Exploring the Archives

A Beginner's Guide for Qualitative Researchers

Kathryn Roulston, Kathleen deMarrais

• Éditeur: Myers Education Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781975503147
• Sujet: Education
• Sous-sujet: History of Education

A 2022 AESA Critics' Choice Book Award Winner
A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner This book offers qualitative researchers an entrée into the world of working with archival repositories and special collections. It serves as a primer for students and researchers who might not be familiar with these sorts of collections, but with an interest in what has become known asthe "archival turn, " in which the use of archival materials and artifacts in contemporary research has increased dramatically since the 1990s. Suited to novice researchers seeking a general introduction into how special collections are created and how they can be used, the book offers useful, clear guidance on using different types of archives, developing topics for research within the archives, assessing materials available, how to work with archivists and curators, documenting the research process, and writing up an archival study. Archival records and material culture (including manuscripts, documents, audio- and video-recordings, and visual and material culture) housed in special collections provide a wealth of resources for qualitative researchers seeking to conduct research in the social sciences. Perfect for courses in: Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods | Research Methods in Higher Education | Exploring Archival Collections | Family Studies | Community Research | Introduction to Special Collections Research

REFLECTION 1

Permissions From the President and Missing Materials: The Challenges of Archival Research

Amanda Ingram, University of Alabama

IT ALL STARTED WITH A class project. I interviewed a woman about her experiences with desegregation and learned that she taught the first desegregated class at The University of Alabama Child Development Center in 1966. While this may not seem significant, 1966 was early for desegregation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Public schools were not desegregated until mandated by a court order in the 1970s. Through the interview I learned that the impetus for the desegregation of these preschool classes was the partnership between the university and Project Head Start.

After the interview, I sought more details from campus archives about both the desegregation of the Child Development Center and the partnership with Project Head Start. On March 26, 2016, I reached out to the librarian in charge of the archives. In his March 28 reply, I was told that “getting access to some of the information will require getting permission from the originating office.” I was provided access to press releases regarding the partnership with Head Start. While a useful start, I still needed to review the remaining documents. I persisted and asked several times for access to the remaining documents. On April 14, I was told the archivist would contact the President’s Office about the records. On April 19, I was finally given permission to view the documents, after the archivist previewed them to verify the files contained no sensitive information.

To provide context, the requested files were from a period ranging from 1965 to 1972. University archival research is increasingly important as institutions of higher education are currently being asked to reckon with their racist histories. These histories of race may begin with slave labor building the institutions and continue through the various desegregation narratives of the institution.

There is always power at play in the archives. It is not an uncontested site of information. What materials were kept? What was deemed an official document worth archiving? What does the decision-making process look like as administrators decide what files to keep and which ones to send to the circular file? And then, what “archival guardians” are in place decades later to determine who may view the materials that were deemed worthy of archiving? (Schwartz & Cook, 2002, p. 11). My project was a simple class paper. Luckily, I was not a student who procrastinated or I would have easily been turned off this project by the delays introduced by the archivist. Requests to the President’s Office take time and my research was ultimately delayed 24 days due to the special permissions I was required to seek and be granted.

Ultimately, the project started me down a path that ended with my dissertation. Between the initial interview and my glimpse into the archives, I felt the partnership between the University of Alabama and Project Head Start was worthy of additional exploration. In 1965, The University of Alabama hosted the second-largest Head Start teacher training program in the country. Head Start was devised the year after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed and was subsequently intended to be run as a desegregated program. Consequently, the teacher training program was also desegregated. The University of Alabama trained 1,700 teachers during three separate 1-week sessions hosted at four sites. At a time when racial tensions were quite high across Alabama and the South, a group of Black and White teachers living and working together for a week is notable.

As this topic developed into a dissertation, the research expanded from the initial archival files. One dissertation chapter specifically focused on the racial context of Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama at the time of this initial training program. I found a collection of oral histories in the archives that had been collected in the 1970s as a part of a class taught by historian Culpepper Clark. The interviews were conducted in 1979 with Tuscaloosa community members who participated in the White Citizens Council in the 1960s. The collection was clearly listed in a digital finding guide, so I did not suspect there would be any concerns about accessing the information.

When I initially reached out to schedule a time to see the oral history transcript and listen to tapes, I was told I could come in at my convenience. When I arrived, I was refused access to the files and told I could not review the transcripts without permission. In a follow-up email, I was told, “We will need to examine our current policies regarding collections with oral histories. I will pass your information to our administration and report back to you.” The archival librarian felt that there were not adequate permissions included with the oral histories which caused them to fall under a restricted category. The Dean of the Libraries agreed. On April 17, 10 days after I was initially denied access to the files, I was informed, “You can listen to the interviews and take notes. You cannot reproduce the interviews in any way. You cannot quote from the interviews.” Technically, I was allowed access to the files, but the restrictions put in place on the files were such that they were virtually useless for my dissertation chapter.

In addition to restrictions, there were inevitably gaps within the archives. Throughout my archival journey, I encountered gaps from both items not initially placed in the archives and misplaced items. Not all documents about the Head Start training program at The University of Alabama were retained to be added to the archives. Memos and letters may have been discarded as inconsequential during or immediately after the implementation of the project. Complaints or criticisms may have been thrown in the trash by the administrator who received them. Schwartz and Cook (2002) point out that some gaps are accidental and others intentional. Administrators from the past may shape future perceptions by omitting items. Archivists may make decisions about what to include or not include in a collection in order to influence how a particular figure or event is perceived. In the moment that something occurs, those involved may or may not consider the event to be something significant that might one day need to be part of the historical record.¹

At the time the Head Start training program was happening on campus, we cannot know what administrators thought about the program. They may or may not have seen it as an historic event. The university’s desegregation events from both 1954 and 1964 were recognized in the moment as important historical moments, and copious records were retained. The desegregation of the Child Development Center—a process involving women and children—was likely not recognized at the time as historical, and thus, fewer records were kept.

Archival research remains a key aspect of historical research but can present an incomplete picture due to both missing and restricted items, challenging researchers to find additional sources. In my case, I was able to conduct some oral history interviews with those associated with the Head Start teacher training program at the University of Alabama. Their voices supplemented the archival records that I was permitted to view and use in my research.

Note

1. Eric Ketelaar refers to this as “an anticipation of the future” (2001, p. 133).

References

Ketelaar, E. (2001). Tacit narratives: The meanings of archives. Archival Science, 1(2), 131–141.

Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1–2), 1–19.

THREE

Examples of Archival Research

THIS CHAPTER REVIEWS EXAMPLES OF studies in which researchers used archives. We examine how researchers conceived of their studies, what kinds of research questions they asked, what sources of evidence they used, and how they organized their findings. In other words, how do researchers tell stories based on archival evidence?

We typically think of archival research as the province of historians. Thus, we have included studies by historians who conducted archival research as well as selected research by social scientists in other disciplines. Although qualitative researchers typically do not draw on archival data as a primary data source, we highlight examples of qualitative studies that do. For each of the books we discuss

• how the author conceived of the topic,

• the purpose of the study and research questions asked,

• how the researcher discussed research design and methods used,

• how authors used theory in their studies,

• sources that researchers made use of in presenting the stories of their studies,

• how authors organized and represented findings,

• how long the study took to complete, and

• what we can learn about doing archival research.

Because book-length studies are diverse with respect to how authors represent findings, we have not included in-depth answers to all these questions for every one of the studies reviewed. This chapter, however, represents some of the approaches researchers have taken in designing studies and representing findings to diverse audiences in anthropology, communications, history of education, history, Black diaspora studies, and women’s studies.

Anthropology

Anthropologist Alysse Waterston (2014) began the project of writing her father’s life story in 1995. She described her study as an “intimate ethnography” in which she used her research skills as a cultural anthropologist to chronicle her father’s life story within the events in which they occurred. Waterston shared that she had multiple reasons for pursuing this project, which resulted in the book My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century. As a daughter, she pursued the project at a time in her life when she was reflecting on personal history and her own difficult relationship with her father. As an anthropologist, she wanted to explore the relationship between different forms of violence and individual stories. A key assumption in Waterston’s book is that “political and structural violence … shape the course and quality of human lives” (p. xvi).

Waterston’s father was born Menachem Mendel Wasersztejn prior to World War I in Poland. Mendel migrated to Cuba in 1930 to join his brothers, who had established businesses in the apparel industry. Later, Mendel moved to New York City, where he enlisted to serve in World War II. On his return to the United States from England, he changed his name to Michael Waterston and became an American citizen. Postwar, Michael married and started a family and regularly traveled to Cuba to develop his apparel business. Troubles ensued with the Cuban Revolution, and once Fidel Castro became prime minister, Michael’s business was taken over by the state. After experiencing much financial hardship, the problems in Cuba led to the family’s move to Puerto Rico, where Michael reestablished his business. In old age, he lost his regained wealth to an unreliable business partner.

Waterston (2014) organized each chapter of her book in two sections: an account of her father’s personal story, followed by the historical and cultural context in which the events described took place. Waterston’s evocative narrative relies on both family records, including letters, emails, financial papers, legal documents, papers, diaries, photographs and so forth, and archival documents that she located online and examined in libraries and institutions. Waterston conducted audio- and video-recorded interviews with her father and consulted her mother’s unpublished memoir. With other family members, she traveled to the places where events occurred. She visited Cuba in 2000 and Poland in 2001 and 2008. Excerpts of audio and video recordings of conversations with her father and her travels to Cuba and Poland are included on a companion website found at http://myfatherswars.com.

Waterston’s (2014) account portrays her father as a man of courage and vulnerability, who, having endured incredible hardships from an early age, continued to struggle against all odds throughout his long life. In depicting her father’s flaws and failings along with his accomplishments, Waterston highlighted how privilege and power operate to marginalize others, how “personal identity becomes muddled with dehumanizing ideologies,” and how conflicts between religious, racial and ethnic groups are “shaped by large-scale, often-invisible forces” (p. 153). Waterston’s book explored how the upheavals of the 20th century impacted individual lives, concluding that the events through which her father lived “brought terrible disruptions to the self; my father’s subsequent troubles were rooted in the trauma of loss, his search for respectability, and his yearning to belong” (p. 153). The research approach Waterston used to examine her father’s life demonstrates how connections can be drawn between the life story of an individual and the eras through which a person lived. Her work drew on personal and family archives, together with public archives, and interviews and observations relative to her father whose life formed the central topic of the study.

Communications

Harold “Bud” Goodall (1952–2012), in his study of growing up in a family with secrets (Goodall, 2006), explored his family’s past using both archival and interview data. As an established scholar of communication studies who used ethnography, Goodall (2000) was drawn to exploring his father’s side of the family because he knew little of them—he imparted that he only learned about his father’s sister when he read her name in his father’s obituary (p. 26). By learning more about his father’s family, Goodall (2006) believed that he could lay the foundation for examining his father’s “carefully, officially, and deeply buried past” (p. 26). Goodall’s research questions were driven by personal mysteries he hoped to solve. For example, why could he not locate one photo from his father’s youth apart from his father’s high school yearbook? And why was his father—who served in World War II—absent from the official government records of those from the state of West Virginia who served?

Goodall’s (2006) autoethnography draws on historical records from the town where his father was born, national and local archival collections in the United States, and from interviews with remaining family members and friends. Goodall recognized at the outset of his book that his narrative was fragile and incomplete. Goodall organized this study’s findings chronologically, supported by evidence he found. Through his exploration of his father’s life, Goodall learned some of what he did not know. For example, his father had married, had a daughter, and divorced prior to his marriage to Goodall’s mother. Goodall searched for traces of his father’s life and answers to questions about what his father did. For example, why did the family move from West Virginia to Rome, Italy, and then later to London? How did his father come to be exiled in Wyoming? Why was his father’s life tragically cut short under mysterious circumstances? Throughout the book, Goodall juxtaposed autoethnographic narratives of what it is like to grow up in a household of secrets against the workings of a spy agency designated with keeping a nation’s secrets. Goodall’s book does not simply tell the story of one family—it also contextualizes the stories of Goodall’s family against the backdrop of the work of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War. Through Goodall’s dogged pursuit of answers to ...