex Education System

A few months later, and now with a little financial support from the University of Sussex, Sexy Pigeons hosted their second workshop: The Sex Education System. Located at the Music Rooms in New Cross, South London this workshop also featured ice breakers, focussed discussions, zine making and creative world building exercises – this time in the form of acrostic poems. The struggle for this workshop was recruiting participants. The event was open to all and marketed online but Sexy Pigeons were disheartened by the small numbers of sign ups. In the end seven participants turned up and took part in what ended up being an intimate workshop with time and space for everyone to explore and express their thoughts and ideas.

We were inspired by the idea of the anonymous question box you might have at the end of a sex ed class, and encouraged participants to write down as many questions they could think of, either that they wished would have been answered during their time at school, or that would be beneficial to someone going through school right now. We then turned a question each into an acrostic poem. We had ‘discharge’ ‘contraception’ and ‘masturbate’ [and] the Ten ‘Cum’andments was a highlight of this workshop. 10 self love and educational points to wholeheartedly stick to. And of course we were proud of the name! (Sexy Pigeons 2024)

You can read more about this workshop here: The Sex Education System 

Workshop 3: Sex across timelines.

In November 2024, Sexy Pigeons hosted their third creative workshop in the Palmer studio at Hoxton Hall in East London. This time, the workshop took on a different structure using different creative exercises to gradually construct a timeline that hung across the workshop space. We had a solo participant turn up, however ended up being able to try out material in a really personal and honest way. We had some really cathartic moments reading out free writing material we’d written to our past selves, and got to know the women from the archive in greater depth.

By the end we had a huge variety of materials hanging on the timeline: questions, segments from the interviews, data poems and free writing to name a few. Circling back to the idea that multiple times are existing at once, we wanted to round the workshop off by making personal time capsules. Participants were allowed to deconstruct the timeline however they wished and add material to their time capsules. We focussed on the ‘message in a bottle’ idea using glass bottles which could be filled up and decorated on the outside. (Sexy Pigeons, 2024)

When developing the RAD project the project team were inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s work on queer time. Freeman talks about the need to make visible the ‘imperfect sutures between past and present’ (p.111). Freeman highlights the example of artist and film-maker Elizabeth Subrin’s work, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands’. Here, Subrin shows two reels of silent footage of the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, taken nearly a decade apart, and sutured together. The first is taken in the weeks following the New York September 11th attacks and the second nearly a decade later. In suturing two times together like this, Freeman argues, we can see the anachronisms at play. This is how we can ‘‘unsituate viewers from the present tense they think they know, and to illuminate or even prophetically ignite possible futures in light of powerful historical moments’. (Freeman, 2010). 

In this workshop, the Sexy Pigeons take up these themes, playing creatively with time and making spaces to make multiple times present.  

‘What makes the concept of Reanimating Data so exciting for us is the idea of multiple timelines being in conversation with one another. By exploring a selection of interviews from the WRAP Project Archive we are reanimating these words within the context of the present day and giving them a liveness upon which to create new work and initiate new discussions.’ (Sexy pigeons, 2024)

You can read more about the workshop here: Sex Across Timelines.  

Workshops 4 and 5. The Past, present and future. 

On the 25th January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons facilitated their 4th and 5th workshops at the Palmer Studio at Hoxton Hall – ‘experimenting with structure and pace through trialling two hour-long workshops this time round.’ The groups – each with 10-12 participants –  worked with extracts from the Women Risk and AIDS Project archive, creating body maps and discussing the homophobia and biphobia that surfaces in the interview and talking about the politics of sex education, before finishing up with a letter-writing exercise. You can read all about these workshops here:  The Past, Present and Future 

‘We wanted to round off the workshops with a letter-writing exercise to bring in an element of the future, looking towards a brighter future of sex education, and our relationships with our sexual identities. We love the wind-down/reflective time this gives participants to chat with us and amongst each other about any topics explored in the workshop, as well as promoting individual creativity. We encouraged participants to write a letter to their future selves, with the aim of opening it in 2 hours/days/weeks even years!!! We wanted to draw an invisible thread between the women from the interviews in the 1980s, the participants in our workshop in 2025, and whoever those participants may become in the future, to span decades of sex education. It brought a lighter feel to the end of the workshops after some fairly heavy content, and brought an atmosphere of peacefulness into the space.’

New directions…

After 10 months of experimenting with the structure and length of the workshops, trialling different venues, materials, activities and ways of advertising and recruiting participants, the sexy pigeons decided to try some new directions… more coming on their interactive exhibition and reanimating data filming day soon!  

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How do we to tell stories about social change?  

Rachel Thomson

This seems to have been the question of my week. On Sunday I went to the launch of a new project/ archive/ website called HOWL – the History of Women’s Liberation. The main aim of HOWL is to collect and publish the memories and stories of feminists involved in any of the many layers of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement. In contrast to the more ‘elite’ projects such as the British Library oral history collection – this is a user driven crowd sourcing project as older feminists are invited to click and communicate by adding their own stories. In the words of the organisers:

Let the rich, united, divided, contradictory, joyful, difficult, amazing, ordinary and banal years of the WLM be recorded in our own words. This is our story. Our history.

A favourite of mine shared at the launch was this memory from Wendy Knight – giving her personal version of the feminist slogan ‘ it starts with you sinking into his arms and end with your arms in his sink’. So this is a collection of activist voices for activists. It spreads its web wide and seeks to be inclusive – perhaps ‘more inclusive’ than other projects. But you need to be connected in order to contribute your story.

Also this week I reviewed a book – which was made from the testimonies of women who were teenagers between 1950-80 – so probably the same generation of women involved in the HOWL project. The voices in Hannah Charnock’s book Teenage Intimacies young women, sex and social life in England 1950-80 were sourced from panellists of the Mass Observation Archive responding to a series of relevant directives and a group of women in the Exeter area who agreed to take part in oral history interviews. Charnock is keen to emphasise the everyday nature of teenage lives rather than the spectacular rebellions – the ordinary subterfuges and recalibrations of sexual mores that made a ‘quiet revolution’ in intimacies that for example saw illegitimacy lose its meaning and power as social censure. These young women were not activists, but they did want more for themselves in terms of happiness, pleasure and fulfilment than what they saw in their parents example. And their parents knew enough to turn a blind eye and hope that daughters avoided the mistakes that blighted their own lives. Silence, awkwardness and learning by doing is the motif of this book.

And thirdly, I spent a very happy morning in a group of women convened by textile artist Vanessa Marr in order to create my own duster-art using visual material from the 1950s gathered in the Brighton art school archive. Our group of middle aged women searched through idealised images of house work, kitchens and domestic technology imagined by advertisers for a new kind of female consumer. Our task was to cut and stitch onto dusters to create collages that both animated the archive and created connections between past and present. In the group we joked about the material, about our own favourite recipes, reclaiming the rooms of children leaving home – whether a tall or short plumber was to be preferred. We touched on parenting and questions of domestic labour.  As we chose material we also chose narratives, stories we might tell. I started  by focusing on the men/ husband who seemed to frame the elegant domestic goddesses in the advertisements.  There was something nasty in their sharp suits and postures. I was thinking of Mad Men and Alfred Hitchcock – misogynist men and captured wives. But as my collage took shape I saw my men as floating as they do in the opening titles of Madmen. The absence of their women literally unhinged these bodies. We began to joke about our men as captives themselves, admitting that for two of us at least it is the men in our lives that do the lion’s share of the house-work while we pursue careers in the public sphere.

So, the moral of the stories? That we need to be able to move between loud sources that capture and portray images that powerfully shape narratives and quiet sources – which may in fact be almost silent, but which include a reworking and recalibration of the everyday while avoid the spectacular. That in order to get to these more complicated places we need to work with and through sources, they do not reveal themselves immediately – not even to ourselves.

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‘I never thought I’d be sitting here writing poetry about abortion, but here I am.’

Martha Nicholson

A blog by doctoral researcher Martha Nicholson on using reanimating data methods to co-produce policy recommendations with health professionals in Northern Ireland.

Reposted from The Open University with the author’s permission.

Co-producing knowledge is often proposed as way to ‘build bridges’ and establish equitable partnerships between academic institutions and research participants in the health system. But how might the co-production of knowledge and policy-relevant recommendations with health professionals work in practice?

In this blog, I present the creative co-production process I used to facilitate a safe and reflective space for nurses and midwives to discuss the issues around abortion care that were raised in my PhD research. Based on the interview data I collected, participants and I generated recommendations for how policy and practice can improve health professional’s knowledge on abortion care in Northern Ireland, and in turn make the health system a safer and more compassionate place to seek abortion care. These insights may provide useful inspiration for other researchers considering involving health professionals in the analysis of data on a stigmatised research topic.

What did the co-production process aim to achieve?

I used co-production sessions with five participants with the aim to 1) allow them to co-own the interview data collected in my PhD project, 2) to co-generate recommendations, and 3) create a safe space to talk about the topic of my interview data – abortion service delivery in Northern Ireland. Three midwives attended a group session, and two nurses joined one-on-one sessions (scheduling challenges!).

Step 1: Warming up with ‘a line of discovery’

Sessions started off by making commitments to 1) protect confidentiality, 2) respect each other, 3) and to support each other emotionally if needed. I then adapted an Alliance for Choice creative workshop activity and invited participants to write a chronology of their interactions with abortion along “a line of discovery”. We reflected on: “what started the conversation?”, “what feelings did they associate abortion with?”. This helped participants to start writing, thinking, reflecting, and to share their experiences. It laid the groundwork for the following activities by allowing us to let go of the formality of our professional identities.

Step 2: Reanimating data using blackout poetry

Archivists, activists, and academics have used techniques to “reanimate data” to explore change and continuities in intimate lives over time. Blackout poetry is used in the social sciences to generate a deeper connection with material, reveal the ghosts in a narrative and hold a mirror up to our analyses. It can also help researchers to reflect on their emotions when engaging with their research  I used blackout poetry in this workshop to give participants a tool to engage with the research data, and to explore how my gaze on the study data may differ to theirs.

To do this, I distributed quotes from my interview data that highlighted tensions between localised and authorised forms of knowledge. I invited participants to work with creative materials (card, pens, scissors, tape, and glue) to rehash the quotes, reveal a hidden story, using words that “glow” and resonate with them. They enjoyed the task, taking their time to pass around the quotes, consider the ones that meant something to them and explore ways of using the creative materials. One participant summarised the feeling in the room: “I never thought I’d be sitting here writing poetry about abortion, but here I am.” They accompanied their creative work with a title, note on what the poem is telling us and what needs to change. They also included annotations, doodles, and drawings, working with the materials they had to hand.

The participants’ work engaged with themes in the data: the urgency of time in abortion care, intersectionality of abortion restrictions, and poor resourcing of abortion care in Northern Ireland. They chose to work with testimonies that came up in the interview data about the de-prioritization of abortion care in hospitals, the injustice of the pre-2019 abortion ban, and the dominance of men in decision making about women’s health care. An excerpt from one participant’s poem entitled “Multifaceted” read:

We feel that we have to play down the bit about abortion.

You felt you had to play it down,

a wee bit.

And you kind of feel,

A wee bit of shame.

Just to keep the peace,

and not to have any confrontation with anybody.

Step 3: Generating recommendations for policy and practice

Together we watched a short video by the Array collective – an art collective in Belfast who use art and collective action to respond to sociopolitical issues affecting Northern Ireland. I wanted to show what art can do.

Building on these activities and discussions, participants noted down recommendations for how policy and practice could improve health professionals’ knowledge on abortion care. We read the recommendations and clustered them into broad themes. For example, several recommendations emerged for developing care pathways for marginalised people, protecting spaces for abortion care providers, and introducing mandatory training on abortion for multi-professional groups. 

Discussion and conclusion

The workshop created a safe space for participants to share their experiences of abortion care in their personal and professional lives. The reanimating data exercise gave them tools to explore hidden messages in the quotes, examine their experiences in relation to the quote, and allowed me to explore my own assumptions about the standpoints of the participants. I took this opportunity to reflect on my role as a researcher, learner, and advocate for abortion care. The recommendations that we arrived at proposed practical, structural, and ideological changes to the framing of abortion in Northern Ireland. This suggests that nurses, midwives, and other health professionals can be powerful advocates for change when given the time, tools, and spaces to do so. To conclude, using creativity in co-production sessions can help participants engage in difficult topics, facilitate a safe space for honest and reflective discussion and inspire ideas for change.

Tips on facilitating co-production workshops with research participants

  1. Apply for funding to be able to reimburse participants for their time. I offered my participants £50 Love2Shop vouchers for a half day workshop (8.30-1.30pm) as well as coffee and lunch.
  2. Show a video or presentation on creative methods to give participants the tools and inspiration to make something of their own. I showed my participants this video on art activism from the OU, Array Collective and Alliance for Choice.
  3. Allow time for participants to share their expectations and engage in a warmup activity to get everyone comfortable with speaking up and using the creative materials at hand.
  4. Secure a private space, free of interference or disruption. I used an Open University Belfast conference room which was spacious and in an accessible location.
  5. Consider what you define as ‘data’ in the co-creation sessions. You may like to keep notes of the ideas and discussion that participants engage in. I decided not to voice record to maintain the privacy of my participants, but others may wish to do so.
  6. Ensure that co-production workshops plans have been reviewed by research ethics committee, and that participants give informed consent for their data to be used in research outputs like this one.
  7. Break up the sessions with a coffee or lunch break to allow participants time to rest and re-charge between sessions.

This blog was original posted at: https://wels.open.ac.uk/research/centre-study-global-development/blog/i-never-thought-id-be-sitting-here-writing and is reproduced here with permission by the author.

For more information please contact: martha.nicholson@open.ac.uk

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Reinventing ethics

By Rachel Thomson with Janet Boddy, Jette Kofoed, Niamh Moore & Sharon Webb

The Reanimating Data project has involved a great deal of reflection in relation to ethical issues and even some ‘carefull risk taking’. This is a term coined by Niamh Moore and colleagues (2021) to capture how methodological innovation is often associated with the need and appetite to delve deeply into research ethics and to make contributions to new ethical thinking. Our project has demanded that we extend or extrapolate conventional ethical thinking in order to cover the new terrains into which our methods took us. For the Re-Animating Data (RAD) project this included; working beyond the original consents that shaped the data in our archive; negotiating the ‘ambivalent gift’ of returning data to the community from which it was extracted; taking care-full risks to alert ourselves to the kinds of ethical sensitivities involved, including the right to not be reminded or to remember intimate conversations from the past; and developing modes of working as secondary analysts that held tensions between the need to be playful with data and respecting the integrity and significance of the material. We are busy writing a paper to capture this learning.

We are currently thinking about employing the reanimating model with another data set and decided that it was a good time to take advice from fellow travellers about how we might think creatively about research ethics in the future. As part of this work we were grateful to secure support from the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab to hold a workshop that staged a conversation between members of the Reanimating Data team (Niamh Moore, Rachel Thomson & Sharon Webb) with Jette Kofoed our visitor from Aarhus University, our ethics adviser Janet Boddy and other members of the Sussex research community, including the ethics research committee. In this blog we capture some of the key insights from the conversation and think through how we might work with these in the RAD project and beyond. Quotations from the panel discussion are marked in italics and are slightly edited for the purpose of readability. Each key insight from the conversation is marked by a heading followed by a number of quotations which are then commented on and responded to in plain text. We have not noted the individual speaker – considering that the fruits of this collective discussion are collaborative.

The ethics of remembering and forgetting

You raised the right to be forgotten. So, we’re having these conversations in some domains, but in the social sciences you still barely have the right to be remembered. In fact, you don’t. There’s also this kind of collision… you know these stories don’t belong to me [the researcher], and I certainly shouldn’t destroy them. You know they should be made available and be in the public realm.

Sociological interviews 20 years ago become historical artifacts. It’s like what happens in those, intervening years, it becomes like it kind of shifts disciplines. … for a historian it is like ‘what! you’re destroying data?’, but actually, understandably, from ethical perspective [you have agreements]. But in 50 years’ time that may be the only trace of these things. 

People are way more conscious of data and rights around data, and where it goes, and what it does than they were 20 years ago, probably even 10 years ago….. [In research] We are giving people the opportunity to put what they want to say on the record. So [it’s] unlike all of our other kinds of data that’s being harvested, you know our horrible Amazon shopping list, all the things that we don’t want people to know, and we don’t want to be the historical trace of us. 

Thinking about queer temporalities within that. So as life courses shift so too identity shifts. So, the right to be remembered in the way that you want to be remembered is important, and the right to be forgotten in the way that you want to be forgotten. 

What I’ve learned from archaeologists in teaching with them at the ethics courses, is that a very old rule is that you never dig everything out. You leave something behind for the next generation, because you know that those coming after you might be able to do it more diligently, or to do it differently. 

Working across disciplines can be generative for ethics. Norms and assumed ‘good practices’ in one field are challenged by norms and practices in another. Where the social sciences (which generally work with those who are alive) tend to lean on anonymity as a methodological norm and (uninspected) ethical good, historical approaches provide different perspectives. On the one hand, oral history traditions encourage us to think about ‘testimony’, the invitation to members of the public to become part of history and in doing so to use their own names. On the other hand, historians are alert to the very partial traces of the past that are left to us in the archive. Certain voices disappear. So not only can we make a strong case for the data of social science to become part of the public archive, but we also need to think carefully about whether anonymity is always an ethical good. This may be a question better discussed with participants rather than a decision made on their behalf. We may not always know or understand what counts as sensitive data – and what is sensitive may change over time as people enter different stages of life, and/or when they are no longer there to make decisions. What does it mean to delegate care of data? Can we imagine a prolonged or unending ethics – that involves returning to data or unresolved ethical challenges from the past.

Care, curation and infrastructures

.. my imagination of what an archive was […]: a box into which you, you know, post your data. Instead of: an archive is an infrastructure that you build that puts data in connection with other data and other things, and those standards, or what makes that possible. 

What are the limits of our capacity to care for participant? So, for instance, we might retire or get made redundant from the university, and no longer have access to the archive that we saw ourselves as looking after. If we’re talking about long temporalities, the duty of care that we feel very strongly, can that be delegated? Can that be passed on? Can that be shared? 

It has to be a constant conversation, and it relies upon infrastructures that are responsive to users, and which allows research participants to know exactly what’s out there about them, and enabling that kind of ability to kind of request takedowns or request changes or request.

We went for the most restrictive creative commons license, because we didn’t want commercial use. We didn’t want derivatives. We didn’t want, you know, sharing with attribution. And so, thinking about how those types of standards might benefit conversations  about the kind of reuse imagined.

What does that traveling of data entail [for example data made available for secondary analysis by new researchers])? Does that mean that you can give it to me, and I can just violate it in in some other form or direction?

We cannot have that conversation [about AI and research ethics] outside of understanding technology and what challenges are being created for us to think about the human capacity to think and feel and to connect and to notice each other, and to be present with each other when we’re doing research.

Universities and Libraries play a vital role in assuring the preservation of data and archives enabling researchers to imagine the longevity of research data and  to trust that our promises made in the present will be honoured long into the future. But what does it mean to care beyond the immediate ‘now’? In the Reanimating Data project we have worked with a dual approach to archiving the WRAP data set that assumes a long-term preservation approach using the institutional repository and a much more user-friendly and participatory approach that draws on the platform of Omeka. We work with CC BY NC SA  creative common licenses to make our intention for the data clear to potential users – enabling sharing and adaptation but requiring attribution and restricting commercial uses. We also create metadata using the Dublin Core standard that enables us to link individual items in the archive into a cat’s cradle of digital relationalities that enable interested others to find the data. These infrastructures are vital and alongside the knowledge and theory of archivists, they enable us to leverage access to marginalised collections and to bring these into a truly ‘public sphere’. Yet this is not an automatic or automated process. It involves careful labour (the work of data preparation, creating metadata, maintaining platforms) and careful risk taking as we work out and work through the consequences of our decisions. It is productive to think about care beyond the immediate situations.  New technologies necessarily pose new affordances which take time to understand while also learning of their pitfalls. We are beginning to grasp how digital archives can enable us to enliven research. The ethical labours of today can be written into the way that materials survive and the ways that future users experience them and allow us to scrutinize what care might mean in the future life of the data.

Democratising ethics

Participants are making decisions anyway, about what they tell us, and what they don’t.

We very rarely allow that our participants may have ethical frameworks themselves, and may have ways of working through ethical issues in their kind of everyday lives.

The thing that people were most concerned about in archiving was about representation, not just of them personally, but of their community and the potential for research to do ethical harm in relation to perpetuating stigmatization, political harm as well.

The problem of missing data turns into a really political project which is about: if you want to represent people who don’t trust research, then you’ve got to do it in a completely different way. And I think that’s really productive, because it’s not just by mistake that it is missing data. 

What do we want to save? It is not just the funded research. 

Ethics is utterly in the writing.

We tend to spend a great deal of time thinking about professional ethics and institutional procedures in order to identify and minimise risk. Yet, in an era that provides us with the technological tools for co-production, to distinguish between risk and harm and in doing so we need to recognise and engage with the ethical frameworks and insights of participants. We know that people deliberately absent themselves from what they perceive as potentially stigmatising knowledge projects. So, when starting new projects and building the archives of the future we need to think prospectively about inclusion and dignity. This is something captured by Rachel and Liam in their paper ‘starting with the archive’ (Thomson & Berriman 2023) where they mapped out stages in co-production of an archive (permission; negotiating the idea of ‘the public’; becoming data; publishing and compliance) as well as principles that could underpin all stages of this work (a sense of possibility; a commitment to co-production; understanding and promoting shareability; and securing posterity (a safe home) for the archive). When we do this kind of work carefully and collaboratively, we find out interesting things. For example, that people have their own language and insights about how they want their documentation to be handled by others. These kinds of consultations can also sensitise us around data sets from the past, when it is harder to find and involve the original participants. For example, in the Reanimating Data project the experience of the original research team encouraged us to not seek out original participants, understanding the potential burdens of being reminded of intense and sensitive memories which would outweigh the potential ethical goods associated with renewing consent. Such a decision places moral obligations on the researchers and archivists in shaping how materials are used, and how participants are represented or presented. 

Not all research has the benefit of ethical review, or at least not all stages of the research are interrogated in this way. The ethics of writing, although perhaps the most sensitive of all ethical issues, generally falls outside of ethical procedure. Realising how the ethical practice is visible not only in consent forms or the paragraphs describing the ‘ethics’, but also how ethics is in all the details of how we present the settings, the holding of bodies, affects and ways of engaging. We want to discuss in much more detail the ethics of writing.

Ethical muscle: fallibility and tensions between procedural and relational ethics

Credible researchers go back and, you know, sometimes they unmake their previous decisions.

Are these researchers ethically competent? Are they demonstrating their capacity to think [..]. are they saying I’m a trustworthy person who knows what to do when I don’t know what to do. 

‘Having’ ethics is such a weird, such a weird thing to say, isn’t it? I have ethics meaning: I have the approval. The institution has said that I’m good. 

We can see a future where you get brought into a project to write a really good ethics application. 

It would be an interesting exercise for us to ask ChatGPT to do an ethics application for a fantasized project.

[Take an ethical scenario], and know how to unpick it, work your way through it. [The aim] is not to answer it. It’s not about being right, is it? But having be having the capacity to think. 

I like this idea of sticking with the messiness. You know, allowing that kind of complexity and messiness to kind of be part of the research journey. 

Part of our conversation focused on the importance of preparing researchers to become ethically competent. This of course means understanding procedural ethics and having the confidence to work with an ethics committee. Ideally this takes place in stages, seeking ethical approval as a study unfolds and having the confidence to work iteratively in collaboration with critical friends. Ideally, we would seek ethical review for each set of methods as they arise in a longer project. But ethical competence also involves having time, space and supervision so that ethically complex situations and examples can be explored not merely for the purpose of achieving approval of an ethics application. This involves working through the emotional responses of researchers and participants to different parts of the study. Jette’s (2015)  account of ethical hesitancy was embraced as a way of maintaining a research position when working with sensitive topics that give rise to pressures towards ’helping’ and ‘solving’ the problems encountered. Hesitancy can support researchers to be able to operate in the present tense without collapsing into safeguarding reactions – although a good understanding of safeguarding is a crucial underpinning of working in an ethical way. Jette shared examples from a Danish context of extended courses for doctoral researchers where they are invited to talk through ethical challenges (and joys) that they experience and to explore how to implicate themselves in their data. The aim of this training is not simply for them to become compliant in relation to ethical procedures but to build the capacity to think and act ethically and to build ‘ethical muscles’ collaboratively with peers in safe spaces. Allowing fallibility to be part of ethics is not an invitation to carelessness, or to not care about making mistakes. Rather it is a manner of acknowledging the careful risk-taking as part and parcel of all research processes. ‘Having’ ethics, we find, seems to be a new lingua developed through ethics applications and ethics assessments where once ‘approved’, you ‘have ethics’. Such possessive ethics must be challenged by a vivid language of ethics, involving terminologies such as careful risk-taking, hesitancy, prolonged ethics, democratizing ethics, giving back, ethics of writing, ethics of leaving traces behind. Questions of supervision and peer support are a vital part of such terminology and of ethically robust research – as well as the ability to slow a project down so that the granular and iterative character of the research process becomes evident. A willingness to learn, implicate ourselves, communicate and to change our minds are characteristics of healthy relational ethics.

These thoughts, ideas and values are incredibly useful as we begin to think about developing a pilot stage for our new Working Mothers project.  We also generated ideas and insights that are valuable for Ethics Committees and ensuring that ethic committees continue to learn and work in conjunction with a research culture that promotes learning in relational ethics.

References

Kofoed, J., & Staunæs, D. (2015). Hesitancy as ethics. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.1559

Moore, N., Dunne, N., Karels, M., & Hanlon, M. (2021). Towards an Inventive Ethics of Carefull Risk: Unsettling Research Through DIY Academic Archiving. Australian Feminist Studies, 36(108), 180–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2021.2018991

Thomson, R., & Berriman, L. (2023). Starting with the archive: principles for prospective collaborative research. Qualitative Research, 23(2), 234-251. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941211023037

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Reanimate this! The 1979 working mothers interviews.

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/ . 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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1979

Mark Erickson

1979 was the pivotal year in the post World War 2 UK for employment and employment relations. Many commentators will cite 1979 as being the beginning of neoliberalism in the UK, with the new Conservative government bringing in ideologically-driven policies to reconfigure the relationship between state and society. We can still feel the effects of this today in the form of the legacy of public service privatizations (water, energy, telecoms, housing) and a shift in societal attitudes towards more individualist and consumerist positions. Yet these seismic shifts have been underpinned by changes in modes of employment, the labour market, and industrial relations.

We should note four key transformations whose emergence can be dated to 1979, all of which are presaged in the Sue Sharpe Working Mothers archive. Firstly, deindustrialization; the demise of the UK’s heavy industries had already started but now picked up pace as coal, steel, shipbuilding and large-scale car production all went to the wall. There was an attendant steep rise in unemployment to peak in 1984, which remained high (above 7%) until the late 1990s (https://www.statista.com/statistics/280236/unemployment-rate-by-gender-in-the-uk/). Secondly, trade union decline. Trade union membership reached its peak in 1979 (13.2 million) and then went into a steady, and ongoing, decline (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy 2022: Trade Union Membership UK 1995-2021: statistical bulletin page 5). Thirdly, fragmentation of careers and an end to ‘jobs for life’ dramatically changed the experience of many workers in the UK, and saw the dismantling of historic occupational communities. Fourthly, the feminization of the workforce takes off in 1979 with women increasingly being drawn into full-time and part-time work, a trend that has increased year on year since 1979 (ONS 2019: 7). 

The long term changes to work and employment that started in 1979 are still at work today, and the consequences of these transformations are still not fully understood. Looking back to help us look forward is a vital task if we are to be better equipped for the coming changes that the UK labour market and workforce will face. 

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Reanimating folk

Rachel Thomson

On a Sunday in October  I went to an amazing show – based on an oral history project called Sweet Thames lead by Sam Caroll and Zoe Bliss of Star Creative Heritage. The project was interested in capturing the still living history of the London folk scene rooted in skiffle clubs, that emerged in London in the 1950s and went through a revival in the 1970s when participants began to focus on documenting and embodying the songs of the British isles. This period of revival involved an intensive collecting, study and performance of this oral tradition as well as invention of new songs. For the Sweet Thames project interviews were conducted with 26 people involved in both the original and revival scenes. These testimonies were shared with performance artist Ewan Wardrop who saturated himself in the material, condensing and sculping it into a verbatim performance piece that involves moving fluidly between voice, song, dance and recorded material to share an account of this movement that is multi-vocal, funny and moving. 

The audience for the event at Lewes Con Club was made up of a range of people, but a predominance of older, greyer white folk who knew the words to the songs – members of folk clubs. And the first half of the event was by folk club rules, with individuals invited to take up floor spots and to introduce and sing a single song. Those that contributed each explained their role in the folk club movement and chose songs of significance to share – with the audience joining with the chorus. The first time I experienced this – when I first moved to Lewes 10 years ago and attended the weekly folk club at the Elephant and Castle I was genuinely unnerved – as those around me broke into soft song – knowing words and breaking the fourth wall of the stage. Now, more familiar with the proactice, I find it comforting and moving – a kind of call and response that captures the democratic ethos of the clubs and a sense of a living tradition that is collective and embodied.

After a break and a chance to look at the exhibition, Sam Caroll introduces Ewan and explains how she engaged him to be part of the project sitting one night around the fire at a music festival. She held back from telling us more, saying simply ‘it is really something’. Ewan began with a digital recorder, explaining how it contains hours of talking, voices. He pressed ‘play’ and shared a short audio collage of fragments from interviews. The stage was bare and well lit, with functional chairs stacked and a pint sat on a barrel – looking like any folk club. As Ewan begins we understand that his testimonies include members of the audience who we have recently listened to sing and reminisce. We recognise the cadence of their talk and their preoccupations. We find out more about how the skiffle movement began, how its roots in black American music were obscured and how folk in the 1950s forged a bridge with blues and calypso that could be crossed in both directions. Music was made on stage from a box, a broom and a string. Rhythms were danced on a wooden board taking us back to the clubs but also to the many times and places where popular song and dance were practised by ordinary people as a way of connecting with each other.

Women’s voices were also conjured, communicating a sense of the gender regime of the scene, as well as their passions for research, community and the emotional currents of song. We spent time reflecting on battles over ‘tradition’ and why certain clubs developed rules that encouraged a focus on material from the British Isles and a focus on songs rather than singers or performances. The practical rules of the club scene (from bans on eating on stage, through the layout of the room, to the selling of raffle tickets) were given due attention as part of a concern with the mundane and the unnoticed. We heard about how ‘starry’ American musicians were taken aback and delighted when performing at Cecil Sharpe house by the quality of the chorus when the room sang back to them with rich harmonies. And we the audience echoed the experience by singing back the chorus then and there. As Ewan’s performance came to its climax the focus settled on the capacity of song to connect us over history and place. The interlocutors reflected on the liveness of the scene, and the aging of the participants. Rarely had recordings been made, and now people were beginning to die. We listened and joined in with a recording of a 100 year old man who himself was joining in with singers stretching back into time. There was not a dry eye in the house. 

The event and the project did not describe itself as ‘reanimating data’ but I recognised it as such. And understood that our attempts to reanimate can be seen as part of a tradition of oral performance and song where joining in, adapting, and making the material alive again involves a practice and a community – a bridge across which material and people can flow. Unevenly, awkwardly. The use of recorded material, verbatim theatre and audience participation together worked brilliantly and enabled so much more to be communicated that was simply on the page.

This link takes you to Ewan Warthrop’s performance at Cecil Sharpe House

https://vimeo.com/840443841

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Other archives

Rachel Thomson

One of the joys of this project has been to learn new skills. Having been trained as a sociologist I have a particular set of methodological skills.  Sociologists are good at producing data: this might be in the form of conducting and recording interviews, groups discussions, ethnographic field notes, questionnaire returns, creative projects with participants. We co-produce documents/ data. That is our starting point and then we use these documents as our evidence – often drawing strong boundaries around this body of evidence asking hard questions about what it represents, how it can or can’t be generalised as well as distinguishing this primary source of evidence from other secondary sources.

This is part of a wider story about the evolution of the social sciences, the emergence of the ‘sample’ as a device for generalisation that has been written about in interesting if controversial ways by Mike Savage (Identities & Social Change OUP 2010) and Peter Burke (Sociology & History, Routledge, 1980). But it is not the only story of sociology, as argued by Niamh Moore, Andrea Salter, Liz Stanley and Maria Tamboukou in The Archive Project  (Routledge 2017) – who trace an alternative sociological tradition that takes in life histories, oral history, genealogy and community archiving.

As a sociologist I have been responsible for making (or contributing) to a number of important data sets which have in turn been archived both at the UK data archive and in digital formats that make them available online: this includes the WRAP data set that is the focus of this project, but also the 15 year longitudinal Inventing Adulthoods data set that operated as a demonstrator project for the social science archiving and the Everyday Childhoods project literally ‘started with the archive’, inviting participants to make a public archive with researchers to be deposited within the Mass Observation Archive. But what I have never done before is work with an existing paper archive.

The rationale for the Reanimating Data project included a commitment to recontextualise the WRAP data set, in particular the 70 odd interviews generated in Manchester during 1988-9, conducted by myself and Sue Scott. One route back to this time was the field notes written by the researchers, the time sensitive references in the interviews (for example mentions of Gillick, the Rosie Barnes campaign to get rid of topless images of women on ‘page 3’ of tabloids and a health scare around the IUD ‘Dalkon Shield’).  Elsewhere on this blog I have written about the strange wormholes of memory that I found myself falling through when working with the original research documents, needing to place them into diachronic order as a starting point for triangulating my narrative memories with archival traces. I found myself needing supervision and guidance from a historian, how could I begin the process of connecting the WRAP archive with other sources that helped me escape the confines of my own biography and memory. Claire Langhamer, a critical friend of the project, suggested that I start with the local press, the Manchester Evening News and the weekly cultural round-up ‘City Life’.

Claire and I were interested in the relationship between sociology and history. I had invited her to be involved as a critical friend because of her doctoral work exploring women’s postwar leisure in the greater Manchester area, imagining her oral history interviews as capturing some of the intergenerational back-story of the lives of the WRAP  young women (Langhamer, Claire (1999) Manchester women and their leisure: changing experiences from youth to married adulthood, 1920-1960. Manchester Region History Review, XIII. pp. 32-42). But my approach to the archive was highly boundaried. I wanted to focus on the time period covered by the original fieldwork, to gain a sense of synchronicity – what was happening at the same time, possibly on the same day as an interview. This gave me boundaries (Claire said I was lucky to have this focus) as well as allowing me to take an inclusive approach – hoovering up depth and detail to contextualise the ‘moment’ of the original research.

I spent several days in Manchester’s central reference library pouring over the bound volumes of City Life for 1988 and 1989. My narrow focus on the two years meant that I did not need to ‘sample’ the volumes – for example focusing in one edition for each month – rather I immersed myself in the whole collection,  flicking through as one does with magazines – reading some articles, making copies of things that caught my eye, noticing connections and disconnects between the Manchester portrayed the magazine and the Manchester emerging from the interviews. My key ‘method’ in the archive was using my camera as an aide memoire, capturing snapshots to be made sense of later. Over the course of two visits I snapped 200 images, which I then catalogued and made into my own personal archive. What I collected was heterogeneous, but the guiding logic was material that expressed something of the sexual culture and politics of the city at that moment. This included:

  • small ads (I was interested for example in the new 0898 telephone lines being advertised for advice as well as sexual services),
  • personals (noticing how do people describe themselves and what are they looking for),
  • news stories (capturing activism around sexual violence, the closure of family planning clinics, activism around section 28, and the privatisation of public assets including worries about corruption),
  • event listings (a lively women-only feminist scene, concern with censorship, the eruption of house music, the arrival of ecstasy and the flourishing of a new service sector fuelled by cultural entrepreneurship),
  • reviews of books and films (the complicated politics of pleasure) and
  • opinion columns (the enduring nature of sexism and the reinvention of northern masculinities).

One of the most interesting sources were the cartoons that condensed and expressed this zeitgeist, speaking clearly to the middle class hip audience that made the magazine’s readership and which resonated with my identity thirty years ago as a 23 year old graduate student and researcher.  A series of cartoons by illustrator Martin Ridgewell were particularly generative, two of which are reproduced (badly) below. The first features a conversation between a young couple on a bus, talking about an old woman – amazed that the new language of body fluids and safer sexual practices would be foreign to her. For me this image captures the sense of change that was characteristic of the moment and the way that speaking explicitly about sex (as demanded by an activist public health response to HIV/AIDS ) became a marker of generational change that consolidated a range of assumptions about social class, religion and gender politics. The past (as embodied in the older working class northern woman concerned with respectability, speaking in euphemisms and shaped by demands of industrial capitalism) is pushed away as embarrassing and irrelevant. In doing so many assumptions are made about her and the past which are no doubt unfounded. Yet we hear echoes of this narrative in the interviews as young women distance themselves from the expectations and values of their mothers, recognising that as a generation they will need to forge lives of a very different kind. See for example Stacey (MAG12).

Cartoon by Martin Ridgewell, with permission of artist. Originally published in City Life 1989.

In the second cartoon we see a new mother – struggling to translate her progressive political commitments into a form of parenting, yet doing so alone at home suggesting that although ideas and identities may have changed continuities continue at the level of practice and the participation of men.[

Cartoon by Martin Ridgewell, with permission of artist. Originally published in City Life 1989. CPBF is the Campaign for Broadcasting Freedom, very active in Manchester at this time, holding weekly meetings and regular conferences.

It took me a while to understand the acronym CPBF, but looking at the listings helped me work out that The Campaign For Broadcasting Freedom was very active at this time holding regular meetings and conferences. In fact the whole question of censorship was a big deal to those who saw themselves as progressive. The Chief of Police in Greater Manchester (born again Christian James Anderton) had become infamous for his enthusiasm for eradicating pornography (including raiding an alternative record store and confiscating the 1984 album by the band Flux of Pink Indians ‘The Fucking Cunts Treat Us like Pricks). Section 28 of the local government bill which banned the promotion of homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationships’ was also a focus for activism and understood in terms of censorship. In his book on Good As You: 30 Years of Gay Britain, Mancunian journalist Paul Flynn comments; ‘It wasn’t just gay sex he [Anderton] disliked so much. He had built up a habit of police procedures that included raiding local sex shops, gay and straight, and swooping into newsagents to divest them of top-shelf materials.’ (2017: 77)

The vocabulary of the cartoon is also vintage late 1980s with the term ‘discourse’ capturing the turn to language that swept up academics and activists, focusing attention on the way in which it was and was not possible to talk about sex. Understanding heterosexuality as a language that privileges masculinity was at the heart of the feminist politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was published in 1990). We can hear something of this language in the interviews and the frustrations expressed by a group of self-consciously feminist young women, committed to social change but struggling to negotiate this within intimate relationships. Coming up against the problem of desire that continues to be calibrated to unreformed versions of masculinity [see for example Donna (NMC06), Hannah (ABC09), Simone (NMC12), Rebecca (THW50),  Amanda (MAG19).

Moving between the interview collection and the City Life archive has been valuable in many ways. It helped me pin down a chronology around important events. It also helped me think about the cultural currents of the city, the relationships between students and locals, the city centre, the neighbourhoods and the surrounding towns – what it might mean to go to different nightclubs, to travel, to be political. I also gained immediate access to the technological landscape of the times. The small ads gave me a visceral sense of face to face meeting, lots of clubbing, dangerous walks home, DIY publishing, landlines, walkmen and phone sex. It was a version of the city that made sense to me – I had been a reader of the magazine in 1988-9.

Another archive would tell a very different story of the city and may well connect with the interviews in distinctive ways. For example we have also worked  with the Feminist Webs archive which is held at the People’s History Museum and which consists of the pooled personal collections of feminist youth workers working in the northwest over this thirty year period and more. The collection is full of newsletters, posters and educational materials that would have been used by and with young women attending youth clubs in the city. Arguably these sources tell us more about the youth workers than the young people, in much the same way that City Life tells you more about me as the interviewer rather than the young women I was interviewing. Perhaps this is inevitable in that young women despite all being in Manchester in 1988-9, willing to be interviewed and aged 16-21, the WRAP interviewees are a wonderfully diverse group. And while they are shaped by place, that place is also incredibly heterogeneous, with the intersections of locality, religion/ ethnicity, social class and industry giving rise to micro cultures, which combined with family dynamics and personal agency presents through diverse biographical situations and projects. Understanding more about the cultural landscapes of the time is vital, but we also need to understand how and why particular cultural resources become important.

The cultural resources that were important to the young interviewees are not always the resources we might expect. In the interviews we hear about Jackie Collins novels rather than Just 17 and local pubs rather than city centre night clubs. Yet as Elizabeth Lovegrove shows us in her blog, there are ways of moving between cultural archives (such as magazines) and interviews that do not rely on direct relationships – but instead connects how it was (or wasn’t) possible to put sex into words (and images), defining certain kinds of problem and answers as featured in the popular problem pages of the magazines.

So what is the relationship between ‘our archive’ – the Women, Risk & Aids project collection and these ‘other archives’ that can be linked to, providing context. In an age of digital data it becomes possible to draw a range of digital sources together – presenting them as part of a time-line or a map. If the items are digitised we may be able to show and share them as part of our archive – but only if they are licensed in such a way that allows this. The WRAP materials are made available under a creative commons, educational, non-profit license which means they can be shared freely. The City Life archive is not digitised and in making copies of material I agreed to do so for personal use only. I have reproduced the cartoons above having had personal correspondence with Martin Ridgewell, who ironically does not have copies of the cartoons himself any more and asked me to send him my photographs.  The image from an 1989 edition of Cosmopolitan above is unauthorised and I may be asked to take it down. It is my own copy, but I do not have rights to reproduce it. I have included it here for educational purposes because it tells us a great deal: here we see the naming of a ‘problem’ in a new way, the relationships between a teacher and a pupil, something eventually criminalised by the 2003 Sexual Offences Act which codified such a relationship a breach of trust. We also see the 0898 number again – here as a monetised route to advice. British Telecom had been privatised in 1984 and by 1990 the problem of ‘0898’ numbers was being raised in parliament in relation to the circulation of ‘obscene material’ and fraudulent use of communications. Technology and intellectual property governance has a history, but it also shapes how we are able to show and tell our histories.