This one has been my favourite paper to present so far. I think it was really fun and people seemed to enjoy it.

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Brainstorming

Slides

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Script

[slide 1]

I am going play two sound recordings which both discuss abortion, so if you think this might upset you I invite you to mute your computer and after I have played them I will signal in the chat that you can unmute. 

(Plays segment from Redstockings Abortion Speakout, March 21, 1969, New York City and the anti-abortion film “Silent scream”) 

[slide 2]

The first clip we listened to was from the Redstockings Abortion Speakout, which took place on the 21st March 1969 in New York City. The second clip was from the anti-abortion film “Silent scream” made in 1984. 

[slide 3]

Both are featured an episode of the podcast “the Last Archive” made by historian Jill Lepore. In this podcast Lepore is trying to work out who killed truth and in this specific episode she discusses how the concept of “speaking your truth” that was used at the Redstockings’s Speakout contributed to creating the post-truth era we live in now. The whole podcast, but especially this episode haunted me whenever I started writing this paper. I would try to add it in but it did not really work, so in the end I extracted this haunting from my brain by writing

[slide 4]

 “speak your truth” on a post-it and popping it in the corner of my blackboard. I am going to do a similar thing now and 

[slide 5]

just leave a digital post-it in the corner of my presentation. 

[slide 6]

I realised that the title of my presentation is a rather ambitious, so I would like to make some amendments to in order to better frame what I am going to talk about.

[slide 7]

(Only Time Will Tell: the ethical dilemma of reusing oral histories in low risk contexts that DO NOT involve children or venerable adults, animals, topics of war, crime, drugs or sex etc.)

I am specifically looking at how to encourage reusing oral histories and the case study I am basing my research on is the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, which I assume will produce relatively low-risk oral histories.

[slide 8]

In this presentation I am going to map out the basic relationship between ethics and oral history that I imagine I will experience during these next three years. 

[slide 9]

Here we see a timeline of the life of an oral history. 

[slide 10]

At the start we have our oral historian, who wishes to conduct an oral history project. 

[slide 11]

This is the beginning of the oral history’s life. Already from the start this oral history is affected by something I am going to call 

[slide 12]

“experiential noise”. I am using this term to refer to how a person perceives the world at that moment in time, which is influenced by everything from what is in the news to whether they were hugged enough as a child. I specially use the word noise because I find it to be a very nebulous and volatile feeling. Here is a quick example of experiential noise in action. 

[slide 13]

This is a picture of someone hugging their grandparent: before the pandemic this would have be a lovely picture of intergenerational love, however now you hope that the grandparent has had both their jabs. 

[slide 14]

The oral historian’s experiential noise affects the oral history straight away. Lynn Abrams, refers to this as her “research frame” and discusses in the Transformation of Oral History how her position as a “university lecturer in women’s and gender history” influenced her interviewees testimonies when she did a project on women’s life experiences during the 1950s and 1960s. 

[slide 15]

The next step in the life of the oral history is to get ethical approval. How to gain this differs between institutions. I have completed my first ethical approval for my low-risk project and it was relatively painless. I consider myself lucky. 

[slide 16]

Clutching its ethical approval the oral history moves on to meet the interviewee, who has plenty of experiential noise. 

[slide 17]

The interviewee’s experiential noise is very complicated because they are the ones who are remembering. Memory is messy and potentially all sorts of confabulation, misremembering and gaps can appear during the process. 

Now we have all this noise that is being supplied by the interviewer and interviewee, but as soon as the record button is pressed all of it is frozen. 

[slide 18]

Stopped. Now we move onto a really important step for my project. The recording can now be archived, which means that it can then be reused and reusing is the thing I am focusing on. 

[slide 19]

But we must not forget to consult the consent form, that is the appropriate permissions and clearances, which if I am being honest have no idea of:

1. I haven’t done it yet
2. It’s different for everyone
3. GDPR is confusing

[slide 20]

But let us say for the sake of the story that it has been stored and is available. 

[slide 21]

Our little oral history can happily nestle between all the others holding its consent form and ethical approval close to its heart. 

[slide 22]

Some time has passed and along comes a researcher/listener. Being a pestilent human means they are full of new fresh experiential noise. Once they and the experiential noise come in contact with the oral history three things can happen:

[slide 23]

Option one:

[slide 24]

The listener listens to the oral history, goes on to write an account of why things changed or stayed the same with a full understanding of the context in which the oral history was created and the experiential noise that was present. 

[slide 25]

Option two: 

[slide 26]

Because of their experiential noise the listener listens back to the oral history and is shocked by what they hear and goes on to write something about the interviewee that is not flattering. Joanna Bornat recalls a situation where the testimonies of white Australian housewives, who initially had been interviewed about domesticity, were used to illustrate racism in 20th Century. Having their oral histories used in this way was not something the interviewees had agreed to when they gave permission for their oral history to be archived. It also suggests, as did the housewives, that racism has a history. They believed and said things then that they would not believe and say now.

[slide 27]

Option three:

[slide 28]

Again because of their experiential noise the listener listens back to the oral history and is shocked by what they hear because they are surprised that this is allowed to be public. Our relationship with privacy has changed a lot over the last few decades, as has the relationship between researcher and researched. An example of this could be when the historians Peter Jackson, Graham Smith and Sarah Olive, reused the testimonies found in the archive, the Edwardians. Theyfound that the interviewers had included field notes on the interviewees that contained information that definitely would not pass an ethics review or board these days. 

[slide 29]

In both option two and three the ethical approval and the consent to use form no longer matched up with the oral history, because the reception of the oral history had changed. The words said have not changed but their meaning has. The passage of time has not just changed the experiential noise of the listener/researcher but the whole of society’s. This is not surprising as language changes all the time, just think of the word 

[slide 30]

literally or zoom. 

This is why oral histories are so difficult to archive and write ethics for. 

[slide 31] 

The best way I can describe it is like one of those toys where you have to put right shape through the right hole. 

[slide 32]

Only in the case of oral histories the shape keeps changing.

So what do we do now?

Well I offer three options:

[slide 33]

Option one:

[slide 34]

Stop recording oral histories, stop archiving them, stop asking money for them. It’s just going to be an ethical mess. Stop it. 

Now I am going to go on a whim here and assume this probably is not what people are looking for. 

[slide 35]

Option two:

[slide 36]

We can try and improve our ethics forms to accommodate its noisy nature. Maybe if we make a system that forces us to annually update our ethics and consent forms we can keep up with the noise. Now considering how much time and effort already goes into ethics I imagine that this option is also not realistic. It reminds me of Wendy Rickard writing in her paper Oral history – ‘more dangerous than therapy’ that she wishes that more interviewees and interviewers could listen back to their tapes, but that this is simple not possible due to lack of resources – “it seems you have to be rich to be ethical”. 

[slide 37]

Option three:

[slide 38]

To start with we do more reusing. According to Michael Frisch within oral history there is a preference to record interviews instead of reuse them. This results in less information on the process of reusing. Which is why I am suggesting that we reuse more so we can learn more about it. The more we revisit, the more we can reflect, the faster we can pick up on ethical misdemeanours or challenges and the more we can improve the process of recording, archiving and reusing oral histories. We need to become more practiced in reusing and learn more about the ethical pitfalls of reuse. It is important to keep telling these histories that people have worked hard for to capture, but this also means we need to keep the shop tidy. Sometimes we might make a mistake but then it is our responsibility as a community to fix it and grow. 

[slide 39]

We are never going to be able to write the perfect ethics form. Time affects how we experience oral history so we need to find something that is as stubborn and relentless as time which I believe is 

[slide 40]

us (the human race)—the vessels of experiential noise and the deciders of 

[slide 41] 

“what is ethical?”. 

[slide 42]

Like our history, our ethics change with us because it lives within us, so trying to shove all the nebulous responsibility onto a single static document does not make sense. So for now we might just have to hustle though because only time will tell if we are doing it right. 

[slide 43]

But there is one more thing… 

[slide 44]

The post-it note. “Speak your truth”. 

So after I had finished planing this paper, I stared at the post-it note for while contemplating its existence. Eventually I concluded that the option three, where we embrace reusing and all its messiness was really scary. In this post-truth world where everyone “speaks their truth” and does not listen to each other it is terrifying to simple get on with and keep going. As an oral historian you could ruin someone’s life because you allowed public access to their testimony and someone completely misused it. You could write something and be “cancelled” or “trolled” for your opinions. Or you can have your funding cut by your government because the narrative your telling is not what they want to hear. 

[slide 45]

Initially I was going to end it here in a slightly depressing way, but I sent my draft to my supervisor who said that I might be over-worrying a little bit. His words reminded me of something my old neighbour used to say, something that I think is important when you do pretty much anything in live including research: 

[slide 46]

“all perfect must go to Allah so if you want to keep your rug you have to make a little mistake”