Rachel Thomson – Reanimating data

July 5, 2023July 28, 2023

The Reanimating Data manual – the what, when and how of the method

Archive materials can be understood very broadly: newspapers, photographs, letters, official documents; diaries, personal memorabilia. There are a wealth of archives where such materials can be accessed and these can form part of the methods explored {list of sources. The focus for this method is on archived social research, especially qualitative data in the form of interviews, ethnographic notes, focus groups, visual methods. There are a wealth of sources for this material as well as guides for secondary analysis.

Introduction: what do we mean by Reanimating Data?

In this manual we share the key components of a method that was forged in our ESRC funded project. The project enabled us both to create an archive from a 30 year old study (the WRAP) and to use these archived materials as a starting point for new research with a new generation of young people. The Reanimating method that we share here can be used with any archived data sources, but to better understand the approach and examples shared in this module we suggest that you watch a short explainer which introduces you to the archived Women, Risk and AIDS project and to the Reanimating Data approach.

The idea of reanimating data is linked to a number of key methodological developments – an archival turn in the social sciences where we are engaging in secondary analysis of archived sources; a turn towards creative methods and the co-production of meaning and an interest in time as a feature of research design, for example in helping us understand continuity and social change. In this blog we have done the work of locating the methodology within a wider literature. We encourage you to read this as part of the manual. Here we summarise the key points:

What? Re-animation as a term which captures the liveness of the original data and the possibilities of making this available to new audiences in new contexts to be animated in new ways.

Why? The archive as a shared boundary object with the potential for critical pedagogy. Time-binds are a way of connecting past-present-future and feeling history.

Who for? Working with an intergenerational tradition/community – feminist activist research. Playful approaches to working with data with wide range of contemporary audiences.

Making sure the method is safe.

You will probably be exploring this method on your own. However the method is ideally suited to collaborative and group work and it is important to think about how we can make safe spaces to work in. Moreover, the materials and examples we are using in this manual focus on a sensitive area, young people’s intimate relationships which can include non-consensual sexual experiences. So before we start we need you to be prepared for working with these materials and to think about what you might need to do when working with others using these kinds of approaches. Generally we work with a group to brainstorm ground rules before we start this kind of work. These are some we developed when delivering this training to a group.

Listen, support and encourage each other
Share the airwaves.
Everyone has the right to pass and to choose not to participate.
Only share data that you have permission to share both in the workshop and afterwards.

Time for a quick break, before we go on explore the 4 methodological strategies that together constitute the Reanimating Data approach.

Strategy 1: Reasking

One productive way into an archive can be through the questions asked (rather than the answers provided). Focusing on questions can tell us a great deal about how issues or problems were framed by researchers in other times and places. They can also prompt us to answer the questions posed for ourselves – giving us a way of connecting present and past.

A key motif of the Reanimating Data approach is playfulness. Facing pages and pages of transcribed materials can be overwhelming. Treating the archive playfully and focusing on questions is one way of making these material accessible to new audiences. Here you can see how Ester McGeeney sets us the task of working with archived interview data when working with a group of young women (The Women’s Theatre Society) at the University of Manchester. She throws the pages into the air and asks them to find questions that resonate with them.

Once chosen, the participants engaged with the questions as a starting point for discussion and creative exploration. In these two short films you can see how this group of young women questioned the approach of the original research, but also answered the questions anew from their own perspectives.

We can try this our ourselves –

This is a question taken from one of the WRAP interviews (LJH22)

Mm. When you were talking about the sort of physical closeness, I was wondering whether – I mean when you think of sex what do you think of,
what – what does sex mean to you?

Spend 2 minutes free writing your answer or reaction to the question.

The method also works well as a focus group activity. So first the group are invited to play with the data and cut our a question or two. Then sitting in a circle individuals are asked in turn to pose the question they had chosen to the person sitting on their left. Here we see Ester asking a question to Jo that she has extracted from the data and Jo answers as best she can.

Ester: [to Jo] Okay, right, but I mean, how about the idea…I mean, do you see yourself as a Christian and living by those rules or anything?
Jo: Wow, how interesting. No, but of course I did when I was young and suddenly all of this is really making her come back. No, I don’t and I think that in fact recently I did a thing where I sort of wrote out, I tried to remember a lot of the attitudes that were put into my head about what sex was and what it was for and what it was not for, and whether it was spoken or not, what was approved of or gained of through facial expressions, or what got switched on or off on the telly or all of those things. And a lot of it was kind of expressions of female sexuality that was joyous got switched off or turned down or, you know, disapproved of, and I feel like a lot of those things went into my bones as a young person…..And so I wrote out my own stuff now which was more about sex being about joy and about connection and about generosity of spirit between people. And being yours, you know, and not for someone else to tell you what it could be. So I’m going to say no, I don’t, thank you. (laughs)

So as a method, reasking questions from archived materials can be a generative method that

Provides prompts for focus group discussion and / or creative work.
A playful method.
Decentres the researcher.
Facilitates intergenerational conversations and reflections on social change.
Can give permission to explore less talked about areas.
A method that requires a safe and supportive environment.

Strategy 2: Collaging

A second approach to reanimating data is collaging. This involves working with data alongside other relevant archival sources as raw materials for creative work – including the creation of posters, fanzines and poems.

Data poems:

This is a methods that can be done face to face or online. Participants are given interview material and asked to take scissors to it and chop it up. They then arrange phrases on a page in order to create their own poem. When we did this activity in person we would bring along photocopied visual materials from others archives (for example magazines, adverts and ephemera from 1988-9) and these could form part of the creative work. The poems would then be a focus for conversation and discussion, with participants talking both about their responses to the source material and the story that they were telling for themselves.

We were also able to do a version of this method virtually using the black-out poetry maker tool https://blackoutpoetry.glitch.me/

Participants copy and paste an extract of data into the tool and then highlight words and phrases that resonate for them. The tool blocks out the rest of the words revealing a poem that can then be the starting point for discussion. This poem was created using an extract from a WRAP interview about tradition and gendered aspirations:

In the Reanimating data project participants often created collages juxtaposing 1989 and 2019, using a range of source materials. Again this creative work could then be the starting point for group discussion.

To find out more about how the Reanimating Data team worked with material from other archives you can read this blog written by Rachel Thomson. We also have a wealth of material linked to our work stored on a padlet for you to explore and to add to.

Strategy 3: Revoicing

The third method involves re-voicing the material, focusing on the answers rather than the questions. Inviting new participants to re-voice the words of others can be an interesting way of engaging them with the material and asking them to join you in collaborative analysis.

Choosing and then re-voicing the words of someone else can be a safe way of exploring issues. As we have seen it is possible to invite participants to experiment with how the material is performed, for example a story can be told as if it is a funny account. But is could also be told again in a very serious way. In order to experience this for yourself we invite you to work with the following data extract.

I went to an all girl’s school and my mum said’ ‘you do what you want’.
She didn’t say ‘well I think you should do this, and I think you should do that and I don’t want you to go to University because I think you will grow up and away from me’, and all this lot like one girl at college is having. Her mother is frightened that her daughter is going to grow up, whereas my Mum
said, ‘I wish you all the luck in the world’, because she didn’t achieve, so she’s not going to hold me back. She doesn’t force me to do anything I don’t want to do.
Interview with Leigh ss101

Try out delivering these lines in the following ways:

as if you were telling a joke
as if you were angry
as if you were saying it to someone you are very close to
as if you were a news broadcaster.

It may be that you get a sense that by exploring it in this way you are able to get deeper into the material, findings different kinds of meaning. This was the case when Ester worked with a group of young peer educators to reanimate her PhD research on young people’s accounts of good sex. Here you can see Carlos struggling to perform the words of interviewee Oscar.

The revoicing method allows research participants a safe way of telling their story through telling the story of someone else. In this short animation you can see how Emma reanimates an account that she found in the archive, a story that she is able to identify with.

Here Emma explains why she chose the extract that she did:
E: The first thing that interested me was the extract from the 80s with the women. And just like reading that and just seeing how like life is really similar to how it is now. I think that beforehand, I never really thought about it, but I think I thought it was different times obviously, I thought maybe that girls my age would have acted differently maybe and would have abided with the rules that they. Reading the extracts it was really similar, some girls were rebelling, like not getting on with their parents and all of that and that is still happening now. And I think that’s the thing that interested me.
And what she got out of of reanimating the story:
E: The way she spoke. It felt really modern, like the way that people speak now. And I found out that the girl was actually black girl. Yeah I think I was told, after reading it, that she was black after reading it. In my mind I was thinking ‘oh all the girls that were interviewed were like white, white British’. It didn’t cross my mind that they could be asian, black or other races. I think that’s why I chose that extract.
R: Is it possible to say why it’s important to you to choose a black girl?
E: I felt like…It’s like representing. Representation really matters. It’s like seeing myself, in every area of life. Seeing a person who looks like you, like coming from your background, is really important. Like having role models as well….And I didn’t realise that Manchester at that time was really diverse as well. I thought only recently maybe that people came from different countries. I really thought that it was just like white people.. it’s good to hear that [there have] always been a diverse communities in Manchester for a really long time and people grew up – like that other races – black people, asian people – they grew up and were born in Manchester from a long time ago and they created their own families. It’s nice to hear that.

So as a method revoicing

Creates opportunities for participants to analyse, interpret and comment on the data as a co-researcher.
Acts as an invitation to participants to tell new stories but without any pressure to do so.
Can provide participants with a sense of connection, solidarity and sense-making.
Decentres the researcher and can allow participants to lead the research agenda.

To find out more see our further reading list.

Strategy 4: Recollecting

The final method that we cover here is ‘recollecting’ – the idea that participants exposed to archived materials may be inspired to tell their own stories and to contribute their own material and that of others to archives in the making.

The invitation to contribute to an archive for the future could be something very simple and accessible. So for example, when sharing the WRAP materials we invited participants at to contribute their own stories and experiences anonymously to the archive –filling a pinata with messages for others, creating patchwork squares for a banner, and uploading feminist objects into the digital archive

Banner created by RAD participants and friends at our International Women’s Day event in Manchester

The most sustained example of re-collecting emerged from the Women’s Theatre project where the participants took inspiration from the stories in the archives, and through a creative process of workshopping, they created a performance in which they wove their own stories with those of the archive. Here you can see a student who you heard re-voicing material in the previous section, using these insights and experience to generate her own feminist analysis of sexuality and social change. [go to scene 12 mins in]

So what do we learn from Recollecting?

Gives participants permission and confidence to tell their own stories or to research the stories of others.
New stories emerge in conversation with old stories.
Participants contribute towards a collective storytelling project.
Can use a range of expressive art forms (including non-verbal)

If you would like to contribute something to the FAYS archive as a result of the work you have done while finding out about this method (be it a collage, a poem, a photograph of a feminist object), you can use the upload tool to contribute to
our research and the lessons you learn. https://reanimatingdata.co.uk

So finally…..

we leave you with some key questions to consider for yourself in exploring this method and considering if and how you might use it.

What source materials can you access
What could create meaningful time-binds for your work, connecting ‘data’ with ‘audiences’?
How might the different stakeholders think and feel about the ‘archive’? Boundary objects can be different things to different people.
Making safe spaces for the work. What does ’care-full risk’ involve?
What is the data? What/ whose is the analysis?

The Reanimating Data project involved a team of researchers: Ester McGeeney, Niamh Moore, Sharon Webb, Rosie Gahnstrom and Rachel Thomson. It was funded by the ESRC https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FR009538%2F1

Please cite the research when using the method.

Further resources (tbc)

June 8, 2022July 27, 2023

What do we mean by reanimating? Locating the methodology

Rachel Thomson

In this blog post Rachel Thomson locates our idea of ‘reanimating data’ within a wider methodological landscape and literature, twisting together three methodological threads: the vitality of data; an archival turn within the social sciences and creative approaches to working with time in the research process. The blog identifies the key components of a reanimating approach and points to further reading.

Data – dead and alive

One important element of contemporary social science methodological discussion concerns how we engage with what Adkins and Lury (2009) call a ‘post-empirical’ moment for sociology (see also McLure and others on a post qualitative moment) – that involves stepping away from separating the methods of documentation that we engage with and the data generate this data. This moment is informed by a number of different strands of thought including feminist methodologies which have critiqued the view from nowhere associated with modern scientific paradigms understanding knowledge as situated and agency as relational (for example Haraway 1988, Barad 2007); posthuman approaches associated with science and technologies studies such as John Law’s 2004 After Method which argues simply that methods produce the realities that they seek to understand; and the embrace of a reinvigorated relationship with these data that recognises their vitality and communicative possibilities as laid out for example in Back and Puwar’s manifesto for ‘Live methods’ (2012).

The motif of ‘liveness’ as opposed to deadness is a recurring theme in contemporary discussions of methods, denoting the need to remember that research itself is an embodied social practice involving relationships, feelings and collaborations. The motif of aliveness also connects us to the posthuman notion that agency may not be simply the preserve of people, but for example that documents, objects and data may have agency in their own right. For example Les Back’s account of ‘live sociology’ uses the dead / alive binary to counterpose intrusive empiricism, objectifying practices and zombie concepts with vitalities that transcend human/ objects as captured by new materialism. Dead sociology is objectifying, comfortable, disengaged and parochial. More recently, and in a similar vein Ellingson and Sotorin (2020) call for a sense of academic playfulness that has the capacity to inject new life into what might feel like tired methodological debates. Key motifs in their account include ‘livelineness’, ‘messiness’, ‘data on the move and on the make’, ‘becoming with data’ – which they oppose to notions of dead data and zombie methods.

This ‘re-enchantment’ of data also extends to discussions of data linkage and working with data archives. So, for example Lisa Blackman works with a notion of ‘haunted data’ as a way of exploring hybrid forms of aliveness and deadness made possible by digital methods and transmedia data linkage, suggesting that ‘It is through the connecting up of fragments across space and time that a new collective story-telling machine can and could take form’ (2019: 177). In a Maryanne Dever’s collection on new feminist archive methodologies, Marika Cifor uses the terms ‘animacy’ (‘a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveliness 2012:2) to argue for an understanding of archives as ‘vigorous and changeable’ rather than as ‘static, dusty, and the collectors of dead things and past times’… a space, set of practices, site of intervention’ (2019: 18).

In our approach we use the idea of reanimation – in recognition that there is and always was life in data but also, that in new encounters and entanglements with these materials new things can happen.

The data are out there – an archival turn for the social sciences

The idea that data may already be ‘out there’ and that our engagement with these data can be a site of creativity and novelty has taken some time to evolve within the social sciences and is shaped by the divisions between qualitative and quantitative paradigms that continue to structure the field. Within qualitative approaches there has been considerable resistance to practices of data archiving and re-use, despite official policy inciting these approaches with the deposit and sharing of data sets becoming a condition of public funding and the review of existing data sets a requirement for new proposals. Encouraged by investments in longitudinal qualitative research, the qualitative research community has engaged with what it might mean to work with documents generated by others considering what it might mean to assemble materials from different studies and rethinking the relationship between the original context of a study and the new moments and contexts when such data may be revisited (see for example Hughes et al. 2020). These discussions form part of a wider interest in temporal methods within sociology, that includes revisiting studies, longitudinal approaches and an engagement with archival sources as part of a historical sociology (McLeod & Thomson 2009 for overview). In an important intervention in the field ‘The Archive Project’ (2017) Niamh Moore explains that ‘social science struggles to imagine its own archive’ (149) and this includes ‘the sometimes fraught debate over archiving and (re)using data’ which has ‘compounded this ambivalent relationship’ with archives (149). Moreover, ‘archival research does not appear as one of the sites of innovation in the social sciences’ (149) – often more concerned with questions of access and confidentiality that the potential for knowledge and methodological renewal that they might promise.

Debates within sociology have felt removed from wider interdisciplinary discussions associated with an archival turn, which itself has been fuelled by new possibilities offered by digital methods including a democratisation of collecting and sharing associated with community and everyday archives (Bastian & Flinn 2019, Beer & Burrows 2013, Withers 2015, Eichhorn 2013). In fact, it is spaces where community and academic interests coincide that much of the new wave of interest in archives can be found, including exploring how the re-use of materials from the past might make sense in the present – for example in areas such as black archives; queer archives; feminist archives; and archives as a source of evidence in political struggles. Importantly, archives may operate as effective points of shared interest for different knowledge communities, what Moore (2016), drawing on the writings of Susan Leigh Star, characterises as a ‘boundary object’, shared yet understood in unique ways by different stakeholders, with academics brokering essential access to the resources necessary for preservation and findability for these resources. For DM Withers the feminist archive is our ‘already there’, ‘a field of inheritance’ that demands care and keeping alive ‘through practices of exchange across generations’ – in a way that recognises ‘psychic links between generations’ and the potential of a continuous transgenerational flow/imaginary that is concealed by metaphors of waves ( 20-21, 28). For Moore and colleagues, this kind of work demands a new ‘inventive ethic of care-full risk’ that is more responsive and less prescriptive than the kinds of approaches to ethical practice in social science that have become institutionalised.

We see our work as an intergeneration sociological endeavour, connecting feminist researcher-activists over time within a tradition which is porous and inclusive both in the past and the present.

Rewilding methods – unleashing creativity and unleashing time

The question of how we might engage with archived materials is perhaps one of the main stumbling blocks to social researchers interested in the re-use of the rich data sources that are available to them. Approaches range from large scale data mining approaches that connect data sets (Edwards et al 2021 to smaller scale (often place based) initiatives in which the specificity of data fragments operates as a starting point for engagement with new communities of interest (Lyon & Crow 2012, Moore et al 2022 forthcoming). Questions of how data might be matched across samples, or what it might mean to compare data from the past and present rattle the cage of social science methodologies still reliant on underpinning epistemologies of sampling.

In thinking through how we might work with archived materials we have turned to work in the field of queer temporalities, in particular Beth Freeman’s Time Binds which points to the potential or creative and imaginative methods for exploring thinking about the materiality of archival documents and the ways that they can connect past and present. The idea of the ‘time bind’ provides a way into a rich vein of creative methodology. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Freeman conceptualises the time bind as ‘achronic correspondences’ (2010: 126) connections between past and present that facilitate antinarrative leaps across time achronic correspondences’. Time binds involve mimetic connections with affective resonance – and when staged within meaningful intergenerational relations these can conjure a sense of ‘afterwardness’ – belated understanding, potential to relive a past she could not live at the time’. Although focused on the past such methods ask us to imagine the future ‘in terms of experiences that discourse has not yet caught up with, rather than as a legacy passed on between generations’ (84). For Freeman Time Binds are found in literary and cinematic works, in the form of homage, pastiche and other kinds of ‘temporal drag’. The perfect match imagined by the social sciences is not a focus, instead the impossibility of matching like with like is understood as generative through an embrace of anachronism – variously conceptualised as ‘habitus out of joint’ and ‘chronotopic disjunctiveness’ (6) that ‘unsituate viewers from the present tense they think they know.’ (61). Freeman seeks a ‘method of literally feeling the historical’ (93), focusing on allegory as a literary form that allows ‘the telling of an older story through a new one’, ‘suturing two times but leaving both visible’ (69).

The methods through which such encounters are possible are participatory and creative. Here we might point to Lyon and Carabelli’s work with contemporary youth on the Isle of Dogs, encountering the archives of Ray Pahl and the imagined futures of their predecessors (Lyon & Carabelli 2016). We might also take up Ellingston and Sorotins (2020) idea of ‘palpating data’ and ‘following data’s lead’ through the staging of data engagement or sense events. The evocation of time itself through an encounter with archival traces is something also suggested by Adkins in her discussion of archives as a site of speculative research. While such sources can attune us to ‘the pastness of data’ they also attune us to ‘the capacities of recorded data itself’, allowing ‘time to emerge as a key object of investigation’, ‘a form of time .. [that] is incomplete, not-yet known, and stands in a possible or not yet relationship to the future and the present it inhabits.’ (Adkins 2017:117). In a similar vein Kate Eichhorn suggests that archives can ‘produce a space to imagine an encounter that otherwise may have remained unimaginable’ (61), offering the idea of ‘archival proximity … the uncanny ability to occupy different temporalities and to occupy temporalities differently, thereby collapsing the rigidly defined generational and historical logics that continue to be used to make sense of feminist politics and theory’ (61). By inviting research participants and audiences to encounter, engage with, revoice and rework words, ideas and feeling captured in research encounters of the past we can open new spaces which allow something new to be experienced and articulated, in ways that escape the well-worn narratives generally available to us (McGeeney et al. 2018, Perrier & Withers 2016).

In our approach the idea of the time-bind – the meaningful connection between past and present is important, as is a playful and irreverent approach to ‘data’ enabling the opening of spaces through which authentic connections can be made, and through the ‘cover’ of this kind of temporal drag, new insights may be forged.

The What, How and Who of Reanimating Data

WHAT: Re-animation as a term which captures the liveness of the original data and the possibilities of making this available to new audiences in new contexts to be animated in new ways.

HOW: The archive as a shared boundary object with the potential for critical pedagogy. Time-binds as ways of feeling history and connect past-present-future

WHO: Working with an intergenerational tradition/community – feminist activist researchers. Playful approaches to working with data with contemporary audiences

References and further reading

Adkins, L. (2017) ‘Sociology’s archive: mass observation as a site of speculative research’, in A. Wilkie, M. Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (eds) Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures, Routledge.

Adkins L. & Lury C. Introduction: What Is the Empirical? European Journal of Social Theory. 2009;12(1):5-20.

Back, L. & Puwar, N. (2012) Live Methods, Wiley Blackwell/ The Sociological Review.

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina:Duke University Press.

Bastian, J., Flinn, A. (eds.) (2019) Community Archives, Community Spaces: Heritage, Memory and Identity , 2nd edition, Facet

Beer D. & Burrows R. (2013) Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data. Theory, Culture & Society. 30(4):47-71.

Blackman, L. (2019) Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science. London: Bloomsbury.

Crow, G. & Ellis, J. (eds) (2017) Revisiting Divisions of Labour: The Impacts and Legacies of a Modern Sociological Classic, Manchester University Press.

Dever, M. Ed (2019) Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research, Routledge

Edwards, R., Davidson, E., Jamieson, L. (2021) Theory and the breadth-and-depth method of analysing large amounts of qualitative data: a research note. Qual Quant 55,1275–128.

Eichhorn, K. (2013) The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ellingson, L. & Sotorin, P. (2020) Making Data in Qualitative Research: Engagements, Ethics & Entanglement. London: Routledge .

Freeman, Elizabeth (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives”, Feminist Studies 14: 575–599.

Hughes, K. & Tarrant, A. (eds) (2020) Qualitative Secondary Analysis, London: Sage.

Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, London: Routledge.

Lyon, D. and Crow, G. (2012) The challenges and opportunities of re-studying community on Sheppey: Young people’s imagined futures. Sociological Review. Blackwell, pp. 498-517

Lyon, D. and Carabelli, G. (2015) Researching Young People’s Orientations to the Future: The Methodological Challenges of Using Arts Practice. Qualitative Research. Sage, pp. 1-16.

McGeeney, E, Robinson, L, Thomson, R and Thurschwell, P (2018) The cover version: researching sexuality through ventriloquism. In: Boyce, P, Cornwall, A, Frith, H, Harvey, L, Yingying, H and Morris, C (eds.) Sex and Sexualities: Reflections on Methodology. Zed Publishing, pp150-172. McLeod, J. & Thomson, R. Researching Social Change: Qualitative Approaches, London: Sage.

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, vol 36. DO – 10.1080/08164649.2021.2018991-

Moore, N; Salter, A, Stanley, L and Tamboukou, M (2017) The Archive Project: Archival research in the Social Sciences. Routledge.

Moore, N., Thomson, R. & McGeeney, E. (2022 forthcoming) ‘Putting place back into the patriarchy through rematriating feminist research: the WRAP Project, feminist webs and reanimating data’ In J McLeod, K O’Connor, A McKernan (eds.), Temporality and Place in Educational Research (Routledge, forthcoming 2022).

Perrier, M. & Withers, D.M. (2016) An archival feminist pedagogy: unlearning and objects as affective knowledge companions, Continuum, 30:3, 355-366

Withers, D. M. (2015) Feminism, Digital Culture and Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage, Rowman & Littlefield