This conversation took place as part of Developing Healthy Engagement, a collaborative project at the University of Leeds. Our workshops brought together over 35 experts including researchers, professional services staff, archive professionals and creative practitioners, to explore how universities as institutions might better support wellbeing in the engaged research projects they facilitate.
The project is also inspired by community activism and scholarship that recognises the transformative possibilities and joy to be found in archival encounters. Together we produced Emotionally Engaged: A Toolkit for your Archive Journey and a series of Collaborative Conversations. The conversation published here features the playwright and dramaturg Lorna French, Leeds-based artist Ellie Harrison (she/her), and Professor of Applied Psychoanalysis Kevin Lu, facilitated by Kate and Simon. It has been edited for clarity and concision.
“I consider myself an interloper”
Ellie: The whole project has felt like it’s about a rebalancing of power… or an acknowledgement of power and where we can rebalance it. I consider myself an interloper; I’m kind of the Uber driver of university lecturers, and so to be invited into this space has already felt like something is shifting, and to be around people from so many disciplines feels like we’re moving towards somewhere where history could be co-authored which feels exciting and necessary.
Lorna: I found this idea of a rebalancing of power really interesting throughout this project. What do the different voices feel about this? What emotions are they feeling? Who is allowed to express emotion?
Kevin: Our subjectivity in relation to historical knowledge cannot be denied. But where this project moves things forward is by being unafraid to imagining possible futures, and this comes from the intention to dialogue with the creative arts and industries. What are we imagining? Nothing less than new futures for the discipline.
“it’s so much about the emotions of the people who have come before”
Ellie: I feel that human interaction is so key with archives – to even getting people at the front door, let alone through it. There’s so many creative, beautiful ways of doing that, whether that’s little videos of different people, different visitors welcoming you or soundscapes or booklets. There are so many options, but it’s about humanising it rather than the building being rigid and immovable. And about you, as the person having to change to accommodate the building.
Lorna: I think it’s so much about the emotions of the people who have come before you, to show you that you know that what you’re feeling is fine. Asking open questions as an oral historian would, asking what their experience was and trying not to guide them. For example, in a past project we created a soundscape of voices from oral history recordings so you can hear their accents, their voices. If there is somebody who’s coming into an archive and they feel worried about something, if they hear something similar to what they are feeling in a spoken response, it validates their feelings. There’s a kind of joy in finding that what you’re anticipating has been felt by others.
Kevin: What is that first point of contact when we enter a space, and how do we make those spaces more human and accessible? For me, this boils down to listening. And what is it that historians do? They listen. They hear the multitude of voices emerging from the past, and they make decisions on how best to facilitate those, at times, conflicting perspectives. Everyone has a story of how they arrived at this place in this moment in time. We must find ways to honour the subjectivities of others while honouring and listening to ourselves. It takes a huge cultural shift, especially within organisations. The challenge is how we prioritise this shift amongst the many other responsibilities of frontline Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums workers.
Kate: We can begin by acknowledging that some people come to archives to make a connection. Not everyone is on a fact-finding mission. This desire for emotional connection is something that archives and museums are beginning to harness. At the V&A East Storehouse for example, you can order up and spend time with a David Bowie costume. Can this approach help us reimagine the relationship between museums which put items on display, and archive collections where most collection items are stored out of sight? What happens when we move beyond the gatekeeping role of the specialist curator, so people have choice over what they encounter and find something that’s important to them? This brings different risks to those of a carefully curated exhibition, but it also acknowledges that people who are not professional curators also make meaning from collections held in archives and museums.
Lorna: I wonder about this idea of people just wanting an experience. Is there something around the idea of allowing people to express that artistically in some way? What it was like to experience the item, then walk off into the night with a spring in their step because they’re imagining him [Bowie] on stage…
“being able to turn it into a communal experience is a powerful thing”
Ellie: I think what we seem to be talking around is different ways of making the lone archive-user feel less alone. It can feel very isolating and can bring up big feelings, and so being able to turn it into a communal experience is a powerful thing to do.
It’s a communal activity like, “Should we go to the pub? Or should we go to the archive?”
Simon: Unlike working online and feeling completely isolated.
Kevin: I’m reminded of one of the events Iqbal Singh organised with Stillpoint Spaces London, where participants really appreciated the emphasis placed on co-creation and establishing a community of citizen researchers, allowing participants to focus on archival materials rather than being potentially overwhelmed by the historical resonances, burdens and legacies attached to being at The National Archives. Participants reflected on emotions and reactions that arose from their engagement facilitated by a poetry therapist, Charmagne Pollard, who invited offerings through response art that could be shared with the group. Our co-creators came alive when they were able to weave their own personal experiences and histories into their reflections.
Kate: Collective encounter can be especially challenging for institutions historically organised around systems that privilege individual knowledge production. But it is possible. One recent project, Staging the Archive, uses collective encounter as a methodology to engage with the historic manuscripts of Black theatre-makers working in early twentieth-century Britain and held in the British Library. Theatre-makers and researchers worked with curators and professional services staff to develop a chatty reading room. Instead of being lone researchers at individual desks, manuscripts were placed around a large table in what used to be the office of the head of the British Library. We looked at the manuscripts together and shared our emotional responses to the material all the while being overlooked by portraits of important people (white men) in the Library’s history.
Lorna: There is a picture from that chatty reading room of two members of the team laughing their head off over a manuscript.
There were manuscripts being passed around and we’re all talking. There was a producer sitting next to me and we’re both looking at the page. I was looking at the wording, then trying to see how different the language at that time was. Looking at the kind of sentence structure, how long each line of dialogue was. The producer, she felt the page and she turned to me and said imagine the actors who have touched this page, imagine how this has been staged. I then discussed the dialogue with her. And it was interesting being able to exchange different ideas about the script from different creative perspectives. It felt like such a communal experience because we were all in the space encountering and discussing these scripts together.
“the arts are foundational to impactful, immersive historical research”
Kate: There is a challenge here: how do we create emotionally supported archive encounters that require new ways of thinking and engagement with archive-users when resources are precious and often precarious?
Ellie: Let’s just do a photo. You know how, behind the bar in pubs, there’s loads of pictures of people on their night out. We need a photo wall of all the users of the archive. We need them to give the portraits of the dead white guys a run for their money. We need pictures of people; of those artists laughing their heads off.
Simon: In a communal project I was involved with around the miners’ strike striking miners, women against pit closures, and police officers worked together to look at an archive that represented their own histories. They decided they wanted to make films as responses to existing BBC archives. There’s no one response to an archive, and their approach recognised the very complicated, tangled nature of things. They adopted a creative response as a way of dealing with this.
Kevin: Archives themselves are often a source of inspiration for the arts. A recent collaboration between colleagues at Central, SOAS, The National Archives and Applied Stories saw writers and SOAS historians co-create period audio dramas from archival records, showcasing the profound synergy between history and the performing arts. Too often, the arts are treated as “token” add-ons in funding bids. However, creative output must be integral – positioned centre stage throughout a project’s lifecycle rather than as a late-stage “nice-to-have.” This partnership demonstrates how the arts are foundational to impactful, immersive historical research and that encouraging an exploration of the convergences between disciplines at an early stage of a learning journey remains crucial to cultivating tomorrow’s multidisciplinary researchers.
“care is often something that is tacked on at the end”
Ellie: As someone that does a lot of work about the ethics of participation and care, there’s a similar approach in that care is often something that is tacked on at the end. If we have enough time and enough money – it can be expensive.
Lorna: I think you’re right; artists are seen as expensive. Though, if you can’t care for your participants appropriately, maybe you need to think about doing something slightly differently, you know, and maybe going a different way that allows for care.
Ellie: The question that people who are blessed with power in these institutions need to be asking themselves is: “What am I comfortable losing? What power am I comfortable giving up?’’ – it’s always artist fees that get cut.
Kevin: My response is to pose a question to institutions – in losing a part of yourself, what might you gain by opening yourself to the perspective of those that are deemed other and located on the margins and the periphery? That, for me, strikes at the heart of collaborations that span disciplinary boundaries. We have to relinquish any fantasy (in the psychoanalytic sense) of complete control.
Ellie: I think you grow so much more when you give something up. I never really planned to spend a lot of time hanging out with historians or archivists. It’s the most wonderful happy accident that has fundamentally shifted the way that I see the world, both as an artist practitioner but also as a human being. The way that I move through the world has been fundamentally changed.
Kate: One of the things we have been talking around is how making time for others and listening well is a form of care. This might require us to change structures, break rules and reimagine regulations. University training often focuses on how to ‘manage’ stakeholders. But perhaps we need to train institutions and funders to think differently about time, and the care involved in developing good collaborations.
Ellie: I’ve been really lucky in that I’ve collaborated with academics or people within institutions that have pushed back against their own institutions to say, “Well actually that person’s voice isn’t being heard.’’ I’m now wondering what it is about those individuals that emboldens them to speak back to those structures…and why that doesn’t happen as a matter of course.
Kevin: If the aspiration is to embed this recognition of time as care in organisations, we need this to be embedded at that higher level so that everyone is empowered and responsible for realising this.
Ellie: (Laughing) So what we’re saying is we need to dismantle capitalism.
“a willingness to go to difficult places in what can feel like immovable structures”
Kevin: I’m saying we must find and realise our joy within the parameters of the organisation, and it is the organisation’s responsibility to equip and enable us to meet our aspirations. Having said that, organisations, especially within academia, are facing unprecedented challenges. It’s about finding balance amidst a tension of opposites. We record time and productivity in many different ways, and it boils down to an institution’s approach. If an organisation is committed to cultivating a caring and ethical environment, then its policies become a mechanism through which an alignment with institutional values may be achieved.
Lorna: The last time I was at the British Library I was listening to staff members, in conversation with people about their research. Those conversations are caring. How do we get conversations like that captured somehow, as part of productivity? The ability to talk to people about their research, to talk to people about their feelings… is there a way of building in a mechanism for that?
Kevin: If an organisation is committed to anchoring certain values or achieving specific goals, it needs to provide its members with the necessary training to ensure individuals are sufficiently prepared.
Lorna: So, it’s that idea of receiving training in the things you can do to show that, yes, I understand your situation, I empathise with you and I care for you.
Ellie: When I care about people, we work more quickly and more productively because we have a spark or there’s trust. There’s a willingness to go to difficult places in what can feel like immovable structures. When I really care about a project I over-deliver, I wrap everyone’s gifts really beautifully. You know, when I feel valued. Care for me is hugely efficient. I don’t often make that case to funders or institutions. You can get far more done in far shorter time if everyone takes the time to recognise each other’s humanity.
“It’s about stories, isn’t it?”
Lorna: The idea of the process of the archive being modelled by humans who’ve accessed that archive before… I keep going back, Simon, to the day that we came to Leeds, and we saw the virtual reality thing [Keighley archives and library’s new virtual model]. I keep going back to: how can that be used in a creative way to model some kind of entrance to an archive? To model an archive so that visitors will feel as if they have encountered it virtually before they encounter it physically?
Simon: Since that workshop we made Keighley’s virtual model fully immersive, and we are now working to embed digital collections too.
Ellie: Quite often, organisations that are trying to be very good with disability access will put walk-throughs or little videos of how to get there. But what works for disabled people works for everyone. It makes it more open for everyone, and so it’s immensely powerful to think about that before people even leave their homes, before they leave their beds. You know, when they’re on their phone going “What’s it going to take to get into this building? And if I can’t, how do I experience that library?’’
Kevin: If our intention is to prioritise inclusivity, then we inevitably return to the themes of developing a more human approach, one based on active listening and being open to the emotions and subjectivities of others. And history, at its best, does just that.
Kate: That seems like a lovely joyous note to bring things to a conclusion: thinking about approaches to archives based less on teaching people the rules and more focused on understanding what people need.
Simon: It’s about stories, isn’t it? Ultimately, it’s about stories of experience, stories of real life, and stories that humanise things.
The stories of archival encounters and engaged research experiences shared by the many collaborators in this project have inspired our new toolkit which places emotional sensitivity at the heart of its advice to archive users.