Posted on

Reinventing ethics

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

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

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

The ethics of remembering and forgetting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Care, curation and infrastructures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democratising ethics

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

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

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

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

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

Ethics is utterly in the writing.

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

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

Ethical muscle: fallibility and tensions between procedural and relational ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Posted on

Other archives

Rachel Thomson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

Anonymity in the archive

Rosie Gahnstrom

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.

Posted on

Collaging data and learning under lockdown

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.