Our third-years have been working hard on their dissertations all year. These research projects offer lots of challenges, but also lots of ways to explore their interests, engage in deeper research, and learn about themselves and their skills.
In the first of our series on ‘What I Learned From My Dissertation’, Jac Thomas reflects on what his project, where he utilised oral testimonies to examine unseen LGBTQ+ social histories, has taught him.
For my dissertation, currently with the working title ‘The Agency of LGBT+ Communities Surrounding the AIDS Crisis’, I decided to use interviews with activists from the period to create an oral history analysis of the events. Using this method has taught me many things.
Firstly, the logistics of interviewing people can quite frankly be a nightmare. People may agree, but then life gets in the way and finding a two-hour slot that works for all parties can be awkward. I also had to take about a month more on my preparation than I intended to due to having to get ethics approval (an obviously necessary thing but one which really does take a lot of going through a form ticking boxes to say that you will not be drugging people without their consent).
Secondly, actually interviewing people is nerve wracking. I consider myself a fairly confident person, but having to ask people quite personal questions about their life, listen intently to their sometimes long-winded answers, and remember to ask everything you need to, is stressful.
Thirdly, we have transcribing. Luckily, due to Covid, all of my interviews took place over Microsoft Teams, which helpfully auto-generates captions that you can alter rather than transcribing from scratch. However, whilst this saves some time, I still had to spend about ten days listening to my own voice (which is never fun) and crackly recordings for hours trying to write out everything exactly as it was said.
All that being said, I do not for a second regret using interviews as the primary-source basis for my project. Listening to a woman in her 70s vent the frustration that I, a fairly well educated young gay person, had not heard of magazines and manifestos that were the centre of LGBT rights for a decade was enlightening. This is because they are simply not a prominent focus of historical study, either because of a lack of people working on the topic or because those people had predominantly focused on the work of gay men. I heard so many stories from her and others about events that I had no idea happened. This reminded me why I used oral history in the first place.
Far too often we are presented with a narrative that is written by the majority group; one which details events happening to a marginalised community, but then presents the rights achieved almost as the work of the saviour majority group, or as the work of a few loud individuals. This is not the case. Hundreds of individuals and groups work towards change, often coming up against barriers created by their oppressors who later surrender and then flip the script as if it was their intention all along.
For example, we celebrate Tony Blair for ending Section 28, despite the fact it took him 5 years in government to enact the pledge only entered into his manifesto because of the work of LGBT groups partnering with Trade Unions in London. We celebrate the marriage equality ruling ignoring the men who stood up in Quaker and other church meetings simply asking for people to consider his family as a true one to then persuade them to write the request for a bill in Parliament. We ignore the groups of hundreds behind them who spent decades and used numerous methods to reach those goals.
This does not just happen for recent histories, nor does it happen exclusively to the LGBT community. Many of the surviving slave narratives we have were transcribed and then heavily edited by white people seeking their own agenda, such as the writings of Sojourner Truth which are frequently altered to make her sound uneducated. We also talk of emancipation yet only add tales of individuals such as Harriet Tubman as a side note, and almost as a self-congratulatory move to celebrate ourselves as has been described by black writers on the intention to put her on bank notes. Whilst studying classics, not only do we focus on Greece and Rome, but imagine these places as monolithically white, merely because of the colour of marble statues.
Only focusing on the actions of rich, white, cisgender, straight males is a very narrow way of studying history. Not only is it very boring, but also means we miss many nuances behind key events and their effects on people.
As historians, we owe a responsibility to tell the stories of all historical actors, and the first way to do that is to listen and uplift the voices of those who were actually at the centre of the action. If you have ever wanted to know the hidden or authentic perspectives of an event, consider an oral history approach to the past. At the very least, we can widen our sources to include those of other perspectives than Kings, Politicians, and Bishops. It might very well improve your grade, and definitely your understanding of real history.
YSJU: History, War Studies and American Studies 