Papers by Amy Tooth Murphy
When undertaking oral history research with any group defining itself as a community the research... more When undertaking oral history research with any group defining itself as a community the researcher's relationship to this 'community' must be considered. Intersubjectivity's central role in the oral history interview is widely acknowledged. However, there is little work investigating how being an 'insider' or 'outsider' amongst those whom we interview impacts on the interview encounter. This paper will draw on my experience of conducting two very different sets of interviews in order to assess this impact. Firstly, I examine the ramifications, positive and negative, of being an out lesbian interviewing other lesbian women. I then compare this with being an 'outsider interviewer', amongst survivors of the Bethnal Green tube disaster, where interviewees were bonded together in a community of trauma.
New Directions in Queer Oral History, 2022
Queering the Interior, 2020
This session will focus on building effective partnerships with small charities and organisations... more This session will focus on building effective partnerships with small charities and organisations who can benefit from partnering with the university in funding bids. We will use a recent (successful) 93K bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund as a case study, explaining how the bid developed from an approach from a small charity to give some multimedia advice for a new memorial site to working up a small 10K lottery bid, which was then scrapped and rewritten into a 93K HLF application. We will go on to discuss the early phase of the project itself, an 18 month project interpreting the history of the 1943 Bethnal Green Disaster and its memorialisation, and consider the difficulties and importance of maintaining good partnerships in the project delivery. Finally we will outline some new funding programmes that have started at the Heritage Lottery Fund which may be of interest to others working in the community development or heritage field. The presentation will be given by the project director, Dr Toby Butler and the project manager, Dr Amy Murphy. Full information about the project is here http://www.raphael-samuel.org.uk/bethnalgreen-disaster-memorial-project-0 or see BBC news coverage of the Bethnal Green Disaster anniversary events which features some commentary from the project director.
In existing scholarship of twentieth-century British lesbian history the post-war period has been... more In existing scholarship of twentieth-century British lesbian history the post-war period has been largely overlooked. Whereas the interwar period and the 1970s and 1980s have garnered much critical interest as crucial loci of lesbian identity formation, the post-war period has been obscured between the two. What work does exist has focused almost exclusively on the creation of lesbian public spaces and lesbian communities. This has been to the exclusion of research into lesbian home and private life, and has also served to obscure experiences of closeted or isolated women. The critical focus on the interwar period in particular has also been facilitated and corroborated by lesbian literary studies, which has used the modernist movement as the backbone for the creation of a lesbian literary canon. This has been to the obscuration of lesbian literature of the post-war period. Furthermore, this academic bias has overlooked the significance of the cultural value of such literature by failing to acknowledge or investigate what lesbians in post-war Britain were actually reading. This thesis positions itself at the intersection of these research gaps. Employing an interdisciplinary approach this project argues for the greater inclusion of post-war literature and post-war lesbian lives in scholarly investigation. Through close textual analysis of a range of post-war lesbian literature and oral history interviews conducted by the author, this thesis presents insights into the minutiae of lesbian life and into the roots of lesbian identity formation within this period. To situate itself within existing historiography this thesis takes as its starting point the lesbian magazine, Arena Three (1964-71), undertaking an analysis of the magazine’s book review column in order to build a picture of the post-war lesbian reader. Following on from this, close textual analyses of lesbian pulp fiction and original oral history transcripts are used to assess representations of domesticity. Specifically the concepts of hetero-domesticity and homo-domesticity are developed and employed to investigate lesbian identities as they existed within both heterosexual and same-sex relationships. Graham Dawson’s oral history theory of ‘composure’ is used to examine how lesbian narrators are successful or unsuccessful in incorporating experiences of hetero-domesticity into wider lesbian narratives. This framework is similarly employed to investigate the ways in which homo-domestic experiences can assist lesbian narrators to achieve composure. Lastly oral history reminiscences of reading in the post-war period are analysed in order to assess the role that literature played, both in lesbian identity formation and in facilitating narrators’ journeys into wider lesbian social worlds.
Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s
Interviewing has become a major method in studies of reading, as in audience and reception studie... more Interviewing has become a major method in studies of reading, as in audience and reception studies more broadly, but it is rarely reflected upon beyond brief methodological discussions in individual articles and books. This Themed Section brings together a sample of recent and current projects which use interviews to investigate readingincluding the reading of books, newspapers, and comics, in social and individual situations. It brings together different approaches to collecting and analysing readers' talk about reading, through a series of studies which foreground readers' narratives. To frame the articles historically and to draw out connections between them, this Introduction traces a history of investigating and interviewing 'ordinary readers'-and audiences more broadly-and considers some disciplinary contexts and methodological implications of this practice. It is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to the methodology of interviewing but rather a means of beginning to reflect on where we have been and are now with interviewing readers, and on the limitations and possibilities of talking about reading. We also argue that interviews have come to challenge disciplinary assumptions about reading and readers. Our overall aim is to encourage the examination of a single meeting point in the entangled interdisciplinarity of research into reading.
Many of the interviewees for the oral history project ‘100 Families’, carried out in Britain in t... more Many of the interviewees for the oral history project ‘100 Families’, carried out in Britain in the 1980s, described reading as part of family life. This archive supports Janice Radway’s findings in Reading the Romance (first published in 1984) that women read for escape and as a form of resistance to domestic roles, but it also shows that such findings may be applied more broadly than romance to other kinds of readers and reading material, from the novelreading wife and the newspaper-reading father to the Joyce-scholar husband. Whereas Radway approached romance-reading women, this article develops a new kind of methodological approach with its reuse of an oral history archive, incorporating both female and male readers, and their children, spouses, and siblings. The reuse of interviews for different purposes than originally intended can avoid the imposition of disciplinary categories on data from the outset. In this case the ‘100 Families’ sample allows us to step back from any par...
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Papers by Amy Tooth Murphy