Posted on

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

Posted on

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/ . 

A black and white text Description automatically generated

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. 

A paper with writing on it Description automatically generated

A poster with a person and iron Description automatically generated

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.

A screenshot of a phone Description automatically generated

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.

A brown paper with black text Description automatically generated

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.

Posted on

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. 

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Reanimating data: A method for secondary analysis, historical enquiry, and participatory data collection

In collaboration with NCRM the Reanimating data team will be running an online methods workshop aimed at postgraduate students, early career researchers and anyone with an interest in creative and participatory methods.

The aim of the workshop is to explore data reanimation as a qualitative research method. The focus will be on creative, participatory and innovative ways of working with archived qualitative research materials for the purpose of secondary analysis, historical enquiry and / or data collection. During the workshop we will explore different theoretical and disciplinary traditions informing data reanimation and consider the ethical challenges and possibilities of reanimating qualitative data sets.

We discuss what data reanimation is and consider the benefits and affordances of using this method of enquiry. In particular we will consider how this approach 1) enables creativity, reflexivity, experimentation and innovation in research, 2) creates opportunities to engage non-specialist audiences and communities in collaborative secondary analysis, data collection and/or public engagement 3) engages critically with ideas around social change and continuity.

This is an active workshop that will invite participants to experiment with reanimating qualitative data using different methods. Participants will be encouraged to bring their own research materials with them where possible or work with archived data provided by the workshop facilitators. We will consider how to reanimate data ethically and with care and share examples of how this has been done in recent research and community projects.  

The course will run on zoom on 16th June 2022 10 – 4pm BST. For more information and to book go to:Reanimating data: secondary analysis, historical enquiry, & participatory data collection (ncrm.ac.uk)

Posted on

Ways into the archive

Rosie Gahnstrom

A collaged image with quotes from WRAP interviewees about virginity loss that captures something of growing up in London in 1989

The current moment, framed largely by Covid-19 and its many (necessary) restrictions, poses many difficulties for undergrad and Masters’ students who might have been thinking about conducting empirical fieldwork as part of their dissertations and are now left wondering what they might want to explore instead. In this blog I want to introduce a newly available digital archive of qualitative interviews, conducted with young women in London and Manchester in the late 1980s and to suggest that this might be a valuable resource for research students looking to carry out original feminist research. Now completely anonymised and easily accessed through our digital archive, these interviews, conducted as part of the Women, Risk and AIDS Project, have been relinquished from attics and floppy disks and are waiting to be revisited, reimagined and reanalysed through contemporary thought.

My own PhD project utilizes the WRAP data to (in a nutshell) interrogate how meanings of virginity have changed for young women and what this might be able to tell us about gendered sexual social change. ‘Virginity’ was the thing that really pulled me into the archive –the thing that ‘glowed’ (see Maggie MacLure’s work on The Wonder of Data for more on this).  My own narrative of ‘virginity loss’ was a defining moment in my first foray into feminist thinking about gender and power (though I didn’t realise that that’s what it was at that time) and there was something really powerful about seeing some of myself in the archive, within the folds and contradictions of these young women’s stories. What was really interesting was that it felt like it could have been me and my friends discussing our own sordid tales of virginity loss as teenagers in the late ‘noughties’ (it had to be before we turned 16) – nothing seemed to have changed much in the interim. Of course, taking place over 15 years earlier, the experiences of WRAP interviewees were totally different. The interviews needed to be situated in the particular time and place that they were conducted to get a sense of what sexual stories could be told in 1989 and what aspects of these might ‘stick’ across generations.

While traditionally framed through marriage and religion, the 1980s replaced traditional understandings of ‘virginity’ with new meanings of sexual knowledge, experience and pleasure. Brought into conversation with teen girl magazine problem pages from the late 80s, the WRAP interviews help provide a glimpse into the everyday of this new sexual culture and what it might have meant to grow up in a time more usually defined by Thatcherism, the AIDS crisis and widespread youth unemployment (Brooke, 2014). One particular quote from an interview with Danielle (aged 18-19, Caribbean, lower middle class, no religion), living in London, really captures how things were changing for some young women:

“‘I called him a chauvinist, I said, “you’re a chauvinist; you believe that when women have children they should give up work to look after them”. I said oh, I said, why can’t the man do that?  I said, why can’t you have an equal partnership where you both go out to work’… ‘Marriage is a piece of paper. I don’t wanna have kids till I’m about thirty-five. When you’re mature you can actually enjoy them a lot better rather than having them young.”

Danielle (LSFS32)

And on ‘virginity loss’ specifically:

“Q. Yeah. Cos sometimes, I mean like you were saying about that first relationship where … that you had when you were very young, that it included everything but not sex. You must have made some decisions there that it wasn’t going to include …
A. Yeah, I think we both did to a certain extent because we were both quite young schoolkids. It was just sort of an unspoken rule – you don’t go all the way.

Justine (LJH17)

While Justine (LJH17) doesn’t mention penetrative sex here – what we might typically think of as virginity loss – her acquisition of sexual experience without ‘going all the way’ points to new understandings of ‘what counts’ and what is allowed to be talked about, in comparison to earlier generations of women.

Through secondary analysis of the WRAP archive I aim to find out more about how these young women are able to talk about ‘virginity loss’. To locate these findings in their wider context, I’ve first gone back in time to the earlier part of the 20th century to understand how the changing relationship between love, sex and marriage allowed for the slightly more permissive society and sexual politics of the 80s. Teen girl magazines from 1989 are also undergoing some secondary analysis – the problem pages I’ve read so far, in Jackie, J17 and Mizz, don’t seem to have any qualms with their readers having sex – so long as it’s within the confines of a steady, stable relationship and framed by love, trust and good communication.  At some point this new look at old materials will be used to form participatory virtual workshops with young people today to try and gain a further sense of what ‘virginity loss’ might mean now, eventually (hopefully) culminating in some sort of online open access resource on using the WRAP interviews as a pedagogic tool.

While my research focuses primarily on themes of desire, respectability, femininity and social change, there are loads of ways into the archive and so many different questions you can ask it.I read each interview at least twice when preparing the dataset for digital publication and I’m sure if I read them all again now, I’d find something new to think about!

Exploring the relationship between location and sexuality would be a great place to start –  there are striking differences between the stories told by WRAP interviewees in London and in Manchester, despite the diversity of  young women that were interviewed in each place. Many in Manchester had totally different, more traditional aspirations than those living in the capital. This is highlighted even more by WRAP London interviewees who had moved to the city from somewhere more rural or Northern and reflect on their experiences of a more cosmopolitan lifestyle.

This word cloud shows you just *some* of the keywords that you can search in Figshare to pull up different interviews that might pique your interest:

You could, for instance, look at the different forms of contraception that young women were (or not) using and their experiences of these. There were many health-related fears around the contraceptive pill at this time, for example, and many WRAP interviewees used birth control to regulate their periods rather than to protect against pregnancy. Some accessed contraception through family planning clinics while others visit their GP. Sex education is another key feature of the interviews – how was it different to now, and where did these young women find alternative means of sex education outside of formal schooling? How did young women from typically othered cultural or religious backgrounds, usually here as second-generation migrants, navigate their own sexual subjectivity in late 1980’s UK? What were some of the cultural tensions and contradictions they were facing, and are these the same or different today?

Another way into the archive would be to strip back the interviews even further and think about where the WRAP study sits within a historiography of feminist sexualities research or girlhood studies. While the original project was a response to the AIDS/HIV crisis and widespread anxiety around the sexual health and safety of young people, there was other feminist work on ‘desire’ happening at the same time. Where does WRAP fit in with this? What methods were able to be used and which questions were able to be asked? ‘The Male in the Head’, a publication from the original WRAP research team that came out of the project, offers a way of thinking about how youth sexuality and identity was constructed at this time, and would be high up on my list of recommended reading for anyone interested in the study.

The Reanimating Data Project offers both tools and inspiration for using the interviews in participatory group work with young people, which could be easily adapted. You can go big, like Ester did with the Women’s Theatre Society at the University of Manchester, where she facilitated workshops using data from three of the WRAP interviews that resulted in an incredible, intergenerational performance. Emphasis in these workshops was to be messy with the data to see what might happen – from re-asking each other questions from these original interviews and using the data to write songs and powerful personal moments (for more on these methods check out Ester’s blog here. Niamh’s work with Sapphormation and subsequent work by Ali Ronan with a youth group at the Proud Trust demonstrate how generative just small chunks of interview can be. You can read Ali’s blog about this here.

Image from a Women’s Theatre Society RAD workshop

With previous experience of both youth work and conducting creative, participatory research on youth sexualities and sex education with young people, I’m a big fan of using these sorts of ideas to engage young people in critical thinking and discussions. There is a real sense of how useful these activities are, or could be, in helping to create the right sort of space for this research. And they might not work with your own group of young people – which, of course, provides useful and reflexive insight in itself.

I hope what I’ve managed to convey through this post is that there are a number of ways of using the WRAP interviews outside of the more traditional archival sense and I hope that others – from sociologists, to social historians to youth practitioners, and everyone in between – can utilise the value in these young women’s now-historical accounts. There are so many fascinating ways into the archive and so many interesting discussions that can come out of it. I was lucky enough to find my thing that ‘glows’ fairly early on, and I hope that someone else might find their own wonderous lightbulb moment in the WRAP archive, too. Let us know what you find and feel free to get in touch with any questions. You can follow us on Twitter at @ReanimatingData

Posted on

Working with questions

Ester McGeeney

Back in October 2019 I went to one of the Women’s Theatre Society’s Reanimating data workshops. The group were coming to the end of five weeks of workshops in which they had been exploring data from three of the WRAP interviews using movement, games, creative writing exercises, song, music, ephemera from the 1980s and lots and lots of discussion. The project was led by third year drama students Elena and Lae with different women invited to facilitate the workshops, of which there were two a week. The workshops were popular, with between 8 and 20 women coming each week and new participants continuing to join. The workshops were also productive, generating so much material and so many ideas that Elena and Lae decided to put back the performance by a few months to give them longer to work with the material.

This was the first (and only) workshop I went to. I was keen to observe the group and see how the young women were working with the data we had given them but the group soon put me to work. Elena asked me to talk to the group about the Reanimating data project and then run a workshop in any way that I wanted to. A few weeks previously I had been in Brighton to see the sound installation that has emerged from another one of the project experiments – What really counts? In this experiment Rachel Thomson and sound artist Alex Peverett had been working with fragments of original audio recordings collected as part of the Men Risk & AIDS Project (MRAP), a follow on study to the WRAP with interviews conducted by Janet Holland, Sue Sharpe and Tim Rhodes. In the experiment, as well as working with fragments of the original recordings, Rachel and Alex also worked with original MRAP interviewer Janet Holland, asking her to re-record some of the questions that she asked the young men 30 years ago. The final piece includes a combination of the new material re-voiced by Janet (and 2019 young person Issac Thomson) and the original poor quality recordings of Janet, the other other MRAP interviewers and some of the young men they were speaking to.

What stood out to me as I listened to the installation were the questions. Taken out of the context of the interview they sound blunt and obtrusive, making the sociological ‘sex’ research interview strange as you reflect on what it is possible to ask and say in this public/private space.

Listening to the installation I was also interested in the interplay between deliberate and random selection. Rachel had been through the MRAP data and coded it, carefully selecting questions to re-voice and material to include in the installation. But what the viewer hears at any time is selected at random by the algorithm that Alex created. There are chunks of data that come round cyclically but as a listener you are never sure what question or answer you might hear next and whether it will be Janet from 2019 that will speak or Janet from 1991.

Fresh from viewing this latest experiment I decided to play around with these ideas in the theatre workshop. I was interested in working with the questions from the Women Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) and playing with this tension between purposeful and random selection. We don’t have the audio from WRAP like we do from MRAP, but we do have the transcripts and had previously given the group three transcripts from the archive that had been very deliberately and purposively selected. All three interviews were with young women who, in 1989, were all drama students at the University of Manchester. We were interested in how drama students at the university thirty years later would engage with the material and its descriptions of sex, gender and the role of women in the ‘drama scene’.

I handed out print outs of the three interviews to the group. I asked them to throw the papers up in the air and then to mess them up, to mix them up, to stamp on them and scrunch them. I wanted them to know that they could be irreverent with the data – to mess with it and play with it. A month earlier when I had met with the society committee one of the young women told me that she had read all three interviews and felt overwhelmed by them. They were so rich. There was so much to say about them and so much material that she could use for the workshops she was going to deliver. Her feelings were very familiar to me. I frequently felt overwhelmed by the data set of over 60 interviews and often struggled to know which interviews and which extracts to use when working with other groups. Today I wanted to work in a different mode. I wanted to work with the data more randomly, more irreverently, more playfully.

Next I asked each person to select one or more sheets of paper at random and to chose questions that stood out to them and to cut them out. These could be questioned that interested them, or jarred them and they could discard the sheet they chose and select another if nothing stood out. As they cut them out they stuck them on coloured pieces of card.

Working in pairs the group had a go at re-asking each other the questions from their newly created interview-question-collages and then reflecting on how this felt. I’d asked them to keep the original pages from the transcription that they had cut their questions from and put them to one side. Once they had tried interviewing each other they compared their own responses to those of the original participants, captured on the cut-up transcripts.

The final task was to devise a short scene that captured their experiences of re-asking the questions and reflecting on the responses past and present. After some time for experimenting, devising and rehearsing the pairs and trio performed their scenes to the rest of the group. I recorded each of these, with consent, on my phone. [Available to view here]

There were six scenes in total, each capturing different themes. There was religion, faith, death and dying and hospital care; school sexual culture, gossip, slags and virginity; AIDS, changing attitudes and sex education; the mother-daughter relationships, periods and sexual learning; sexuality and relationships. Some of the scenes reflected on the research process itself, exposing the questions as blunt and strange tools, offensive and unusable when taken out of context. Other told personal stories, intergenerational stories or captured moments of discussion. The young women used words and silence, their bodies, chairs and bits of paper and other props. Some played with time – spinning it round, splicing it up, juxtaposing now and then, 1989 and 2019.

As a mini-collection then scenes seemed to me to show the range and the breadth or what the WRAP data (+ these women and their creative practice) can do and become – the conversations, stories and silences, as well as the reflection, thinking, performance and play.

  1. Are you Catholic?

This trio started their scene with one young woman asking another: are you Catholic? The question was abrupt and jarring but effective. Her respondent opened up, talking about her dad’s experiences of Irish Catholicism and telling a story about her Grandad’s funeral, in which the priest, who turned out to be her Grandad’s cousin, barely mentioned her Grandad at all. ‘My Grandad’s body is right there’ she said, ‘and no-one has mentioned him for like two hours’. As she was telling her story the other two group members used physical theatre to act her stories out. Then they switched and the same question was asked again. The new respondent told another intergenerational story about her families experience of being Christian scientists. She tells the story (whilst her co-performer acts it out) of her Grandmother being in a car accident and refusing to go to the hospital even though she was in ‘so much pain’. Her dad took her Grandmother there against her will. ‘I wish’ she said, ‘they didn’t have to think like that’.

2. Back to back

There’s no question in this scene. Just two young women sitting back to back on the floor, talking. It’s a snapshot of a discussion about their experiences of sexuality at school, naturalistically performed as if they are just talking to each other as two friends. School is a place where women’s sexuality and virginity are policed and gossiped about. There is always a ‘slag of the year’. Knowledge of who has done what is public and school seems to kettle the gossip and the cruel labels so that nothing can escape. It’s only once you leave school and come away to university that you don’t hear those words and those labels and sex doesn’t seem ‘naughty’ anymore.

3. AIDS? I mean I’ve not really heard of it before

In this scene there are two performers – one is 1989 and one is 2019. 1989 says – AIDS: I mean I’ve not really heard of it before. 2019 says – AIDS? Why shouldn’t it be included in sex education at school. Anyone can get AIDS. 1989 is shocked and appalled – ‘even heterosexuals?’. The scene is funny. The joke is on the past – for thinking that straight people can’t get AIDS and for thinking that if we teach children about AIDS, something terrible might happen.

4. A daunting task

In this scene the performers also sit back to back, but this isn’t a naturalistic, intimate discussion of shared experiences of school sexual culture. This is a highly stylised scene that captures the power and discomfort of sexuality research, highlighting how strange and inappropriate interview questions can be when taken out of context.

When I spoke to these two young women they said they found it unsettling to re-voice the questions and found themselves silent in response. They said the questions were obtrusive, invasive. Silencing. They capture this beautifully in their scene and shoe that when you decontextualize the interview questions they are stark, shocking and unanswerable.

In the scene the two young women are on chairs and take it in turn to read out the questions that they have cut out from the transcripts. When one asks, the other responds largely through body language. Head in hands, body turned away. Silence. An exasperated ‘yes!’. A long stare – of disbelief? And more silence. A shy look towards the floor. And more silence. A quiet – ‘I mean I guess so’. And finally, an abrupt leap out of the chair and cry of: I’m not answering that question.

5. Quite a closed question

This scene starts with one young woman holding up a piece of paper that says: 1989. The other two performers act out the start of an interview and the interviewer asks (reading from the original cut up transcript):  We are talking abouts sexuality and differences between men and women. I wanted to ask you do you think of your sexuality in terms of physical things like orgasm or in terms of emotional things like getting close or relationships?

The response also comes from the 1989 transcript. The young women tells us that it is  ‘difficult for me to say right now’.  She’s quite ‘career minded’ and doesn’t able to get into a relationship as she fears ‘it might hold me back’. For her a career and a relationship are incompatible.  

The first performer returns, this time silently holding up a piece of paper that says: 2019. The interviewer and interviewee have switched round this time but the question is the same. This time, the respondent speaks as herself, a young woman in 2019. Her response is quietly delivered, and moving:

I mean, I feel like it’s quite a closed question maybe? I mean. I don’t know. I feel like it’s only recently I’ve been properly confronting what my sexuality means to me and I feel like that binary thing that its either a physical sexual thing or its emotional I feel like women typically either being consigned to having no sexuality or just the emotional side of it is quite limiting and I think sexuality I’m trying to navigate having both and accepting both and it being my own.

This scene has played on my mind. I was struck by how much has changed since WRAP and since I was a teenager, when it felt like young women didn’t know they had a sexuality to confront or to understand. We barely knew that we had a choice about being straight, let alone that being straight (or gay or bi) could be done in so many different ways. We were navigating something, but I’m not sure we had the language, reflexivity or self-awareness to know that we were doing it.

Through this project I have come to understand that one of the features of WRAP that made it a landmark study is that it was able to name and denaturalise heterosexuality. This scene reflects on one of those moments in which the researcher is spelling out a feature of asymmetrical heterosexuality in which physical sex is for men and emotional relationships are for women. The respondent is living with this asymmetricity – choosing a career over a relationship, because women cannot have both. In 2019 this language and construction of sexuality is so limiting that the young women cannot relate to it. It is too ‘closed’ and they see a sexual future that offers much more for them. I’m relieved and grateful that these young women feel able to access a more expanded version of sexuality and also mindful of how much hard work it all seems.

6. Mum – what are these?

The question in this scene comes from a child, who asks her mum, ‘what are these?’, referring, we guess, to a box of condoms. There are three mini scenes here that tell us a condensed story about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The passing of time is marked by the daughter standing up and spinning round and telling us how much time has passed: 3 years later! 6 years later! They have a lovely and loving relationship. The mum, it seems, wants to deliver age appropriate sex education for her daughter but she is uncomfortable when her young daughter finds the box of ‘sweets’ and distracts her by offering Haribo. At 16 she tried to give her daughter ‘the sex talk’ but her daughter is cringing, barely able to listen, and at this point knows all about condoms from school based sex education anyway. When she starts her period at school, she calls her mum from the school toilets on her mobile and her mum reassures her and helps her out. Go to the reception she says, they will have something there.

7. It was like therapy.

There was one final pair who didn’t perform a scene. Instead they ‘played’ around with the questions and got talking. They found the questions productive and provocative. They had ‘a couple of rants’ and joked that ‘it was like therapy’. One of the pair remarked that reading the questions ‘makes you think about things that you wouldn’t normally think about on a daily basis’. In particular a question about ‘positivity’ seemed to resonate. Or rather –  the participants response. Whatever the question was she said something like:  ‘now that I think about it I was actually really sad but I didn’t realise it at the time’. This led the pair to talk about how women experience and manage their emotions and how this effects sexual relationships and friendships. ‘Its interesting’, one commented, ‘because as women…there’s a lot of pressure to put on a positive font but sometimes you need to take a moment and then you realise – oh actually I was kind of sad then but I didn’t let myself feel like that.’  

There wasn’t much time to discuss the scenes or reflect on the task as we’d taken up most of the three hours already. In the final part of the session the young women reflected on the work they had been doing over the past five weeks, writing down activities they had enjoyed and themes that stood out for them so that Elena and Lae could use these to plan the next stage of the project. I looked at these and saw that one young women had written that they had realised how ‘seeing how doing little is actually a lot in theatre’.

In this workshop I was struck by how little data was needed in order to do a lot in theatre. One line, one question, one comment could become a long discussion, an intergenerational story, a highly crafted silence, a joke. Watching the performance months later I saw some of the scenes from the questions workshop in the play, along with movement pieces, songs, group scenes and a series of beautiful monologues in which the young women told their own stories about love, sex, sexuality, relationships and their bodies. It felt like there was no end to what the WRAP data + these young women and their shared creative practice could do.

Previously in workshops with other groups we had struggled to select small amounts of data for groups to work with and had become burdened by the scale of the archive and the belief that we needed to have sound logic in our data selection. We had experimented with bringing along extracts to workshops, carefully selecting data that related to a theme we thought the group might be interested in or from interviews that seemed a good match in terms of age, religion or ethnicity. This was often clunky and what resonated with different women and different groups was surprising and of course unpredictable.

In this workshop data selection had been careful – a deliberate match between the young women and the data in terms of age, gender and occupation but the method had been playful. It allowed the group to work with small amounts of data and explore what the data could do now. The women worked in part in part randomly (chucking the data up in the air and picking up the sheet that fell close to them) and part deliberately and incisively selecting questions that jarred or connected with them.

At the end of the session in October I reflected to Elena what a special space they had created. I mused: It feels safe, participatory, inclusive. There are different women there, bringing different experiences. There is so much enthusiasm and appetite for the project – it feels like there really is the opportunity to experiment with the data and the archive as I had hoped we could. This – what’s happening in the workshops – is what I wanted to do in this project. I’m wondering why this has ‘worked’ and the others haven’t – at least not in the ways that I had hoped.

Importantly this experiment was the only one that was led entirely by young women. In the other projects I often felt uncomfortable, like we were taking over a classroom or youth group space that didn’t belong to us. In this experiment, everyone was in the room because they were interested or invested in the project. They also had a shared creative practice, unlike in other groups were the young women had a shared investment in their youth group perhaps, but not in a shared creative or artistic mode.

Reflecting on ‘what worked’ helps us pull out the learning for future projects but I also know that meeting Elena and Lae was a moment of luck and serendipity. As third years and women’s theatre society committee members they were perhaps looking for an opportunity for the society to do something different and they were also in a position to be able to make something like this happen – to craft the project, to bring together and nurture a large group of young women and craft the experimental work they were doing into a final performance.

You can view the final performance of Reanimating data here and read more about the teams reflections on the project here.

Posted on

Standing on shoulders

Rachel Thomson and Sue Scott

What does it mean to take data back to a community? When thinking through the return of the WRAP data to Manchester we had to think about whether any of the spaces or access points from the original research still existed or made sense. We quickly found that many of the youth centres we had visited in the 1980s had closed down and in some cases been demolished. One access point that did seem possible was the drama department at the University of Manchester. In the original study three interviewees were drama students at the University. These interviews captured a particular culture of sexuality – political, reflexive, cosmopolitan but also complicated in term of the sexual politics of the drama scene and expectations of intimacy and availability within the theatrical community. Read again against the elapsing thirty years these interviews seemed to be #METOO before the hashtag.

We approached the University drama department to see if there might be any young women who would be interested in revisiting these interviews today. What would it mean to do this? How much trouble might be involved in this digging up of the past? We were keen to share the anonymised material but also concerned that these accounts would be treated with respect and care. It felt very complicated, yet the possibility of working with contemporary drama students, engaging with verbatim theatre practices and utilising performance as a mode for opening the material up for exploration was an exciting possibility.

Through the help of Alison Jeffers we found the Women’s Theatre Society at the University of Manchester- a student society lead by Lae and Elena, two final year drama students who had recently taken over the leadership of a safe space where female students can engage in performance. Elena and Lae were very open to our invitation and ran with the project – workshoping the material, inviting researchers to join them for questioning abut the original context and engaging themselves in short interviews with original researchers. On Saturday 15 February they presented their final piece at the student union and were met with standing ovation.

Here are some reflections on the performance by the two original researchers who interviewed over 60 young women in Manchester 30 years ago. We hear first from Sue Scott and then Rachel Thomson.

Sue Scott

The weekend had been a bit of a rush and I arrived ‘just in time’ from a crowded train so had not really thought my way into the situation and wasn’t at all sure what to expect. It was delightful when Rachel and myself were greeted by enthusiastic and excited young women – the play’s directors, Elena and Lae.

I had a sense of being a ‘celebrity’ by virtue of being part of the original WRAP project  – very strange when it was all so long ago, but as they made clear in the Q and A they wouldn’t have done it without WRAP and they had clearly got so much out of it that whatever else happens to the play it has played an important part in their student experience.

Such a lot of them on stage – and so colourful – it gave a sense of the best sort of ‘Girl’s Group’ turned theatre. I’m sure that for some of them the confidence was hard won, but they inhabited it, at least for the period of the play. The way that they developed and interwove the stories from the interviews with there own was very well done, if a bit of a whirlwind experience at times. They were brave in what they said – not just because they were saying it in public, but also because they had already said it to themselves and each other and carried on. Yes sex is discussed everywhere, but yet it isn’t. 

The continuities and commonalities were striking and yet the drama students who Rachel interviewed in 1989 probably couldn’t have done this, so something has shifted. The students demonstrated wonderfully some of the many and various ways of being a young woman in relation to their sexuality and their presentation of gender in a way that might have been easier in 1979 than in 1989 – but of course only for a minority and in a safe feminist context.

It struck me so forcibly that the young women of the WRAP data would now be old enough to be these young women’s mothers – older perhaps than some of their mothers. It was clear in the Q and A that this was not lost on them, but there was no time to ask them if they discussed the play and the WRAP project with their Mother’s or Aunts – I would love to know. The ‘imaginary’ interview with one of their mother’s was powerful.

It could have been depressing as many of the negative aspects of sex and relationships for young women were clearly portrayed but they had their appropriate place and not to the exclusion of some positives and also ‘ordinary’ and ’mundane’ experiences being recounted, of which there were many in the WRAP data, but perhaps we didn’t take enough note at the time…

I was struck by the dynamic of the interviews – very odd to hear Rachel giving voice to her younger self! And the way the young women took this as a starting point to – as Rachel put it – then ‘interview themselves’. It definitely made me think about different ways of accessing data and stories.I think the theme that I came away with though was ‘friendship’– or at lease comradeship – and in the young women’s stories and my thoughts about not having explored this sufficiently in the original project. I now want to read the transcripts of the interviews they drew on.

It’s also important to think about what the theatre society can do with this now – all the hard work should have more of an airing and it would be great to share it with other young women.

Rachel Thomson

 There is much to be said about the performance, but the point I want to note here is how it was so very different to what I had originally anticipated and how this difference gives us both insight into the way that social change is lived and hope for the future of gender equality and sexual revolution.

When working with the material, what the young women in the theatre society notice and are moved by are the interview encounters themselves: the communication that took place between a young women (much like them) and a researcher (not much older). The interview questions were bold, much bolder than would be possible or acceptable today (when was your first sexual experience, did you enjoy it, how did you know…).  They found the questions problematic and part of the performance shows their irritation. But they also noted that the space that the WRAP young women took in these interviews was remarkable – speaking with an honestly and openness that was transformative. Not simply in the moment, but again and again as the material is performed and reanimated. The young women in the Women’s Theatre Society wanted to do justice to the realness of the young women’s accounts. In doing so they created their own monologues, effectively interviewing themselves but in the context of solidarity from others – both in the present and in the past.

Witnessing the performance was an extraordinary experience for me: understanding that a form of evolution has taken place, but that it demanded an engagement with a tradition of speaking out together about sex. The young women’s monologues did not start from scratch, they began from where the interviews in the WRAP archive left off and they honour the form of talk and communication that marks the highpoint of those conversations. Some of the monologues deliberately used the interview as a form. For example Savannah’s piece was an imaginary interview with her mother that allowed her to step into her mother’s shoes and to speak about a vivid experience of gay pride in Ghana and Black Gay pride in London – luxuriating in the beauty and freedom of her daughters.

As an original interviewer who has now spent much time revisiting the conversations that took place thirty years ago I am very sensitive to the plasticity of our subject positions: I am me now (a mother), and me then (a daughter). I am the interviewer and yet the interviews tell my story as well as the women I spoke with. It was this fluidity, possibility and pride that I heard most clearly in the performance. Yes, there were and are things that don’t change. Sex and power still combine in cruel ways and new generations of young women appear to have to learn things again painfully. Yet it is also possible to stand on each others’ shoulders, to share knowledge and build possibility. When this happens we are very powerful.

Watch the live performance of The Reanimating Project.
Posted on

Too much?

Rachel Thomson

The idea of working with a group of drama students came about when re-encountering the original data set and finding and remembering an interview (MAG50) with a young woman studying drama at Manchester University. MAG50 was eager to talk about her own complicated emotional life as well as the ‘false and forced intimacy’ of the drama scene.  She shared stories of non consensual sex as well as intense relationships with powerful older men. She also articulated her understanding of the sexual politics of the theatre industry where women may need to be sexually available in order to get work.

Reading this interview in a new historical moment framed by the #metoo movement and  the exposure of predatory men within the entertainment and creative industries encouraged me to take this material to todays drama students at Manchester University. I wanted to find out if they would be interested in the material and in collaborating in a project of reanimation that would help us think about social change and continuity. We began by making contact with Alison Jeffers in the drama dept at MU who put us in contact with Elena and Lea – two third year students who had recently taken over the stewardship of the Women’s Theatre Society – a student led theatre society for women.

The work began. We shared two further transcripts with the group – both interviews with young women who were drama students at UM in 1989.  After 6 weeks of workshopping the material I was able to join them.

Before leaving for Manchester I gathered some memorabilia to take with me – objects from my life at the time the research was done; an old diary, photographs and a copy of my handwritten Masters dissertation on Women and AIDS, which lead to me being part of the WRAP project. I also read MAG50 again on my way to Manchester as well as reading my dissertation. Through these objects I tried to remember my 23 year old self. When I met the young women that evening they jumped, as if they had seen a ghost. I understood that they had got to know a version of me in the interviews and that meeting the 53 year old me was strange for them. I tried to explain that it was strange for me too.

I shared my memorabilia and to began a Q&A session that lasted over an hour where we did the work of weaving feminist webs between our shared relationship with this interview and our shared co-presence, uncannily in the very building where the original research had taken place. There were a number of moments in this conversation when connections were made between the old me and the new me, between the young women and MAG50, between 1988 and 2019 in that building. I felt like we were doing a collaborative analysis.

Making sense of the boldness of the sexual discourse.

A burning question for the group was how it was possible for the original conversation to have taken place. It was so bold, intimate, open. At first I thought that they were telling me that from their perspective the research was unethical, that the questions too direct, transgressive. But over the discussion I began to understand that they were curious about how such a discourse became possible. They wanted to know about the staging of the interview and the lead up to the conversation (did they know what would be asked?) and about whether I had supervision to prepare me for the ‘heaviness’ of the discussion. It became evident that having a conversation like this now would be very difficult, constrained by concerns about safeguarding, consent and triggering. But rather than chastising me for bad practice I discovered that the young women were eager to re-enact this way of talking.

Rachel: I think that’s really interesting because I think now we would see a study like this through the prism of mental health and it absolutely wasn’t how we looked at it. So, we would now … I don’t know, tell me what you think, I think we would think about triggers things like that, is it triggering? Could you ask that because that might…? Whereas in a way this was the stuff that happened before that whole way of looking at  the  world  came  about,  this  was  much  more  political  I  think  in  a  straightforward way, well nothing is straightforward is it? But it was much more about trying to say, “That’s not fair.” Or, “Put that into words; what words does that…?” Because we didn’t really have any vocabulary to talk about sex, people didn’t know what to call bits of their body, they didn’t know how to name power, and I say ‘they’ I would speak of myself as well, you know, like we didn’t really have a vocabulary to describe any of these things so it was the basic work.

Together we worked out the relationships between now (2019) and a time (1989) where speaking out about sex and about power was a project of making the personal political, naming the unnamed and developing a new vocabulary. As threads connected the two moments in time the young women articulated that this formed a necessary foundation for a future culture that is saturated in the knowledge of sexual violence. Yet we also mused that something had been lost in the reframing of sex from a political to a more psychological register. We realised that there is a complicated new kind of silencing that reigns in the young women’s worlds in which sex is both seen as casual and no big deal, as well as too much trouble, too difficult and too important.

#metoo

At the end of the session I asked them about the #metoo movement and about the sexual politics of the drama world and the entertainment industry. Again the young women told a story of unevenness and contradiction. In many ways things are better for young women – there are pockets of feminist practice and areas of the business dominated by women (documentary film was given as an example). Yet elsewhere in the industry things are worse then they have ever been, with market forces determining what it valued and valuable. An actress still has to rely on her body and her youth. It is not sexism as such that is to blame, but the laws of the industry and the preferences of the audience. We talked about women withdrawing from exposed patriarchal spaces, deciding that it is just ‘too much’ and not worth it. I began to understand what they were trying to tell me about contemporary sexuality and to grasp how what came before is part of what is now in a way that escapes the linear narratives of progress and decline that stand in the way of generational connection.

Urgent mini interviews

The evening culminated in an urgent series of mini interviews, with young women choosing fragments from one of the three interviews to revoice and discuss or simply asking me to ask them questions like I had asked the WRAP young women. The interviews were double documented – I recorded them as ‘data’ for our reanimating project and Elena recorded them as useful material that the group might use for devising a performance.

I learned a lot from these conversations: that it was still hard to be a virgin; that it was hard to find a ‘middle ground’; that the protection of men and families is vital for many people still; that loving oneself can be harder than loving someone else. It was an overwhelming and moving experience that I am in the midst still of understanding.  These re-enactments were the frenzied culmination of a long slow process of engagement which I would like to think of as a single method spread out in time and space and certainly a kind of co-production that we both documented and made our own.

Watching the performance several months later I could see how strands of our conversations in the workshop had been worked with creatively and brought to life through performance. Although the performance did contain extracts from the three interviews, reperformed by the young women, the focus was on the 2019 young women’s stories. In the discussion after the show the young women told us that engaging with the material gave them permission and a desire to tell their own stories and to think that someone out there might be interested in listening.

Watch the live performance of The Reanimating Project.