The Speaking Out project has been very busy in the last few weeks recruiting lots of lovely volunteers! These volunteers will be helping us to carry out oral history interviews, create a film and to produce an exhibition.
The volunteers have kindly given up their Saturdays to undergo training for their new roles. We ran two induction days which included an introduction to the project and the partner organisations, information about the history of Women’s Aid and training to understand the dynamics of domestic abuse.
24 of the volunteers will be carrying out interviews with people who have had a connection to the Women’s Aid movement. The first oral history training session took place earlier this month and we were lucky to hear from women who are very experienced in carrying out oral history interviews. Dr Andrea Thomson, who is a member of the Speaking Out steering group and a Researcher at the University of Glasgow Centre for Gender History, gave a great insight into conducting oral history interviews, advice on techniques and some of the pitfalls to watch out for.
We were also joined by Dr Lesley Orr who told the group about the oral history project she worked on for the 30th anniversary of Scottish Women’s Aid. Lesley is a historian working at the University of Edinburgh and she has a lot of experience working to address gender based inequality. We are very lucky to also have her on the project steering group!
In the afternoon we heard from Dr Esther Breitenbach, an academic at Edinburgh University who has worked extensively using oral history as a research tool. She was also involved in carrying out interviews with women who had worked for Women’s Aid in the 30th anniversary project with Lesley.
One of our project archivists, Amy, then gave an overview of transcribing oral histories which involves typing up the recorded interview. The recordings and transcriptions will be archived at Glasgow Women’s Library and will be a very important resource and record for the future.
Finally, we covered the hardest part… using the audio recorders! This can be tricky for those of us who are technologically challenged, but we hope the group were assured that the recorders we have are really quite easy to use.
Our next oral history training session will take place at the Glasgow Women’s Library later this week. Sarah, our project coordinator, will then be very busy matching up volunteers with interviewees across Scotland.
Our other volunteers will be involved in creating a film and producing an exhibition. We’re currently arranging training dates for the film makers and devising a programme of collaborative workshops for the exhibition volunteers which will take place over the summer.
We are very lucky to have a great team of volunteers on board and look forward to working with them throughout the rest of this project. Watch this space to hear from them about their experiences!
