One of the young women who took part in this project was Sophia Rosen-Fouladi. For Sophia, taking part in the reanimating data project was personally and professionally transformative, offering her the opportunity to talk about topics that she rarely had the opportunity to explore.
‘The Reanimating Data Project helps encourage discussions that are so open and encouraging for young women to see they aren’t alone in their circumstances….Sophia’s involvement in [the reanimating data workshops] has gone on to define parts of her career as well as her own confidence in her personal life. She was struck by how little she had previously talked about sex and sexual experiences before the workshops. The workshops offered her a space to learn, grow and discover tools that have improved her personal relationships and her confidence as an adult in many aspects of her life.‘
Several years later, Sophia dreamed up the idea of recreating similar kinds of creative and transformative spaces for others. Together with friend and fellow creative Ottilie Nye, Sophia founded Sexy Pigeons – A sex positive collective hosting workshops for women and non binary people in London. Sexy Pigeons first venture has been to develop the Cum on Down workshop series – imagined as a series of playful, creative spaces where women and non-binary people could come together to be creative, find new communities, build confidence and learn together about sex and sexuality.
Cum on Down!
Between April 2024 and January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons hosted 5 creative workshops in London. You can read about each of them in their own words on the Sexy Pigeons website.
Workshop one: The start of something special…
In April 2024, Sophia and Ottilie facilitated their first workshop with 15 women and non-binary people at the Albany Theatre in Deptford, South London. The focus of the workshop was VIRGINITY, which was explored using a mix of silly games and energisers, focussed discussions, mind maps, exploring WRAP data extracts, creative exercises and zine making.
This was an opportunity ‘to experiment with ideas. To try things out, be bold, and see what sticks’. You can read more about this workshop here in Sexy Pigeon’s own words: Focus Group: Virginity.
Workshop 2: The Sex Education System
A few months later, and now with a little financial support from the University of Sussex, Sexy Pigeons hosted their second workshop: The Sex Education System. Located at the Music Rooms in New Cross, South London this workshop also featured ice breakers, focussed discussions, zine making and creative world building exercises – this time in the form of acrostic poems. The struggle for this workshop was recruiting participants. The event was open to all and marketed online but Sexy Pigeons were disheartened by the small numbers of sign ups. In the end seven participants turned up and took part in what ended up being an intimate workshop with time and space for everyone to explore and express their thoughts and ideas.
We were inspired by the idea of the anonymous question box you might have at the end of a sex ed class, and encouraged participants to write down as many questions they could think of, either that they wished would have been answered during their time at school, or that would be beneficial to someone going through school right now. We then turned a question each into an acrostic poem. We had ‘discharge’ ‘contraception’ and ‘masturbate’ [and] the Ten ‘Cum’andments was a highlight of this workshop. 10 self love and educational points to wholeheartedly stick to. And of course we were proud of the name! (Sexy Pigeons 2024)
In November 2024, Sexy Pigeons hosted their third creative workshop in the Palmer studio at Hoxton Hall in East London. This time, the workshop took on a different structure using different creative exercises to gradually construct a timeline that hung across the workshop space. We had a solo participant turn up, however ended up being able to try out material in a really personal and honest way. We had some really cathartic moments reading out free writing material we’d written to our past selves, and got to know the women from the archive in greater depth.
By the end we had a huge variety of materials hanging on the timeline: questions, segments from the interviews, data poems and free writing to name a few. Circling back to the idea that multiple times are existing at once, we wanted to round the workshop off by making personal time capsules. Participants were allowed to deconstruct the timeline however they wished and add material to their time capsules. We focussed on the ‘message in a bottle’ idea using glass bottles which could be filled up and decorated on the outside. (Sexy Pigeons, 2024)
When developing the RAD project the project team were inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s work on queer time. Freeman talks about the need to make visible the ‘imperfect sutures between past and present’ (p.111). Freeman highlights the example of artist and film-maker Elizabeth Subrin’s work, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands’. Here, Subrin shows two reels of silent footage of the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, taken nearly a decade apart, and sutured together. The first is taken in the weeks following the New York September 11th attacks and the second nearly a decade later. In suturing two times together like this, Freeman argues, we can see the anachronisms at play. This is how we can ‘‘unsituate viewers from the present tense they think they know, and to illuminate or even prophetically ignite possible futures in light of powerful historical moments’. (Freeman, 2010).
In this workshop, the Sexy Pigeons take up these themes, playing creatively with time and making spaces to make multiple times present.
‘What makes the concept of Reanimating Data so exciting for us is the idea of multiple timelines being in conversation with one another. By exploring a selection of interviews from the WRAP Project Archive we are reanimating these words within the context of the present day and giving them a liveness upon which to create new work and initiate new discussions.’ (Sexy pigeons, 2024)
On the 25th January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons facilitated their 4th and 5th workshops at the Palmer Studio at Hoxton Hall – ‘experimenting with structure and pace through trialling two hour-long workshops this time round.’ The groups – each with 10-12 participants – worked with extracts from the Women Risk and AIDS Project archive, creating body maps and discussing the homophobia and biphobia that surfaces in the interview and talking about the politics of sex education, before finishing up with a letter-writing exercise. You can read all about these workshops here: The Past, Present and Future
‘We wanted to round off the workshops with a letter-writing exercise to bring in an element of the future, looking towards a brighter future of sex education, and our relationships with our sexual identities. We love the wind-down/reflective time this gives participants to chat with us and amongst each other about any topics explored in the workshop, as well as promoting individual creativity. We encouraged participants to write a letter to their future selves, with the aim of opening it in 2 hours/days/weeks even years!!! We wanted to draw an invisible thread between the women from the interviews in the 1980s, the participants in our workshop in 2025, and whoever those participants may become in the future, to span decades of sex education. It brought a lighter feel to the end of the workshops after some fairly heavy content, and brought an atmosphere of peacefulness into the space.’
New directions…
After 10 months of experimenting with the structure and length of the workshops, trialling different venues, materials, activities and ways of advertising and recruiting participants, the sexy pigeons decided to try some new directions… more coming on their interactive exhibition and reanimating data filming day soon!
This seems to have been the question of my week. On Sunday I went to the launch of a new project/ archive/ website called HOWL – the History of Women’s Liberation. The main aim of HOWL is to collect and publish the memories and stories of feminists involved in any of the many layers of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement. In contrast to the more ‘elite’ projects such as the British Library oral history collection – this is a user driven crowd sourcing project as older feminists are invited to click and communicate by adding their own stories. In the words of the organisers:
Let the rich, united, divided, contradictory, joyful, difficult, amazing, ordinary and banal years of the WLM be recorded in our own words. This is our story. Our history.
A favourite of mine shared at the launch was this memory from Wendy Knight – giving her personal version of the feminist slogan ‘ it starts with you sinking into his arms and end with your arms in his sink’. So this is a collection of activist voices for activists. It spreads its web wide and seeks to be inclusive – perhaps ‘more inclusive’ than other projects. But you need to be connected in order to contribute your story.
Also this week I reviewed a book – which was made from the testimonies of women who were teenagers between 1950-80 – so probably the same generation of women involved in the HOWL project. The voices in Hannah Charnock’s book Teenage Intimacies young women, sex and social life in England 1950-80 were sourced from panellists of the Mass Observation Archive responding to a series of relevant directives and a group of women in the Exeter area who agreed to take part in oral history interviews. Charnock is keen to emphasise the everyday nature of teenage lives rather than the spectacular rebellions – the ordinary subterfuges and recalibrations of sexual mores that made a ‘quiet revolution’ in intimacies that for example saw illegitimacy lose its meaning and power as social censure. These young women were not activists, but they did want more for themselves in terms of happiness, pleasure and fulfilment than what they saw in their parents example. And their parents knew enough to turn a blind eye and hope that daughters avoided the mistakes that blighted their own lives. Silence, awkwardness and learning by doing is the motif of this book.
And thirdly, I spent a very happy morning in a group of women convened by textile artist Vanessa Marr in order to create my own duster-art using visual material from the 1950s gathered in the Brighton art school archive. Our group of middle aged women searched through idealised images of house work, kitchens and domestic technology imagined by advertisers for a new kind of female consumer. Our task was to cut and stitch onto dusters to create collages that both animated the archive and created connections between past and present. In the group we joked about the material, about our own favourite recipes, reclaiming the rooms of children leaving home – whether a tall or short plumber was to be preferred. We touched on parenting and questions of domestic labour. As we chose material we also chose narratives, stories we might tell. I started by focusing on the men/ husband who seemed to frame the elegant domestic goddesses in the advertisements. There was something nasty in their sharp suits and postures. I was thinking of Mad Men and Alfred Hitchcock – misogynist men and captured wives. But as my collage took shape I saw my men as floating as they do in the opening titles of Madmen. The absence of their women literally unhinged these bodies. We began to joke about our men as captives themselves, admitting that for two of us at least it is the men in our lives that do the lion’s share of the house-work while we pursue careers in the public sphere.
So, the moral of the stories? That we need to be able to move between loud sources that capture and portray images that powerfully shape narratives and quiet sources – which may in fact be almost silent, but which include a reworking and recalibration of the everyday while avoid the spectacular. That in order to get to these more complicated places we need to work with and through sources, they do not reveal themselves immediately – not even to ourselves.
A blog by doctoral researcher Martha Nicholson on using reanimating data methods to co-produce policy recommendations with health professionals in Northern Ireland.
Co-producing knowledge is often proposed as way to ‘build bridges’ and establish equitable partnerships between academic institutions and research participants in the health system. But how might the co-production of knowledge and policy-relevant recommendations with health professionals work in practice?
In this blog, I present the creative co-production process I used to facilitate a safe and reflective space for nurses and midwives to discuss the issues around abortion care that were raised in my PhD research. Based on the interview data I collected, participants and I generated recommendations for how policy and practice can improve health professional’s knowledge on abortion care in Northern Ireland, and in turn make the health system a safer and more compassionate place to seek abortion care. These insights may provide useful inspiration for other researchers considering involving health professionals in the analysis of data on a stigmatised research topic.
What did the co-production process aim to achieve?
I used co-production sessions with five participants with the aim to 1) allow them to co-own the interview data collected in my PhD project, 2) to co-generate recommendations, and 3) create a safe space to talk about the topic of my interview data – abortion service delivery in Northern Ireland. Three midwives attended a group session, and two nurses joined one-on-one sessions (scheduling challenges!).
Step 1: Warming up with ‘a line of discovery’
Sessions started off by making commitments to 1) protect confidentiality, 2) respect each other, 3) and to support each other emotionally if needed. I then adapted an Alliance for Choice creative workshop activity and invited participants to write a chronology of their interactions with abortion along “a line of discovery”. We reflected on: “what started the conversation?”, “what feelings did they associate abortion with?”. This helped participants to start writing, thinking, reflecting, and to share their experiences. It laid the groundwork for the following activities by allowing us to let go of the formality of our professional identities.
Step 2: Reanimating data using blackout poetry
Archivists, activists, and academics have used techniques to “reanimate data” to explore change and continuities in intimate lives over time. Blackout poetry is used in the social sciences to generate a deeper connection with material, reveal the ghosts in a narrative and hold a mirror up to our analyses. It can also help researchers to reflect on their emotions when engaging with their research I used blackout poetry in this workshop to give participants a tool to engage with the research data, and to explore how my gaze on the study data may differ to theirs.
To do this, I distributed quotes from my interview data that highlighted tensions between localised and authorised forms of knowledge. I invited participants to work with creative materials (card, pens, scissors, tape, and glue) to rehash the quotes, reveal a hidden story, using words that “glow” and resonate with them. They enjoyed the task, taking their time to pass around the quotes, consider the ones that meant something to them and explore ways of using the creative materials. One participant summarised the feeling in the room: “I never thought I’d be sitting here writing poetry about abortion, but here I am.” They accompanied their creative work with a title, note on what the poem is telling us and what needs to change. They also included annotations, doodles, and drawings, working with the materials they had to hand.
The participants’ work engaged with themes in the data: the urgency of time in abortion care, intersectionality of abortion restrictions, and poor resourcing of abortion care in Northern Ireland. They chose to work with testimonies that came up in the interview data about the de-prioritization of abortion care in hospitals, the injustice of the pre-2019 abortion ban, and the dominance of men in decision making about women’s health care. An excerpt from one participant’s poem entitled “Multifaceted” read:
We feel that we have to play down the bit about abortion.
You felt you had to play it down,
a wee bit.
And you kind of feel,
A wee bit of shame.
Just to keep the peace,
and not to have any confrontation with anybody.
Step 3: Generating recommendations for policy and practice
Together we watched a short video by the Array collective – an art collective in Belfast who use art and collective action to respond to sociopolitical issues affecting Northern Ireland. I wanted to show what art can do.
Building on these activities and discussions, participants noted down recommendations for how policy and practice could improve health professionals’ knowledge on abortion care. We read the recommendations and clustered them into broad themes. For example, several recommendations emerged for developing care pathways for marginalised people, protecting spaces for abortion care providers, and introducing mandatory training on abortion for multi-professional groups.
Discussion and conclusion
The workshop created a safe space for participants to share their experiences of abortion care in their personal and professional lives. The reanimating data exercise gave them tools to explore hidden messages in the quotes, examine their experiences in relation to the quote, and allowed me to explore my own assumptions about the standpoints of the participants. I took this opportunity to reflect on my role as a researcher, learner, and advocate for abortion care. The recommendations that we arrived at proposed practical, structural, and ideological changes to the framing of abortion in Northern Ireland. This suggests that nurses, midwives, and other health professionals can be powerful advocates for change when given the time, tools, and spaces to do so. To conclude, using creativity in co-production sessions can help participants engage in difficult topics, facilitate a safe space for honest and reflective discussion and inspire ideas for change.
Tips on facilitating co-production workshops with research participants
Apply for funding to be able to reimburse participants for their time. I offered my participants £50 Love2Shop vouchers for a half day workshop (8.30-1.30pm) as well as coffee and lunch.
Show a video or presentation on creative methods to give participants the tools and inspiration to make something of their own. I showed my participants this video on art activism from the OU, Array Collective and Alliance for Choice.
Allow time for participants to share their expectations and engage in a warmup activity to get everyone comfortable with speaking up and using the creative materials at hand.
Secure a private space, free of interference or disruption. I used an Open University Belfast conference room which was spacious and in an accessible location.
Consider what you define as ‘data’ in the co-creation sessions. You may like to keep notes of the ideas and discussion that participants engage in. I decided not to voice record to maintain the privacy of my participants, but others may wish to do so.
Ensure that co-production workshops plans have been reviewed by research ethics committee, and that participants give informed consent for their data to be used in research outputs like this one.
Break up the sessions with a coffee or lunch break to allow participants time to rest and re-charge between sessions.
This blog was original posted at: https://wels.open.ac.uk/research/centre-study-global-development/blog/i-never-thought-id-be-sitting-here-writing and is reproduced here with permission by the author.
For more information please contact: martha.nicholson@open.ac.uk
ByRachel 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
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
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.
Data: Dead or Alive? Henry Robinson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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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.
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.
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
