The idea of working with a group of drama students came about when re-encountering the original data set and finding and remembering an interview (MAG50) with a young woman studying drama at Manchester University. MAG50 was eager to talk about her own complicated emotional life as well as the ‘false and forced intimacy’ of the drama scene. She shared stories of non consensual sex as well as intense relationships with powerful older men. She also articulated her understanding of the sexual politics of the theatre industry where women may need to be sexually available in order to get work.
Reading this
interview in a new historical moment framed by the #metoo movement and the exposure of predatory men within the
entertainment and creative industries encouraged me to take this material to todays
drama students at Manchester University. I wanted to find out if they would be
interested in the material and in collaborating in a project of reanimation
that would help us think about social change and continuity. We began by making
contact with Alison Jeffers in the drama dept at MU who put us in contact with
Elena and Lea – two third year students who had recently taken over the
stewardship of the Women’s Theatre Society – a student led theatre society for
women.
The work began. We shared two further transcripts with the group – both interviews with young women who were drama students at UM in 1989. After 6 weeks of workshopping the material I was able to join them.
Before leaving for
Manchester I gathered some memorabilia to take with me – objects from my life
at the time the research was done; an old diary, photographs and a copy of my
handwritten Masters dissertation on Women and AIDS, which lead to me being part
of the WRAP project. I also read MAG50 again on my way to Manchester as well as
reading my dissertation. Through these objects I tried to remember my 23 year
old self. When I met the young women that evening they jumped, as if they had
seen a ghost. I understood that they had got to know a version of me in the
interviews and that meeting the 53 year old me was strange for them. I tried to
explain that it was strange for me too.
I shared my memorabilia and to began a Q&A session that lasted over an hour where we did the work of weaving feminist webs between our shared relationship with this interview and our shared co-presence, uncannily in the very building where the original research had taken place. There were a number of moments in this conversation when connections were made between the old me and the new me, between the young women and MAG50, between 1988 and 2019 in that building. I felt like we were doing a collaborative analysis.
Making sense
of the boldness of the sexual discourse.
A burning
question for the group was how it was possible for the original conversation to
have taken place. It was so bold, intimate, open. At first I thought that they
were telling me that from their perspective the research was unethical, that
the questions too direct, transgressive. But over the discussion I began to understand
that they were curious about how such a discourse became possible. They wanted
to know about the staging of the interview and the lead up to the conversation (did
they know what would be asked?) and about whether I had supervision to prepare
me for the ‘heaviness’ of the discussion. It became evident that having a
conversation like this now would be very difficult, constrained by concerns
about safeguarding, consent and triggering. But rather than chastising me for
bad practice I discovered that the young women were eager to re-enact this way
of talking.
Rachel: I think that’s really interesting because I think now we would see a study like this through the prism of mental health and it absolutely wasn’t how we looked at it. So, we would now … I don’t know, tell me what you think, I think we would think about triggers things like that, is it triggering? Could you ask that because that might…? Whereas in a way this was the stuff that happened before that whole way of looking at the world came about, this was much more political I think in a straightforward way, well nothing is straightforward is it? But it was much more about trying to say, “That’s not fair.” Or, “Put that into words; what words does that…?” Because we didn’t really have any vocabulary to talk about sex, people didn’t know what to call bits of their body, they didn’t know how to name power, and I say ‘they’ I would speak of myself as well, you know, like we didn’t really have a vocabulary to describe any of these things so it was the basic work.
Together we
worked out the relationships between now (2019) and a time (1989) where
speaking out about sex and about power was a project of making the personal
political, naming the unnamed and developing a new vocabulary. As threads
connected the two moments in time the young women articulated that this formed
a necessary foundation for a future culture that is saturated in the knowledge
of sexual violence. Yet we also mused that something had been lost in the
reframing of sex from a political to a more psychological register. We realised
that there is a complicated new kind of silencing that reigns in the young
women’s worlds in which sex is both seen as casual and no big deal, as well as
too much trouble, too difficult and too important.
#metoo
At the end of the
session I asked them about the #metoo movement and about the sexual
politics of the drama world and the entertainment industry. Again the young
women told a story of unevenness and contradiction. In many ways things are
better for young women – there are pockets of feminist practice and areas of
the business dominated by women (documentary film was given as an example). Yet
elsewhere in the industry things are worse then they have ever been, with
market forces determining what it valued and valuable. An actress still has to
rely on her body and her youth. It is not sexism as such that is to blame, but
the laws of the industry and the preferences of the audience. We talked about
women withdrawing from exposed patriarchal spaces, deciding that it is just ‘too
much’ and not worth it. I began to understand what they were trying to tell me
about contemporary sexuality and to grasp how what came before is part of what
is now in a way that escapes the linear narratives of progress and decline that
stand in the way of generational connection.
Urgent mini
interviews
The evening culminated in an urgent series of mini interviews, with young women choosing fragments from one of the three interviews to revoice and discuss or simply asking me to ask them questions like I had asked the WRAP young women. The interviews were double documented – I recorded them as ‘data’ for our reanimating project and Elena recorded them as useful material that the group might use for devising a performance.
I learned a lot
from these conversations: that it was still hard to be a virgin; that it was
hard to find a ‘middle ground’; that the protection of men and families is
vital for many people still; that loving oneself can be harder than loving
someone else. It was an overwhelming and moving experience that I am in the
midst still of understanding. These
re-enactments were the frenzied culmination of a long slow process of
engagement which I would like to think of as a single method spread out in time
and space and certainly a kind of co-production that we both documented and
made our own.
Watching the
performance several months later I could see how strands of our conversations
in the workshop had been worked with creatively and brought to life through
performance. Although the performance did contain extracts from the three
interviews, reperformed by the young women, the focus was on the 2019 young
women’s stories. In the discussion after the show the young women told us that
engaging with the material gave them permission and a desire to tell their own
stories and to think that someone out there might be interested in listening.
Watch the live performance of The Reanimating Project.
Setting up and getting going: Film-maker, Sue Reddish and I had met earlier to discuss the filming and go over the plan for the evening. We arrived at the venue in Manchester at 6. There were 10 young women there plus 2 youth workers. Hebe the artist and youth worker came at the same time. And then another young women then joined us. Hebe is well known to the group and I had met some of them before, I also know the youth workers well.
We did a quick name round + our chosen pronoun + whether people been on TV or radio/ round which raised some laughs and generated some curiosity about why people had been on TV etc. I introduced Sue and she talked through the consent form and the way that she would do the filming. 2 young women did not want their faces to be filmed but were happy to be recorded, otherwise everyone was happy with the filming.
Time travel: We then introduced the project and talked very briefly about the 1980s at that point. We did another game introducing ourselves plus our date of birth to a 1988 Top of the Pops soundtrack. We also had to say one thing that happened in the eyar that we were born. The dates of birth in the group ranged from 1951-2003 so this got us talking about the decriminalisation of section 28, the new labour landslide victory, the 2002 commonwealth games, the introduction of the right for gay people to adopt, the release of the film Body guard, John Major and Spitting Image, rationing and the end of World War two, the 1999 solar eclipse and the release of the first Toy story film. A lot of discussion was then generated about the 1980s and 1990s. We mentioned the miners’ strike, Greenham and Section 28. Section 28 generated more discussion about sex education now and the difficult discussions that are being had in Birmingham and in Manchester around the rights of parents and faith groups to have a say over the Relationships and Sex Education curriculum.
Who am I? Each person was given a Who am I? sheet to complete and used the answers to create a soundscape. Hebe encouraged the group to draw something on the sheet that describes or represents you in some way, something that is important to you or a symbol or shape that you associate with yourself. This generated more discussion about identity.
I am an activist
I am Israeli,
I am a student,
I am resilient,
I am happy, I am a lesbian
I am autistic,
I am a non-binary woman,
I am brown,
I am wonderful,
I am a daughter,
I am a sister,
I am patient,
I am a walker,
I am a community member,
I am 16 years old,
I am a good friend,
I am indecisive,
I am a woman,
I am organised,
I am a friend,
I am frowning,
I am kind,
I am an aspiring gardener,
I am a youth worker.
Warming up: We then broke for coffee and started again with a warmup moving game – creating a rainstorm with tapping, clicking, stamping, jumping. There was lots of laughing.
Working with data: We introduced some interview extracts that I had chosen from the selection that Niamh Moore had used during a workshop at Sapphormation – a festival in Manchester for ‘women who love women’. The extracts were taken from the one interview in the archive with a young women, Hannah, who explicitly identifies as ‘gay’ plus one extract from the interview with Sarah whose first sexual experience was with a woman.
The young women split into groups of three and each had a look at a couple of extracts. They read the extracts out loud and talked about the data. The brief was to see what stood out for them, to highlight it and talk about it.
The young women were really engaged with the material, sitting on the ground and pouring over the interviews. I went around, clarifying anything and trying to provoke more discussion. After about 10 minutes of lively discussion in the small groups, we asked them to tell us what they thought. They were interested in the short extracts and they were happy to read them out, to talk about the questions and how the interviews were conducted. They felt many of the questions were intrusive.
We then sat down at the table and used the interviews + magazines to cut up and create collages or poems or whatever- this created much more discussion.
We read the poems out, we talked about words and phrases that had meant something to the young women. We talked about the magazines – they were intrigued by the notices of meetings etc.
Hebe talked to the group about how we could take the project forwards. She suggested making some kind of banner that the group could put up when they are in session as part of the ritual of coming into the space and setting up the session. She suggested a table cloth but left this open for further discussion. The poems could be a starting point Hebe suggested, we could edit them down further to identify key words or to create an image- like a young women’s group coat of arms of the things that are important to us. Hebe opens things up to the group and we agree to think some more.
We said good bye – a quick post–it note of one word feedback on the session: Insightful, open, exciting, powerful, intriguing, brilliant, fantastic.
Most of my last year has been spent on my sofa, watching daytime TV and preparing the Women, Risk & AIDS Project (WRAP) interviews to be published in a digital archive – my day to day hasn’t changed much at all in light of Covid-19 (apart from the added anxiety of worrying about the health and safety of everyone in the entire world, the plummeting economy and the precarity of academia and its dwindling job market, a.k.a my future prospects).
My role in the Reanimating Data team has been to format, anonymise and catalogue all of the meta-data for the interviews and their accompanying field notes. Much of this has been fairly mundane, ritualistic and monotonous – open document, select all, change font to Arial, size 11, justify margins, adjust margins, insert, page number (top of page, Plain Number 3), find all double spaces, replace all double spaces with single spaces. The trickier, more interesting bits have been treating the data with a feminist ethics of care. Simple, I thought. I just need to give each interviewee a pseudonym and redact any identifying information. We’ve been taught a fairly generic, blanket rule of adhering to ethics like this, but I’d never really had the chance to properly engage with and reflect on these principles.
I had tried to be completely objective when changing the names of research participants. I had a list of ‘Popular baby names 1970s UK’ open on Google, and once I’d exhausted those would stare longingly at my book shelf, mentally scouring stories for names that might fit the stories being told in each interview. Naming each interviewee couldn’t really be objective – there’s too much tied up in a name, and assumptions around social class, ethnicity, place, time, gender. Which names would the original interviewees have picked for themselves? What a certain name might mean to me most likely has totally different connotations for someone else. AMD18, for example, I had named Tonya. On reflection, I think I had been struggling to think of any new names, but had recently seen ‘I, Tonya’ with Margot Robbie, where Tonya Harding (whose life the film is based on) was born in 1970 – just the right age for a WRAP participant. Rachel, PI for the project, said that she wouldn’t have chosen Tonya for that particular interviewee. There’s lots of literature on the importance of naming in social science research (Moore, 2012 – The politics and ethics of naming, for example), and I’m sure I could quite happily write an entire dissertation on the topic.
Archiving the dataset for public use raises a whole host of other ethical issues, too – does informed consent obtained in the late 1980s still count today? Could any of the original research participants ever have imagined that the archive would be taken out of a box in someone’s garage and uploaded onto the internet for anyone to stumble across? Would they want the intimate thoughts of their younger selves out there for themselves to find? – I still can’t decide whether I would like the goings on of my teenage years and the way that I would have framed them then to be known by anyone now, other than maybe my therapist.
Of course, any potential identifying information from each interview has now been anonymised or redacted. Originally, this had meant working with some key principles for anonymising the data, but in practice it didn’t feel right to be as consistent as that. Names of places, parent’s job roles, bands and musicians that young women listened to became [NAME OF TOWN], [CARING PROFESSION], [COUNTRY SINGER]. How much of these young women’s stories are woven into the industrial town in northern England that them and their parents, and probably their parent’s parents grew up in, and the opportunities that had been afforded to them there, and how much context do we lose when we omit these? These are all different parts of these young women’s lives that have, to some extent at least, shaped the way that they think about their sexual identities or how they position themselves against the opposite sex.
Anonymisation principles used by the Reanimating Data team.
Change all people’s names (in CAPS). This includes the name of the interviewee, any partners, friends, family members etc. This is the only ‘fake’ information we will include.
Where a participant gives their name, change this and create a pseudonym. Where they don’t do this, don’t create a pseudonym.
Put all new text / changes in caps.
Remove names of schools, workplaces and colleges. Do not replace these with made up names. Instead put [school] [company] etc.
Leave all place names and details of neighbourhoods where possible. Where a participant has moved around or where the combination of different places feels identifiable change these. Do not make up alternative places but replace with [town] [city] etc. Or make specifics more generic. E.g. ‘Singapore and Hong Kong’ can be replaced with ASIA.
Change details of locations and jobs for third parties (parents, partners) unless seems highly relevant.
One particularly tricky interview to work with was Amanda’s, or LSFS23 as she had been known for some time. Amanda had unfortunately been through an incredibly traumatic sexual experience in her home country before moving to London in the late 1980s. She went into quite a lot of detail about this in her interview and it felt significant for her story to be told, and to be heard. After much consultation with Rachel, Niamh and Sue Sharpe, who had originally interviewed ‘Amanda’, we decided that it was important to keep more than the bare bones of her story alive. Redacting some of the finer details of what had happened, and the names of countries, of work colleagues, of slang terms particular to where Amanda had grown up, felt like enough. We know through the wake of the #MeToo movement that there is power in storytelling, but of course we don’t know whether ‘Amanda’ would still want her story to be heard, and how she would want it to be told. Omitting the entire experience felt like silencing her, which happens far too much to women in society more generally, so I hope that we have done enough here to retain the eloquence and bravery with which Amanda’s story had originally been told.
The Women, Risk and AIDS Project had been conducted in both London and Manchester yet publications that came out of the study blurred any geographical differences, identifying young people only by their age, gender and social class, rather than by their location. Reading the data now I notice striking differences between the data from each of these places. There are different norms and youth sub-cultures operating in the different cities, and in different places within each city. Growing up in Brighton, my own adolescence was spent outside Borders on a Saturday afternoon during my ‘emo’ phase, in Saltdean park with a bottle of Glenn’s vodka on a Friday night, shortly graduating to club nights like Shameless at Audio on a Thursday or Pound Dance at Digital on a Wednesday. These are some of the places that helped shape my identity as a teenager.
The concept of place had been an important way of framing the Reanimating Data project. We have chosen to work with just the Manchester data and to work with community groups in the city to ‘rematriate’ some of the original data – to give it back to the city and communities it was abstracted from. In anonymising the data, we have clearly labelled each interview and fieldnote as ‘Manchester’ or ‘London’, offering the opportunity for future researchers to explore the significance of place to these young women’s lives, relationships and sexualities. Through anonymising the data and employing a feminist ethic of care we’ve had to remove many of the details of the streets, neighbourhoods, clubs and areas of Greater Manchester that the young women evoke. It feels almost sad that some of the defining parts of the WRAP young women’s stories (their Friday nights spent in Saltdean park making some questionable choices concerning boys in the year above) are lost through the anonymisation process, and that a new generation of researchers are unable to explore how, why and in what ways place might have mattered to them in forming their own sexual identities.
What we have made possible is that current and future researchers can now read these stories which have been handled carefully – twice. Once in 1989 and the early 1990s by the team of WRAP researchers and again in 2019 and 2020 by a new team of feminist researchers trying to balance our desire to both protect these young women from unwanted exposure or harm, whilst ensuring that the stories they chose to tell are still being heard.
INTERVIEWEE: What do you hope to gain from this research? INTERVIEWER: I think we hope to be able to give young women themselves some kind of voice in terms of the sorts of things they find difficult or important or are concerned about. And to have some kind of input and feedback into health education. Some people design the leaflets and posters all the time, but they don’t necessarily talk to the people who are supposed to be reading them about what is important to them. INTERVIEWEE: Will it go back into like sex education in schools do you think? INTERVIEWER: We hope so yes. Because sex education in schools is pretty rudimentary and most people we have talked to say what you said. Something like it’s about babies and it wasn’t very helpful. It’s trying to say something about that. And more general things about how women feel about relationships and sexual relationships in particular, and what’s important. Generally nobody asks you, so we would like to do that so there will be a number of different things that we hope to relate to that and of course it should have been explained to you already …………..so you don’t need to worry about that, but we would like to think that the women we interview might actually read some of the things we write. INTERVIEWEE: You actually write in magazines? INTERVIEWER: Well we might do, we haven’t, but we think that might be quite a good idea to do that……….. not about…..so you might see something about it in Nineteen ……….
Interview with Lucy (MAG18) for the Women, Risk and AIDS Project.
To download and read the anonymised material visit the archive here. And if you don’t know where to start? Here’s Tonya’s interview.
A few weeks ago we posted a blog by Charlotte Bagnall who shared how she and her colleague had used data from the WRAP archive as teaching materials for a series of sessions on thematic data analysis. Since Charlotte and Claire delivered these sessions, Corona Virus has arrived in the UK. We are in lockdown and educators across all sectors are working out how to facilitate teaching and learning online and from a distance. In these unfamiliar times we are realising that digital archives of sociological studies, like the WRAP, offer new possibilities for students and educators who want to research, teach and learn during lockdown. There are possibilities for students to do secondary data analysis, comparative historical work and data reanimation and possibilities for educators who may want to use the data, as Claire and Charlotte did, to guide students through more structured programmes of learning about research methods, feminist sociological research, sexuality studies, creative methods, Relationships and Sexuality education and much more. With this in mind we are sharing details of a session we ran in September last year with a group of students at Manchester Metropolitan University, when we had never heard of Corona virus and could sit and talk, learn, think and create together. In the session we used collaging as a method for engaging with and exploring the WRAP data and thinking about sexuality and social change. Although this was an offline, group session its simple creative methods of reflect, free-write, read, think, stick, paste and share could be transferable to different spaces and contexts.
Collaging sexual learning
On the 30th September 2019 lecturer and former youth worker Jayne Mugglestone, Ali Ronan and I facilitated a workshop for third year undergrad students studying on an Early Years and Childhood Studies programme undergraduate programme at MMU. Ali and I met Jayne early in the morning in the teaching room to set up for the session. Jayne had been feeling concerned that our decision to do a workshop on sexualities in week two of the module was not a good idea. In week two students wouldn’t know her, or each other, very well or have got used to working together as a group. The previous week Jayne had introduced the topic and let students know what would be happening. A few of the students had come to talk to her after the session to say that they were concerned about the topic, because of their religious values – some Christian, some Muslim. Jayne was feeling nervous about doing the workshop and concerned that some of the students wouldn’t turn up. This mirrored the nervousness of another of the youth workers we have worked with in this project who was concerned about how the young women in her group – from ‘strict’ Muslim and Christian backgrounds – would respond to the WRAP material. As we were setting up for the session however some of the students who had approached Jayne the previous week turned up and she could relax.
What jars you?
We started with an activity called What Jars you? (Taken from the AGENDA resource created by Emma Renold). We hadn’t planned to do this but decided to as Jayne noted some nervousness the previous week about talking about sexuality. The task was to write ‘what jars you about talking about sex and sexuality’ on post it notes and stuff these into a jar. There weren’t enough jars so the students had to share. This was a large group of over twenty students – all female except one and all born between 1997 and 1999 (We know this because our intro-starter involved talking about the year you were born!). The group is mixed in terms of race and ethnicity.
I went round and spoke to two tables at this point. At the first table the students told me that nothing jars them. They said they are very open about the topic and they are happy to talk about it. They talked about the importance of RSE and of talking about these issues both as students and young people and as future youth and childcare practitioners. On the other table two of the girls talked about the fact that they don’t talk about sex and sexuality at home or with friends. The silence around sex and sexuality was referred to in relation to upbringing and family. It took a while for us to name culture and religion as important factors. There was reference to the protests in Birmingham at the time around the teaching of LGBT relationships to Muslim children. I wasn’t quite clear if these were evoked as an example of why its difficult to have these conversations or as a polite message to me that we shouldn’t really be having these conversations anyway.
Students weren’t asked to share the contents of their jars. They could choose to take their jars with them or leave them on the tables if they were happy for us to read their contents. Most, if not all, left them. I read them after the workshop, expecting to find examples of what the students find difficult about talking about sex and sexuality in a classroom or professional context (as this was the context of our conversation prior to the activity). Students took up the activity in a different way, sharing examples of their own fears and concerns about sex and sexuality – their own ignorance, experience of abuse and fears of being touched, not enjoying sex or of getting pregnant. They also wrote what jars them about the politics of sexuality – the lack of education, social taboos around sex, restrictive religious and cultural norms, gender inequality.
We used young people’s reflections on the activity, and what they find jarring about sex and sexuality to think about how we were going to create a safe space for working. We created a set of ground rules and talked about confidentiality and how we were documenting the session that day.
For Jayne this activity opened up thinking about what support childhood and youth practitioners need before they can go out and deliver RSE.
‘We expect people to go and work with young people/all ages, in different roles – teachers, community workers, family support, etc. and support them around RSE subjects and issues when they have had no information or support themselves. It’s challenge as there is so little space even in our quite open curriculum to work on this kind of thing. The rooms, the group sizes, the course fees and related pressure on assessment and jobs, all gets the focus and the students themselves get missed in it all.’
Jayne Mugglestone, Lecturer and youth worker
Partner discussion and individual free write
We started the creative work by asking students to talk to a partner about how and what they learnt about sex, sexuality and relationships (and also perhaps what they didn’t learn or wasn’t said). Once pairs had finished their conversations they were asked to individually speed write for 2 minutes about ‘sexual learning’. They could write about their own experiences or reflect on their conversation with their partner. The free writes were anonymous and confidential, although many of the students said they were happy to share them and let me take some photos. Together they capture what has been well documented in youth sexualities research – that young people learn about sex and sexuality from a range of different sources and that sexual learning starts long before children start school. We also see that young people are critical of the education they get at school, that conversations with parents are limited and many young people do not have a trusted or reliable source of information about sex and sexuality or a place to go to explore the topics that interest them in more detail.
Engaging with the WRAP data on sexual learning
Next we put the written reflections / speed writes to one side and then looked at some extracts from the WRAP study on sexual learning. Students were asked to choose an extract and read it several times, underlining things that stood out to them. Next they discussed the extracts with a partner and then with the wider group. There was a feeling that the extracts ‘could have been today’. One pair were confused because they thought that the extracts were from today, and not from the past. This has happened across the projects we have done in Manchester. Young women read the material as if it were from today. At first I saw this as our failure to provide enough historical context around the archive but I have since come to see this as what the WRAP material does. It glows and speaks to the young women who read it today. Rather than seeing the data as a historical document they see the data as an invitation to tell their own stories or to take advantage of a rare moment to hear another woman tell their story, with an intimacy they tell us they rarely hear. They don’t seem to see the interviews and the extracts as historical documents or ‘archive material’ but rather as a collection of women’s voices that they can often relate to, or that they feel inspired by. After this the task was to create a collage that captured their thoughts about what is changing for young people when it comes to learning about sex and sexuality. Students could use the extracts, their own free writes, or create new material. They were given coloured paper, glue, coloured pens, scissors and crayons.
Creating collages
Students worked quickly and creatively, responding to the invitation to explore sexuality and social change in different ways – one created paper jigsaw pieces to piece together the different ways that young people learn about sex, others created columns to show what has changed and what has remained the same. When I went around and talked to young people in their small groups two south East Asian young women told me that they only really learnt about sex and sexuality and relationships from social media – Instagram and snapchat – as they rarely discussed the topic with friends (and never with family). They said that they would see articles pop up on their news feed or in the discover / explore section of the app and would sometimes click on them. We looked at their phones to see what kinds of articles were there on that day. We saw two examples that appeared on their news feeds – ‘How experienced are you really?’ and ‘things girlfriends do that secretly annoy their boyfriends’. The young women said they found these kind of articles useful and interesting as a way of learning about sex and relationships. We talked about the fact that they had no choice over what appeared in their news feeds but choice over what they clicked on, open and decided to read. This wasn’t the same at school, where they had no choice over whether they could take part in an RSE session or not.
In another discussion with a West African and south east Asian young woman the West African young woman describe how she learnt about sex and relationships from her friends, her parents, school sex education and her church. For her these different sites were different, but complementary. She never had a burning question inside her that she couldn’t get an answer to because if church wasn’t telling her, she would ask her mum, if her mum couldn’t answer she would ask her friends. She said that all these different messages and information would bump up against each other and sometimes contradict each other but ultimately she would always come back to what her mum said. You always come back to where you lie at night. She explained that a teacher can’t slap you or punish you like your mum can – you live in her house so you ultimately have to listen to her rules and her way of seeing things. When I asked if that meant that the other messages and learning didn’t matter, she said no – that she heard them all, they passed through and lodged in her brain somehow, even if she settled for now with what her mum tells her. She later had a go at representing this through her collage. Her friend said that things were similar for her, even though her religion was different (Islam).
When the collages were finished we stuck them on to the wall and asked the students to gather round and talk about their collage. Through their collages and the discussion, the students made the following points about sexual learning and social change:
Friends are still a key source of information about sex for some young people. There is more openness between friends for some young people but for others sex is never discussed. Or as one young woman commented – there are some friends I would say anything to and some I wouldn’t talk to about sex at all.
Relationships and Sex Education is still largely scientific – focussing on the biological aspects of sex and not discussing other areas such as emotions, relationships, consent and bodies. It is also still mainly heterosexual. It is still largely taught by female teachers.
The legal and policy framework around the teaching of
homosexuality in schools has changed in the UK. There used to be ‘section 28’
and now there the Love is love movement. There is more openness around
homosexuality now but it is still largely excluded from RSE which still
focusses on heterosexual relationships. LGBT young people have to find out
their own information. As M (young gay man) said – I felt like there was no
space for me within RSE.
Parents still don’t really talk about sex to their
children, although this varies between families and across cultures. One white
young woman commented that her family would never talk about sex but that her
boyfriend’s mum is really open. They all walk around naked! – she told us.
Gender. It
remains the case that women are judged more harshly than men for having sex.
Clinics. There are more sexual health services and
charities to support young people and sexual health clinics are confidential
for young people.
Media. One young woman commented
that young people have always learnt about sex and sexuality from the media but
we talk about this as if it is a ‘new’ phenomena. In 1989 young people were
learning about sex from television adverts about HIV and AIDS and today young
people learn from digital and social media, as well as television. The range of media and the content of media
has changed however. She commented that AIDS would no longer be talked about in
the media as a ‘gay disease’, but that female pleasure is still side-lined as it
was in the 1980s. There are more media sources for learning about pleasure now
(previously just women’s magazines) but – she said – we don’t learn about it.
In a patriarchal society it is more accepted that men have sex.
Others in the group talked about other ways in which young
people learn through the media. For example, through documentaries and
YouTubers. One young person gave the example of Stacey Douley’s documentary
about brothels in Turkey where men visit sex workers because they don’t know
where to put their penis when having penetrative sex with a woman. Here the sex
workers are the sex educators. Shan Boody [Shan Boodram) was mentioned as a
YouTuber that some young people watch.
The group reflected that now there is so much more media to
learn from – particularly from social media. This can be a pressure but it is
an important source of information. For some this is their only source (see
above). There is more about female pleasure in the media now and so many more
sources than previously (just a few women’s magazines). Porn is a source of
education now for some young people.
Religion remains influential and important to how young people learn about sex, sexuality and relationships. Young people felt that things are changing within many faith communities, even though it can be hard to see this. One group said that a sexual health worker had started to come to their Mosque after lots of men started getting STIs from the extra-marital relationships they were having. The young women said that these men can’t talk to the Imam about these relationships or about condom use as the men shouldn’t be having these relationships in the first place.
After the session Jayne spoke with the students and asked them for feedback. She found that students had taken things away from the session for themselves and for their practice as future childcare / youth practitioners. In particular, the importance of access to information about sex and sexual health and the need to not be judgemental and understand difference. Students commented a lot on the creative methods we used, noting that they didn’t feel like they were taking part in research and rethinking what it means to do research with young people.
Six weeks later we returned to do another session using the WRAP data, this time exploring what we find in an archive and what we find missing. The students drew their ‘many selves’ and looked through the archive to think about what stories about women’s lives they wanted to be heard by future generations. Then some of them gifted us stories of their own.
‘The effects of both the sessions were felt throughout the rest of the time I worked with them and after that. Some of them told me that it had really helped to think more about it all and to be in a space where they felt that they could explore different views. It seemed to give them much more confidence in their ability to talk about issues and to feel taken seriously in their feelings and discussions was really important. Several said that they had previously thought about RSE as quite a narrow subject where they now thought that it was much wider and much more important for all ages than they had thought.’
Jayne Mugglestone, Lecturer and youth worker
Click here to explore the archive further and to use the selected extracts on sexual learning use the link above.
One of the main
goals of the Reanimating Data Project (2018-20) was to archive and make
publicly available the interviews and field notes of the 1980s research
project, Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP). The collection, created between
1989-90, had for some time existed in various boxes, hard-drives, computers and
folders in a London attic. In this current moment, the original sociological
data-set is now historical, they are primary material which capture a unique
moment in British history, of youth sexuality, of sub-cultures, of sex
education, of sexual norms and perceptions, as well as teenage anguish and
family life.
My role in the
Reanimating Data Project was ensuring that the we had the correct
infrastructures in place to archive the collection in the long-term, as well as
for immediate access. Our plan was simple, use the University of Sussex
institutional repository, Figshare, as means to store the entire original
collection and the anonymised versions in the long-term, thus ensuring
sustained access to this important collection long after the RAD project
funding ends. Secondly, use Omeka, an open source publishing platform, to
provide users, researchers and students with an access point that includes
curated exhibitions that reflect the concerns, priorities and research of the
current project team and wider partners. Following our own logic, we are also
archiving the research data generated by the current project, therefore, we are
currently working to catalogue the various experiments, project documents,
etc., that we have generated – archiving in this sense is iterative, cyclical –
we are archiving with the worm hole in mind, as we traverse to the future, we
anticipate the needs of those researchers.
It’s important that we separate these activities and take advantage of the infrastructure available to us. We are fortunate to have the support of the institution, this ensures the burden of responsibility shifts from the project to a much larger machine – a third level institution. Knowing that the University, through the Library and ITS, take seriously the challenge of long-term digital preservation is a comfort but as a project we have a responsibility to ensure the way in which we describe the collection is future proof – there is no point creating collections that no one can find, or that users cannot assess (at a glance) if the content is useful to them or not. It is for this reason, that we spent a lot of time making sure that the metadata was a certain standard, that our descriptions were useful and our subject terms appropriate and standardised. I remember the first conversation I had with Rachel about this project, I cautioned that we should not underestimate the time and energy it takes to write metadata and to archive the collection. This task is ever more complicated by the nature of the objects – transcripts in various formats and with varying length. Each interview had to be read from start to finish in order to give a proper summary for the metadata description, the level of anonymity painstakingly reviewed and rediscussed and reviewed again. Even settling on subject key terms is a challenge and a task in and of itself, especially when discipline specific controlled vocabularies like HASSET seem archaic and outdated.
When we showcased Figshare and Omeka for the first time at our Edinburgh workshop (Nov. 2019) we were asked a question from the audience – but what can you do with the archive? Can I do text analysis? Beyond accessing it, what can I do? I struggled to answer the question momentarily (trying to remember any of limited functionality that comes with Figshare and what we planned to implement for Omeka), but then I remembered that, as project, we were tasked with archiving the collection first and foremost. And while, to some, mere access is no longer enough, the task of providing access is massive. Increasingly, we are used to things being readily available, and while additional user functionality is required (and I advocate for it), in some cases “mere” access is a luxury and not always a given. We have made the dataset available and from that starting point researchers and users can create additional access points, through text analysis, through data visualisation. As a project team we have experimented with feminist chat bots and sound installations among others… because we now have access to a previously closed, inaccessible collection.
The use of the
two platforms, Figshare and Omeka, also allows us to interact with different
audiences. Through Figshare the WRAP collection is available to an
international audience, it automatically has a wider reach and is part of rich
research, international, eco-system. Omeka, on the other hand, allows us to
give project partners, researchers, and other users the opportunity to
contribute content, to curate exhibitions which bring collection items together
and to be part of the RAD project and team (and I always smile when I see the “RAD”
team…because it really is rad!).
I’ll probably think more about lessons learned in a few weeks and document more fully our process but in the mean time if you have any questions about our archiving approach and method please feel free ask, sharon.webb@sussex.ac.uk And don’t forget to check out the collections on Figshare (available now) and on Omeka (soon to be published).
It was only 3 weeks ago, but it seems like another life-time
already – a reminder of how the arrival of a new, untreatable virus can change
the world.
The Reanimating data team travelled one last time to Manchester on the evening of March 6th in order to prepare for our finale event at the Library. We had sent ahead some of the physical documentation of the project to be housed in the vitrines of the archives plus section of the library: the original WRAP questionnaires, pamphlets and some data; feminist youth work posters and magazines from 1989 taken from the Feminist Webs collection and examples from our different youth work projects in Manchester which during the last 9 months have ‘reanimated’ the WRAP data. It was exciting to see these materials behind glass and preserved as history.
We then went upstairs to get our meeting room ready – spreading banners, craft materials, and ephemera from 1989 around the room. We had a playlist with some musical highlights and we waited to see who would turn up.
Before long we had a room full to bursting. Young people from all the different youth groups were there. Our critical friends. The original researchers and new generation researchers working with the materials. Youth workers and sexual health workers from across the city and the lifecourse. We all got to know each other by playing human bingo – looking for members of the original research team, a youth worker, a member of a youth projects.
Niamh Moore opened the workshop by welcoming participants and explaining how the old WRAP project links to the new RAD project. We began the day by sharing the film that Sue Reddish and Jim Dalziel have made explaining what it means to ‘reanimate data’ and capturing the different youth work projects in Manchester. Huge thanks to Sue and Jim for documenting the work and helping us make sense of it all.
After this young people from each of the projects then had the opportunity of talking about their experience of the project – sharing what they had done with the data, what they learned and what surprised them. We started with Emma Okomoh from the Levenshulme Youth Project who showed and talked about the short animated film that she had made working with one of the WRAP interviews, noting how important it is to find someone you can identify with in the material as a starting point for connection. Emma had been supported in this by Paula Carley and Siobhan O’Connor and Marianna Vareli, the lead youth worker for the Levenshulme girls group.
Next youth worker and artist Hebe Phillips and young people from one of the Proud Trust ‘s LGBT young women’s groups talked about their work with the ‘purple pamphlets’ and how they had used music to try and get a taste of the 1980s. The group were uncertain whether any of the original interviewees had identified as lesbian or bisexual and in their work on the project had tried to read between the lines of the interviews. They also had a go at asking some of the questions posed on the interviews of themselves as a way of filling the gap. This group’s creative work developed into the creation of self portrait squares that capture their identities as this is what they came to realise was happening in the original interviews as each WRAP participant was invited to tell her story. The making of squares was opened up to participants on the day and in the library after the event. These squares will be stitched together by textile artist and youth worker Hebe Phillips to make a banner that celebrates the voices of young women and takes their stories into the future.
The best thing about the data for this group was the lack of subtlety of the interviews making it possible to talk explicitly about sexual practise and feelings. What surprised one of the young women, Bethan, was how little has changed in terms of formal sex education despite big shifts within the culture towards openness. Answering the question of how they had learned about sex the young women at the Proud trust were surprised to find that their answers were very close to those of young women in Manchester thirty years earlier.
Listen to some of the Proud Trust group talking about what the reanimating data project was like for them in their own words.
Young people from the Women’s Theatre Society talked about how they had worked with the interview material since September, using drama exercises and bringing it to life in different ways and in the process creating a show that included skits, extracts, and personal testimonies inspired by reading the stories of others. Again, the directness of the original questions were valued, even if they had been surprising and transgressive at the start. By working with these direct questions the group found themselves having conversations that they would not otherwise have had, making themselves vulnerable and naming experiences in such a way that they were able to identify with each other and with an audience. The positive reception that the show received had taken them aback, being so wrapped up in what the process has given them the young women were surprised and moved to realise that this process would continue with the audience who also identified with and responded to the authenticity of the material, feeling that they had been understood through the story of another.
Hear from some of the Women’s Theatre Society in their own words (and bear with the bad audio – it gets better!)
Lecturer and former youth worker Jayne Mugglestone from Manchester Metropolitan University talked next about working with her final year Early years and Childhood studies students to explore the WRAP data. Jayne reflected on how the creative and participatory methods used to work with the data had transformed the students’ understandings of research but also how she had been reminded herself about what was possible in a university classroom setting. From a predominantly South Asian backgrounds and living in Greater Manchester the young women Jayne works with had been fascinated both by the continuities over the thirty years (nothing has changed) but also positive changes such as the way social media facilitates community for those who might otherwise be isolated. The experience of being in a community of women, asking difficult questions about sex that spanned thirty years was a powerful experience for the group – opening up their understanding of well-being and the role of women’s spaces of inquiry in making this important work happen.
Next up was Claire Fox Reader in Educational Psychology at MMU and Charlotte Bagnall, PhD student and associate lecturer – who shared with the audience how they had worked with BSc Educational Psychology students to use two transcripts from the WRAP archive to teach qualitative research methods, including the coding and interpretation of qualitative data. The richness of the material meant that students could focus on just three pages each from two transcripts generating rich findings about the inadequacy of school sex education and the workings of an informal sexual culture characterised by a sexual double standard and governance by sexual reputation. Here is their blog about their experience of using the archive as a teaching resource in higher education(and how to make methods teaching lively, ‘experience-near’ and feminist!)
Ali Ronan who acted as the coordinator for the youth work projects thanked all the projects and shared her view that the work has only just begun.
The final part of the event involved sharing the archive that has now been formally published in the University of Sussex repository where it will be preserved. Rachel presented this and thanked Rosie Gahnstrom for the huge amount of work that she has been doing in anonymising and cataloguing the data set. Janet Holland and Robert Albury were also thanked for the tricky and time consuming work of freeing the original data from obsolete media and machines. The archive will also be available through our Omeka platform (FAYS) where we will be creating ‘exhibitions’ using material we have collected and generated over the course of the project. This will give potential users a taste of how the WRAP archive can be used and explored and will help build a community around the archive.
The archive has been reverse engineered, and Manchester has been put back into the material and made visible. The archive will also remain in Manchester and people were encouraged to use it.
Over the course of the project we have been exploring different versions of sharing and exploring and animating the archive, including the kinds of youth work and creative practice shared at this event. To conclude the event Rachel shared some initial reflections from another experiment we have been working on – the feminist chatbot. This has been developed in collaboration with a group of women learning to code at the University of Sussex as we explore new ways of asking questions directly of the archive. We introduced the room to the bot and asked everybody to write down one question they would like to ask of the archive. We tried one and the bot couldn’t answer, but we’ve kept their questions to help us understand what potential archive users might want a feminist chat bot to do and what future work might be done with the WRAP archive.
At this point the group went downstairs to the archives section of the library which was buzzing with people who had come for the International Women’s Day celebrations. Members of the public were invited to make their own felt square using material from the archive, an invitation that they responded to enthusiastically.
A huge thank you goes to Ester McGeeney who managed the reanimating work from a distance and planned and lead the day. An exhausting, exhilarating ending for an extraordinary project.
Research methods are a core component of most degree-level programmes, but nonetheless renowned for being students’ least favourite component of their course. Tasked with the role of developing new content to teach qualitative research methods, within the Faculty of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, I was keen to demonstrate the usefulness and real-world implications of key qualitative methods and analysis to inspire my students. In doing so, I came across the ‘reanimating data project’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (for more information see: http://reanimatingdata.co.uk/about/), which gave my colleague Dr Claire Fox and I what we needed and ‘reanimated’ our students.
We had three weeks to work with the students on this project. Week One, students firstly learnt about the importance of archival data-digitising, sharing and re-using data, in addition to ethical considerations to take into account when conducting such work. This led on to Weeks Two and Three, where, following lectures on qualitative data analysis and more specifically Thematic Analysis, the students had the opportunity to conduct their own Thematic Analysis on real-world extracts taken from two interviews collected as part of the Women, Risk & AIDS Project (WRAP) social research study conducted in Manchester in 1989-90. Each student worked with three pages of data. Their research question was:
‘What are young women’s perceptions and experiences of sex education in the 1980s?’.
Prior to delivering the sessions, Claire and I had analysed the data ourselves. We were working with two interviews from the WRAP archive: The interview with Simone, 18, White British, working class, Roman Catholic (Ref: NMC12) and the interview with Stacey, 20 – 21, White British, working class (Ref: MAG12). Two main themes emerged from our analysis: Basic or limited sex education and Gendered Double standards.
Basic or limited sex education was a semantic theme, in other words it described explicit, surface-level meaning within the data. This theme included talk about the basic and limited sex education the young women received within the 1980s. For example, sex education lessons were selective, passive and detached, with teachers only focussing on the biological aspects of sex and discussions about emotions and the relational aspects avoided. These gaps were in part shaped by teacher embarrassment and their assumptions of hopelessness, which meant that, as a result, sex education lessons had little impact, students instead having to take their education into their own hands and seek out magazines as a source of better information.
In
contrast, Gendered
double standards is a latent theme and looks beyond what is said to
identify deeper-level implicit meaning within the data. Gendered double
standards were evident in that boys and girls faced different pressures in
relation to sex in the 1980s, girls particularly fearful about being labelled
as ‘loose’, a ‘slag’ and acquiring a negative reputation if they engaged in
sexual behaviour or discussed sex. This ultimately
underpinned young women’s perceptions, experiences and relationships during
this time.
In the session with students we presented our analysis findings by sharing one table for each theme with the codes and supporting quotes. We also shared a short write-up of the theme Gendered double standards as an example (You can read this here). Students were then asked to write up the other theme.
It was clear through the students’ write up of the Basic or limited sex education theme that they had engaged well and become immersed within the data. Here is an example from one of our students.
The young women detailed the amount and depth of the sex education they received within Catholic schools in the 1980s. The idea of basic or limited sex education was shown by mentions of few lessons given, e.g. ‘we got a lesson once’ (Simone) and ‘there was no sex education at all’ (Stacey). Teachers would rush over lessons, or miss out crucial information. ‘She didn’t really go into detail; she just went very fast. So we didn’t have much time to think’ (Simone) and ‘she just said – you can’t get AIDS from this, you can get it from this’ (Simone).
Sex education largely had a biological focus, as opposed to informing students about safe sex. ‘Yeah, just like how babies are made, and that’s it’ (Simone), ‘Q: Did they talk about contraception? A: No’ (Simone). Students were not informed about the ways to prevent pregnancy or transfer of STIs: ‘Q: So did she say that if you use a condom you’ll be protected? A: No way’ (Simone) and ‘Q: Did they talk to you about contraception and STDs at school? A: No, nothing like that’ (Stacey). Furthermore, teachers did not explain relationship dynamics, or what emotions may arise when a student became sexually active, e.g. ‘nobody ever talked to you about the problems and the entanglements, and what it means to be in a relationship when you start having sex’ (Stacey). The girls also noted that any sex education they did receive only involved the teacher giving a short session of ‘just the basics’ (Simone), with no time allotted for further discussion or an opportunity to ask questions. ‘All we did was read from a book. We didn’t really discuss it or anything’ (Simone).
Sex education for the general student population was described to be a bare minimum. Some further education would be given if students opted to study biology; ‘only if you took biology in the fourth or fifth year, we did quite a bit’ (Simone). The feelings towards sex education within biology in later school years seemed to be more positive, with more extensive education on how the body works: ‘I learnt a lot from biology, you know, about sort of …and the insides and things’ (Stacey). However, this more detailed teaching was reserved only for those who chose to study biology, and was not offered to other students.
The basic or limited sex education led to students having to take their education into their own hands. Girls would seek out magazines as a source for better information, namely ‘man and woman’. Stacey explained that ‘we read them all! I think I learned a lot off that’. School sex education sessions left large gaps that the girls filled independently outside of school. Overall, the girls explained that they received quite poor sex education. Between teachers rushing lessons, and only providing factual information, to more information being kept back from the wider student body, and only being taught to fulfil the exam curriculum, students’ sex education was basic and limited.
Angel Mellor-Davis, Year 1 Educational Psychology, MMU
There was such a depth to the data, that we were able to give students just three pages of data and a simple but constructive task to get them enthused and engaged in qualitative data analysis. They can take this learning with them and apply it to a different dataset for their assignment. Students discussed similarities and differences between the sex education they received and that of the young girls within the transcripts. However, with hindsight we could have done more of this and perhaps used it to teach students about ‘reflexivity’.
It has been great to be part of this project and use the WRAP data to the benefit of our students, and I am looking forward to involvement in further projects stemming from the reanimating data project archive.
This workshop (second in the series) focused our attention on the relationship between the front end of the bot (written in Java and creating the interface with the user, designed to hear and decipher their question) and the back end of the bot – the potential answers to the question that takes the form of a data base or archive (and created in python code within a flask container). Workshop leader Suze Shardlow encouraged us to think through all the stages that might be involved in a simple question and answer cycle – each action requiring construction. Here we see one attempt to map the stages involved.
Suze encouraged us to juxtapose a typical commercial
application for a chat bot (for example online Pizza ordering) and our attempt
to use a chat bot as an interface for an archive made up of interviews conducted
in a conversational style. So for example, the question ‘how can I help you’ on
a pizza order site is limited in its potential answers to the menu offered by
the restaurant. The questions that we might ask the WRAP archive and the kinds
of answers that could be evoked are not so constrained. So how do we begin the process of focusing
down the kinds of questions that can be asked and the potential answers that
can be given?
We could offer our users a limited set of FAQs
to choose between. This would make things easier in the short-term, but it
would also mean that we miss out on discovering what it is that contemporary
audiences want to ask. It would also derail our desire to mimic conversation –
to create the feeling that the user is talking directly to Mary and to the
past that was so powerful in the first workshop when we first met Mary.
Thinking about potential questions also prompted a
discussion about what was feminist about our bot. Would she for example refuse
to ask certain questions, suggest that people reflect a bit more or simply
suggest that they ‘google’ that one. How censorious and how curious would our
chat bot-be?
We also had to think through the relationship between the
questions asked through our chat-bot today (which would be relayed to the
archive) and the questions asked thirty years ago by researchers. At one level
this is an entirely practical matter – perhaps we could simply piggy-back on
the original questions, re-using these to call up original answers. The problem
with this strategy is that the interviews were highly conversational in style –
it can be hard to isolate a single question and answer as we see below in this
extract from an interview with Melanie:
Q: How about ways to stop it being sexually transmitted? Do you know how you can not catch it, I mean what safe sex is? A: Oh yes, using a condom. Q: Is there anything else that would count as safe sex other than using a condom? A: No. Q: Right, I’m not testing you. I’m generally trying to find out what type of things people know. A: I think this is terrible actually, I really haven’t thought about it and I’m realising that I know so little about it’ Q: For instance would something like oral sex, would you know if it had any risk attached to it or not? A: Well no I wouldn’t, but I would imagine that I would say it has. Q: Right. So you’ve got a general idea of how it’s … A: I’m assuming it has, is that right?
So, if we don’t piggy-back on the old questions, do we simply ignore them? In relation to the above example we might train the chat bot to hear a question that includes the word ‘safe sex’ – how do you understand safe sex? Do you practice safe sex? And we might select this particular extract from Melanie as an answer ‘I think this is terrible actually, I really haven’t thought about it and I’m realising that I know so little about it’. This allows for a direct relationship with the contemporary questioner and Melanie. Alternatively, the original researcher could be treated as an integral part of the conversation. Following this logic our contemporary user might ask a question of the archive along the lines of ‘how was safer sex talked about in the interviews’ – allowing an extract of conversation to count as an answer.
For the members of the workshop, this question linked directly to our explorations of who/ where/ how the feminism of the project sits and the relationship between feminism then (as captured in the approach of feminist researchers), feminism now (as captured by our decisions as to how to engineer the relationship between the front and back end of the bot) but also feminism (?) of the user whose questions have the potential to open the archive up in new ways.
And this takes us to the final key area of our discussion
during the workshop which was the relationship between a rule-based design for
training our bot to make links between questions and potential answers and a
machine learning approach (Artificial
Intelligence) approach where the bot works directly with the language of the
data set rather than the way that it is coded – having been already trained for
the task using rule based approaches that are no longer visible to us. In
thinking through these alternative strategies we considered the primary role of
the chat-bot as a user-facing tool that would helps people access the archive –
rather than a tool for analysis of the archive. In terms of the ambitions of
the FACT workshop and the RAD project our aims are relatively modest – to
collaboratively build a simple chat-bot and to gain an understanding of the
labour involved in this process (FACT), and to experiment with ways of
reanimating the data set to encourage new users and to learn about the questions
they may have (RAD).
As with the previous workshop we also learned about the
painstaking process of coding and that things take much longer than you might
think – both in building the front end of the chat-bot and in preparing the
data for the back-end. Our immediate plan is to mark up 5 interviews with
around 10 key words as a first stage of creating a relationship between
possible questions and potential replies. On Saturday March 7th we
are introducing our pilot version of the chat-bot to her first audience at an
International Women’s Day event at Manchester Central Reference Library where
we will showcase some of the
‘reanimation experiments’ that have been part of the RAD project.
Our latest experiment for the Reanimating Data project is the creation of a chat-bot that forms the interface between the WRAP archive and users. The project is a collaboration with FACT// Network, Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology, and part of their CHASE funded programme of work which promotes feminist expertise in coding. The project is lead by Cecile Chevalier and Sharon Webb of the University of Sussex, and the first in a series of workshops was lead by Suze Shardlow who is co-director of Women Who Code London. Over the course of three sessions, we are working together to complete a project whilst learning and applying the fundamentals of both the Python and JavaScript programming languages.
So what is a chat-bot, and can they be a feminist? Most of us only have experience of chat-bots providing help in our online banking, drawing on an archive of possible answers trained by AI to match up with recognised questions. Cecile and Sharon explain: ‘Our feminist approach to computation means that we are not just coding for coding’s sake, we are interested in critiquing both the means of production (e.g. the process of making) and the outcomes (e.g. the software/object created). This also means that the data and the context of our coding work are important. Therefore, we are delighted to announce that we have teamed up with the Reanimating Data Project to create a chat-bot that speaks to the Women’s Risk and Aids Project archive (WRAP).’
So Friday was the first in
the series of workshops and Suze worked patiently with a diverse group of
participants whose expertise ranged from ‘complete novice’ to ‘rusty’. We learned
about the difference between the ‘front’ and ‘back-end’ of applications and
gained a sense of the painstaking work that goes into to creating the kinds of
interfaces and functionalities that we take for granted. As part of setting up
the task I brought along some of the original pamphlets from the study. However
it was when we connected our coding to dummy data from the archive that we got
a taste of what it might mean to create an interface. The chat bot asked us who
we wanted to talk with in the archive. We said ‘Mary’. And then Mary appeared,
ready to answer our questions: a voice from the past meeting us in the present.
At this point there was an avalanche of questions about the original study, how
old were they now, were they even alive? What had the original consents
entailed and how it might be possible to translate them into a new media
landscape. The conversation moved into our own teenage experiences, questions
about what had changed in intimate relations over 30 years and how much we had
in common as women from different backgrounds and cultures. We also began to
understand the power of the chat-bot as a tool for a new kind of data analysis:
what kinds of questions would she be asked, how would these shape her approach
to the archived material. Even though we knew “Mary” was a sequence of Python
statements there was still an overwhelming emotional response to “Mary”
speaking back – especially for those, like myself and Sharon, who have been
working on the data for the last year.
Our plan is to work towards
building a chat-bot over the next two months and for this to be part of our
presentation of the fruits of the Reanimating Data Project in Manchester on March 7th. We don’t
know what this will look like, we expect that Suze will need to finish it off
for us. We are also unsure whether the chat-bot-and-archive will need
supervision – probably. We know that there are difficult stories in this
archive, including stories of bad and non-consensual sex, or loneliness and
self-doubt. These are also part of the historical record and while we have made
sure that the interviews are anonymous we are unwilling to censor or erase the substantive
content. So we just need to think carefully about the situations in which the chat-bot
is used and to understand a bit more about the black box of AI that we evoke
when we say the bot is trained with the data. In what ways might we need to
intervene in order to encourage her to be a feminist-bot?
Yet again, the project of reanimation has brought up vital contemporary questions. Starting with an archive is an exciting prospect, opening up many opportunities for discovery, collaboration and play. I am very grateful to Sharon and Cecile for agreeing to work with the WRAP project. Not only are we developing some of the skills and awareness necessary for understanding how to make things in a digital age, we are also bringing together tools and materials in new ways that open up the possibilities of what a (feminist) chat-bot might be. I am especially intrigued to fund out what people want to ask the past as well as to discover if these questions reveal aspects of the archive that have as yet been occluded.
In April 2019, I gave a paper, “How did portrayals of ‘disruptive sex’ change for teenage girls in the magazines of 1950–2000?”, at the Rethinking Disruptive Sex conference at LSHTM; my paper referenced WRAP paper 4, ‘Learning about sex’, by Rachel Thomson and Sue Scott. Later at the same conference, Rachel spoke about WRAP in connection with her current reanimation project that explores changes and continuities in girls lives and gendered sexual cultures over the past 30 years.This started a conversation about possible connections between the WRAP data and my own research, which explores girls’ interactions with magazines in the late 20th century.
My research is a historical study that uses readings of girls’ magazines of the late 20th century, and results from a survey of adult women about their recollections of the magazines they read as teenagers. Many of these women were reading the same late 1980s and early 1990s magazines that the original WRAP participants could have read. My research focuses on the letters that girls wrote to magazines, exploring the ways in which they engaged with and critiqued magazine content. What’s clear from the letters that girls wrote to magazines, and which repeatedly emerged from my survey results, was that girls had very limited ways of accessing information about sex. They described being unable to talk to their parents, having no siblings (especially those who have no brothers needing to learn about boys), and about the inadequacies of the school curriculum in covering these topics. Both the WRAP data and my survey data make it clear that for some girls, magazines were able to fill this gap and provide some straightforward, helpful advice:
[I learned] Far, far more about sex and relationships [from magazines] than I would otherwise have known; safe sex, healthy relationship advice that no-one else was giving.
(My survey respondent 1)
Jackie magazines were quite good actually. They’re really sexist but they were good for things like [periods].
(WRAP interview ALS20)
Girls were not all uncritical readers – some of them recognised that much of what they read was romantic generalisations, which turned out to be at odds with the girl’s experience of relationships with boys:
[I read] Jackie, and My Guy, and […] You know you just get an idea somehow from these magazines that the boy will take you out, and will be really nice to you, and at the end, they’ll kiss, and you think […] That’s the way it’s meant to be
(WRAP interview MAG12)
The lifestyles described seemed so far from my own that it was more like reading fiction than fact. Especially […] ‘dating’ as an event rather than something you sort of slipped into. The idea of ‘going on a date’ was totally alien to us.
(My survey respondent 9)
Nevertheless, magazines remained a major source of information for these girls, and the 1980s and 1990s represented something of a turning point in the way they covered sex and relationships. The girls’ magazines earlier in the 20th century were navigating a difficult balance between the dangers of too little information, and social pressures opposed to magazines offering too much information. In the 1980s however that balance slowly began to change, in the wake of influences including AIDS and second wave feminism. In girls’ magazines of the 1970s and earlier, coverage of sex was almost exclusively along the lines of ‘boys want it, and it’s up to girls to say no’, with no acknowledgement of any reason girls might want to say yes at any point before marriage. In the 1980s, that began to change, as demonstrated by this reader letter published in Jackie:
I’m 17 and I have a boyfriend I love very much. I’ve been having sex with him for over a year and up until now I’ve been lucky, but one day I won’t and I’ll get pregnant. We usually use a condom, but I’m still worried. I mean to say ‘no’, but I love him so much I can’t.
(Jackie, 9 May 1987, p. 25)
The landscape had changed enough that the magazine response entirely ignores the last sentence, and focuses instead on advice about contraception. Teenage sex between couples who are in love (perhaps especially when the girl means to say no) was no longer always frowned upon.The WRAP captured similar experiences of women who were having regular unprotected sex with a partner – knowing that they shouldn’t, scared they might get pregnant, but unsure how to have the conversation about contraception or to know who to turn to for help and advice.
QU: This boy you went out with for 9 months. Did you use any contraception? AN: No. QU: Why? AN: Cos he wouldn’t wear a condom, I weren’t on the pill. QU: Were you worried about that? AN: Yeah. QU: Was he? AN: Yeah, both of us was really. I kept on thinking, oh no, I’ve got.. [unclear]…yesterday.. I was really scared, I thought, cos I came on early, so I thought, what’s happening, what’s going on? It’s quite unlike me to come on two weeks early.
(WRAP, interview AMB18)
Experiences like these sometimes prompted girls to write in to magazines to try and help others learn from their example, as in this letter in the Just Seventeen problem page:
Recently, I was at a party and met a boy I thought was really nice. We both got drunk and ended up having sex without contraception. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d been sober, and afterwards I felt so cheap and dirty. I was a virgin before this happened and I’d always hoped that when I lost my virginity it would be with someone I cared for, and it would be a loving and pleasurable experience. It didn’t turn out that way. When my period was late, I became so worried, thinking I must be pregnant. Eventually, my period arrived late and the relief I felt has led me to write this letter. I feel I nearly ruined my life because I got drunk, and I’m never going to let this happen again. I’ve learned my lesson the hard way, and hope you print this to help other people realise how stupid it is to behave like this.
Tricia, Edinburgh. (16 November 1988: 51)
Just Seventeen at this point carried quite a few similar letters from girls who had taken risks with sex and wanted to help others avoid making the same mistakes, despite the fact that they themselves must have previously read similar stories and made the mistake anyway. This is however, part of increasing acceptance in the magazines of girls’ sexuality, and experimentation with sex, even if in sometimes-risky ways.
The late 80s was also the era of a beginning discussion in girls magazines about pleasure in sex for girls and women, which participants in both my survey, and the WRAP interviews, picked up on, albeit somewhat tangentially:
I just sort of knew vaguely that women can have orgasms [from] problem pages
(WRAP interview MAG12)
I learnt the word ‘orgasm’ in magazines, and an awful lot of tips for pleasuring boys. Disturbing considering the age bracket…
(My survey respondent 27)
So although magazine readers of the late 1980s and early 1990s discovered the theoretical possibility of pleasure in sex for women, it would take longer for this to translate into the right to expect pleasure. The conversation was still focussed on girls’ right to say no to sex, with the possibility of saying yes often only implicit in the discussion, or otherwise portrayed as problematic in some way. For example, 19 magazine, aimed at older teenagers, ran an article in 1991 about girls who sleep around, which includes the statement that ‘girls have as much right to do it as boys’, but moderates that right with questions about their motives in doing so:
But are they really happy? Tricia Kreitman thinks not. ‘There is something missing in these girls’ lives,’ she says. ‘They are looking for a sense of worth, to feel attractive and wanted, and they are hoping to find it through sex.’
(March 1991, p. 16)
This example from Just Seventeen is unusually explicit about girls right to say ‘yes’ to sex and in its critique of the slut-shaming discourse that could be read elsewhere:
[T]he only reason why you should have sex […] Because you want to. That means not feeling threatened or bullied and not having sex to appear mature […] being a virgin is nothing to be proud of or ashamed of. You shouldn’t feel inadequate if you’re lacking in experience, or ashamed if you have had sex before […] If you feel ready to have sex with your partner, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make the first move. It doesn’t mean you’re “loose”. Just that you’re taking the lead.
(Just Seventeen, 15 June 1988, p. 37)
The WRAP captured young womens’ experiences of negotiating sex and relationships against this shifting and often contradictory backdrop. Interviewees were frequently asked about their experiences and expectations of pleasure in sexual relationships and although the authors of the study concluded that sexual pleasure was largely ‘missing’ from women’s experiences of heterosexuality there were also examples of young women enjoying sex and trying to make sense of their pleasure using the limited discursive frameworks available to them, as this field note shows.
First sexual rel. at 15 with a 17 year old boy. Did it because she wanted to, says she was not pressured. Her mum is a health visitor and wanted her to stay a virgin until she got married, she didn’t think that that was realistic anymore.
Present relationship with a boy who she thinks she will stay with permanently. I asked her what made him different and one of the central reasons was that he was good in bed, and/or she actually enjoys sex with him. This lead to a conversation about expectations of sexual pleasure. I asked her if men and women had sex for same reasons, she said that women had sex for different reasons, they were more interested in the emotional side and men in the physical.
(Fieldnote for interview AMD10).
Despite the increasingly liberal approach to young women’s sexuality in girls magazines, participants in both WRAP and my own study looked back at their younger magazine-reading selves with some anxiety, and took pains to distance themselves in their present-day critical-thinker personas:
I think […] you always sort of learn things from magazines but I don’t know whether they’re the right things. Because they are all biased aren’t they especially the problem pages.
(WRAP interview BT08)
I didn’t really know how to read this critically, I just absorbed everything.
(My survey participant 55)
Some readers of the magazines did, however, read critically, and some magazines even encouraged this. Mizz in the 1990s was one such, running frequent debate articles on topics like abortion, and sex before marriage, featuring readers arguing the case and responding to each other; the magazine also encouraged readers to write letters arguing with things they’d read in the magazine, and frequently published these. Also appearing in the 1990s, a few years too late for the WRAP participants, was a magazine which whole-heartedly endorsed pleasure in sex for women and girls: more!, fondly remembered by my survey respondents for the ‘position of the fortnight’ and the idea that sex should be fun:
I remember that more! was really sex positive. Giving positions of the week and generally telling girls how to enjoy sex.
(My survey respondent 11)
Every issue of more! in that period contained a double-page spread on sex, including the position of the fortnight, reader letters, mini articles and trivia, as well as the usual amount of sexual content on the main problem pages. But readers’ recollections of this are coloured by their adult ideas about age-appropriate reading matter, for example:
In more! they had ‘position of the fortnight’ which I always thought was quite highly sexualized given the reading age.
(My survey respondent 31)
The WRAP interviewees who complained about the content of their magazines might have been consoled by some small improvements in these magazines in the following decade, with magazines like Mizz encouraging readers think critically about the world around them, including about issues of sex and romance, albeit while still portraying a world where girls must act as gatekeepers for the sex that boys want from them. For the daughters of the WRAP interviewees, and the daughters of my respondents, seeking information about sex in the twenty-first century is a very different proposition. There is infinitely more information available, but finding the good stuff in amongst the bad can seem impossibly difficult. The next challenge may be how to help today’s young women to navigate that.
