 So I'd like to start first with sex work and the state, collaboration, ethics, and challenging histories from Vicki Iklowski Broad at the National Archives. Earlier this year, Vicki completed a fellowship on co-collaboration and challenging histories with the Wellcome Collection, the National Archives and Research Libraries UK. This piece of work used a sample theme, sex work and the state as its focus to showcase study in context. Here, Vicki explores a series of key principles for ethical collaborations, discussing knowing the right time to collaborate and how to ensure an intersectional approach to records before working with collaborative partners. So I hand over now to Vicki. Thank you very much. I'm just going to share my screen now. So hello, everyone. It is an absolute pleasure to be here with you all virtually today. So I work at the UK National Archives, the official archive for England and Wales. My role is as principal diverse histories records specialist. So essentially my work focuses on diverse voices in our records that have traditionally been historically marginalised. Through late 2019 to early 2021, I explored the subject of collaboration, ethics and challenging histories through this fellowship opportunity that's been mentioned. And I'll be talking to you briefly about some of the findings from this work, particularly discussing setting the groundwork for ethical collaborations. And I'll be exploring a little bit the sample subject that I looked at, sex work and the state. So first I'll give you some background information to this work, then take a moment to look at the broad principles that kind of came out of it relating to ethical collaborations. And then I'll take a moment to just reflect on an kind of intersectional approach to records research that I think is a key kind of foundation to collaborative work. So briefly just for some context, my fellowship originally sought to address the challenges and rewards of working collaboratively to enrich our understanding and interpretation of challenging or sensitive histories. Due to the pandemic, the focus shifted to particularly looking at excluded voices in the records and how to address this kind of area of things as a foundation piece of work to collaborations. So this gave me space to think about the important groundwork that needs to be done to facilitate a truly collaborative and ethical partnership. So firstly to just unpack some of the words I'm using, this work seeks to look at collaboration specifically in relation to what I've termed challenging histories. So this isn't to kind of stigmatize those histories. I think it's more reflection on others' institutions and individuals, the kind of baggage we bring to some kind of some ways of looking at these histories. So while collaboration is valuable in many other areas and disciplines, many of the challenges and rewards, I believe are heightened in this area. The institutions grappling with historical archival absences because of past collections biases, the benefits of collaboration can be, I believe, at their most valuable. So these histories may be difficult to engage with for a number of reasons, such as historical or current sensitivities, collections weaknesses, biases and silences. And I think most principally, because of the challenge they may present to our practice and conscious and unconscious biases we and our institutions may have. So hopefully, what, sorry, I'm just gonna give you some records context now. Hopefully you're aware to some extent of what the National Archives holds, but just to briefly recap, our collection is one of the largest in the world containing over 11 million historical government and public records. So this goes from the Doomsday Book to modern government papers, digital files, parchment, websites, photographs, posters, maps, drawings and paintings, just to name a selection of things that we do have. Our records were created and collected by UK central government departments and major courts of law. In terms of sex work, the state has had a long, complex and largely negative relationship with sex workers throughout its history. And the National Archives records naturally reflect this as archives tend to reflect the biases of their creators. This is a sensitive subject as women, men and non-binary people involved in sex work have been historically marginalised by individual society in the state. The state's attempts to regulate sex and sexuality has paradoxically left us with many potential sources through police, criminal policy and legislation records. Ultimately, it's often through the policing of sex work in the past that we're left with so many rich and insightful records now. So that presents quite a difficult and challenging contradiction. So this leads to certain challenges in the records and especially when working with collaborators with lived experience of the subject, these challenges can become significant barriers. So just to highlight some of the kind of challenges presented. So we very much have the state perspective. There's often a kind of framing of the records with a legal, medical or moral lens. There's a lot of historical language in the records that we wouldn't necessarily now use. And this is reflected in the subsequent cataloging, which can obviously be a barrier. There's often a lack of obvious sex worker agency in the archives. So that's not to say it's not there, but it can be hard and difficult to kind of locate. And there's a lack of intersectional sex worker experiences. So I'll reflect a little bit more on this later. But for example, black and ethnic minority experiences were quite hard to try and locate in the government archive. And then there's also difficulties just about the sensitivity of the topic. So there's a lot of violence against women represented, a lot of problematic things around police regulation of sex work as well. Despite this, there's a huge value in the material held in the archives. Even though there's these emissions biases and limitations, I believe it's possible to reframe, contextualize and essentially reclaim the narrative of the individual in such records. So some of the ways I think we can start to do that are by reading records against the grain, particularly in a government archive and collection. Records were created often for very different purposes to what we're now using them as, but we can still read into them against their original purpose to try and find individuals' voices and experiences. We can accession items to represent missing voices. So that's something that the National Archives actually can't do because it was remit very much as the kind of archive of government. But for a lot of collections, that's a way of kind of balancing some of these narratives. So I just wanted to acknowledge that for many people, that will be potentially important. It's possible to collaborate with people who have lived experience of the topic you're looking at, and I'll look in that a little bit more shortly. It's possible to balance narratives by uniting collections. So I've got an image on screen from Bishop's Gate Librarian Archives collection, showing the English collectors of prostitutes. They have their archival records. And so by uniting, for example, a collection like that with a government archive, it obviously gives a more rounded picture. And it's also possible to use creative means of interpretation to kind of fill these archival silences, to imagine or reinterpret what could have been there by, for example, working with creative practitioners. So one of the approaches I mentioned there was working with collaborators with lived experience. So I just briefly wanted to reflect on the COVID context. I very much wanted to work with people who had lived experience of sex work to reflect on the archival records. But it became very clear while doing the fellowship that the effect of a heritage project in collaboration with any marginalised groups affected by the pandemic would potentially be unethical and exploitative. This isn't a collaboration that needs to happen right now. It's not time critical, unlike many other projects that are doing important work, striving to capture COVID memories. Many sex workers are currently fighting for day-to-day survival. Sex work charities are running emergency appeals for funds, illustrating the urgency of the impact of the pandemic on sex workers. And this is essentially why it just didn't feel the right time to do this work. And I think these kind of ethics underline collaborations really kind of crucially. So I've got a quote here, but it's actually from pre-COVID times, but I think kind of emphasises this to some extent. So Maggie's Toronto Sex Worker Action Project, a Canadian sex worker-led organisation, has said, our priority is to meet the immediate and long-term needs of sex workers in our efforts to live and work with safety and dignity. We are vastly under-resourced organisation with limited capacity to do that. And that's obviously kind of key for these organisations, is to support the sex worker community. So this kind of led to thinking about how to engage groups ethically, to think more broadly about principles for ethical collaboration and the foundation work on records to mitigate these archival absences. So the principles that I'll be looking at with you in a minute have developed from many conversations that have been had with colleagues from across the archives and library sectors. So thank you to everyone who contributed. They're generally common sense broad principles designed to be scalable. They're very much still a work in progress and indeed will always be part of a working set of principles that are designed to change over time. Each principle has been more fully defined in the work that I've done, but this is just some of the headline ideas to give you a picture of the kind of things that we have. So there's principles around building trust and being transparent. For example, in terms of the institutional purpose being transparent about that and what records and historical biases might be there. Endeavouring to create a safe space, an accessible space, shapes and consultation with the people you're working with. It's important I think to try and find a balance between structure and flexibility, review and adapt projects throughout giving structure to support participants but also space for that to change. Support authentic multi-sided collaboration acknowledging that all collaborators, for example, community participants, practitioners in the institution are all bringing something to the project. Fostering an environment that supports creativity and inquiry. Supporting wellbeing, trying where possible to create budget resources and project time for this. Collaborations involving these kinds of challenging histories are likely to be emotive and take a lot of emotional labour so it's important to acknowledge and provide kind of resource for that. Give space for agency. Give your collaborators space to make their own choices, be upfront and transparent where this isn't possible. Giving this space to people is really a fundamental way of starting to address the imbalance of institutionalised silences. Develop realistic project outcomes, don't ask too much of your collaborators and only do what you have time and resource to truly deliver. Where possible support the project legacy, try and create space to continue the relationship after a project and accept this will take time and resource. If it isn't possible, try and regulate expectations. And I think fundamentally resource any projects appropriately for the ambitions you have. If you can't do what you want to do ethically and fully, then seriously consider doing a smaller project but doing it well in a way that listens to these principles or whatever the appropriate principles are for the institution. So I'm happy to share more in-depth versions of these. Am I thinking behind them with anyone? So do you get in contact if that would be helpful to you? So now very briefly to focus on the records related side of this kind of collaborative practice. This research in part explored how it's possible to read against the grain of records original purpose. So I worked on developing kind of framework of questions to try and interrogate records, further to find voices that are even more marginalised within sex worker communities and therefore reflected in the archives in a more marginalised way. So this was to try and ensure an intersectional foundation for any collaborative projects. So fundamentals to this were the kind of really basic questions around what biases are in the records, whose perspectives do they represent and repeatedly asking this to interrogate the records, to ensure that as many kind of marginalised and missing voices were located as possible. And then fundamentally looking at whether any perspectives were entirely missing, acknowledging this and then interrogating the records to understand why that might be the case. So this foundation work is of course important for any thorough research, but I think it's also really key for the foundation groundwork for collaborations to make sure that as much as possible, all voices and experiences are represented in the archive material as a foundation to collaborative practice. So the results were kind of a spread of voices. Sorry. So essentially I applied this approach and framework to my own subject and work and the results were very much highlighting some of the missing narratives that were outside of the mainstream archival material around sex work. Particularly this helped to highlight the experiences of male sex workers soliciting other men. Sex workers we might now consider to be transgender and the experiences of migrant sex workers. So I've just got three examples on screen here. The first was around what were often termed in the records, marriages of convenience. Marriages of so-called foreign prostitutes to British subjects who evade the Aliens Act. This helped to find documents of migrant sex workers such as sometimes passport materials or other travel documents and sometimes photographs such as the individual on screen. The middle picture is an assortment of rubberware with vibro machines used by a sex worker who when questioned by police said I'm not a woman, I'm a male person undergoing a sex change. So a really open declaration there of their kind of identity at the time. So representing the kind of potential trans voices historically. And then finally there's an image of calling cards that are from the late 1880s. They were seized as part of the Cleveland Street scandal where a male brothel was discovered by police and the government was accused of covering up the scandal to protect the names of wealthy and powerful patrons. The calling cards belong to so-called professional Maryanns, essentially male sex workers soliciting male clients. And in our records that we have testimony from these individuals and they self-define as professional Maryanns. So it's really kind of rich records that came out of this kind of multifaceted approach to interrogating the records. So just to conclude, this research has helped surface ways of framing the archive to reclaim voices that have been traditionally marginalized within it by using a methodology to examine different historical experiences within the sex worker community. The principles that have been developed are meant to be useful. Please use them, feedback, discuss them with me and I'm sure there'll be further iterations of them. All of this work is very much a work in progress and I plan to do more to surface these excluded voices and take forward collaborations as part of this. So hopefully this short presentation has highlighted the potential stories as possible to find within a government archive and how against the odd sex worker agency and experiences can still be found. So finally with thanks to the Welcome Collection, the National Archives and Research Libraries UK for making this work possible. I'm of course very happy to answer questions a little bit later and yes, sorry for not having my camera on originally. So looking forward to the next paper. Thank you. Thank you Vicki. That was a really interesting paper and I especially liked as I have an audio visual background to the stories that you brought out at the end and some of the narratives that you found in the physical artefacts as well. So that was really great. I'd like to move on to our second panel for today. This is the NHS voices of COVID-19 creating a national collection of COVID-19. And this will be with Angela Whitecross and Stephanie Snow from the NHS Voices of COVID-19 at the University of Manchester. Stephanie Snow is a director and principal investigator for NHS Voices of COVID-19. Stephanie Snow is a director and principal investigator for NHS Voices of COVID-19. Stephanie's research is situated at the intersection of health, history and policy in which she is published extensively. She's also a Welcome Fellowship Award holder. Angela Whitecross is project manager and co-investigator for NHS Voices of COVID-19 and has worked in a range of archive museum and academic settings. Her search interests focus on participatory research particularly the intersections between academic, business, community and heritage organisations. I hand you over to Stephanie and Angela. Okay, thanks very much for that introduction. So my name is Angela Whitecross and I'll be handing over to Stephanie Midworth through the presentation. So today we're going to be talking about NHS voices of COVID-19 and about how we've been creating a national collection of COVID-19 over the last year. So basically just an introduction to the project through timelines. So on the 16th of March 2020 the British government advised all but essential contact to contain the spread of COVID-19. On the 17th of March the University of Manchester which is where we're based closed campus and suspended face-to-face activity. This was followed by the historical speech by Pointless Johnson on the 23rd of March 2020 which declared a national lockdown urging us to stay home, protect our NHS and save lives. On the 25th of March 2020 NHS voices of COVID-19 first remote oral history to do this we'd adapted both the technology that we used to still record in WAV but using the telephone the ethics paper reflecting this new situation that we found ourselves in. On the 1st of May 2020 we submitted in partnership with the team at the British Library an application to the UKRI and COVID-19 rapid response funding call to create a national collection of COVID-19 and to archive our entire collection that we'd created before. It was in July that we'd found out that it was successful. On reflection now the speed at which we were able to adapt and shift our method trained staff and volunteers and considered both the practical and ethical challenges seems astonishing to us. What was clear from the offset was there was already this was a significant moment in the history of the NHS on which others a team had already spent nearly three years creating an inclusive and participatory collection of oral history testimony. Moreover this wasn't only significant for the NHS but for us as humans experienced in this unprecedented there is no other word for it global pandemic our priorities and focus had shifted within our own personal lives but also in our professional lives. At the point in which we went into a national lockdown NHS at 70 which is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund was in the final stages of a three-year project recording oral histories and also showcasing the collection unbelievably on the 14th of March we were still on the road actually doing events as part of our national tour and exhibition a lot to prepare there wasn't many people there. So whilst it's astonishing that we adapted with relative ease and at such speed it's clear that there were a few things that made this possible. Firstly there was the social purpose we felt that we had to document what we were living through our team of about 10 our team's collective experience of working across heritage culture, academia, journalism made this scary and unexpected turn in our lives also something which we felt was so historically significant that if we were able to capture and record it then we should. Secondly in consultation with our main stakeholders who included a national team of volunteers and also all the people who'd already been interviewed along with other partners that we'd worked with it became evident that our compulsion to record this moment was actually something that was shared among people more generally as you can see the motivations in the word cloud on the slide this was when we asked our volunteers back in the end of March would you like to take part to interview people about their covert experience and I think the sense of wanting to listen to experiences for people to be able to share for us to hear those experiences became really clear. Thirdly, once we had no formal relationship with the British Library before this current stream of funding we had already been exploring with the team in the oral history collection how we could apply for funding which would enable the collection to be a secure permanent home and legacy. The pandemic again act as a catalyst here which positioned our collection to date and potential for future collecting during the pandemic as something significantly not only in the longer history of the NHS but as an event which would impact all of us in society. I just want to give here a brief kind of overview of what our collection is the scale and scope of the collection which is being preserved at the British Library and is part of their broader collecting covert initiative. It's easy to think about our collection in terms of interviewee rather than a recording number so we've got a set of interviewees that participated in oral histories before covert this represents about 800 to 900 people. We've also got interviewees that participated before and during covert as well as some people that participated during covert only. Also during the pandemic we had a cohort and we still do, they're still recording now of around 100 interviewees who did several interviews over the course of the pandemic capturing in real time changes in experience and perspective. Due to the inclusive participatory ethos of the project interviewees have shipped the course of the project we draw on a wide range of interviewees from NHS staff in the front line to people shielding at home. Our interviewee interviewer pool is equally broad and over 140 people have actually conducted an interview with someone for us so that could be an idea of the kind of scope and scale. The NHS places human experience at the centre of the project so in the UK everyone has an NHS story. If I asked you now to describe the NHS in one word what would that be? If you had to describe covert in one word what would that be? It's likely that the word you picture in your mind now relates to your experience but also how you're feeling now which is perhaps different from March 2020 or even last week. It's also shaped by the multiple relationships we have with the NHS thus our archive and collection is inclusive as it doesn't box people off or style up people according to a particular research, question or identity it's not specific to the way we might think about the NHS as an institution or covert as a singular experience so by taking this holistic life history approach it means that the interviews that we've recorded reflect the past many aspects of life this was particularly heightened I felt during Covid 19 it is impossible to separate our experiences of health care and covert from our other selves which lends to our strapline the history of the NHS and covert is essentially the story of our lives I just want to sorry I've got clicked on something it doesn't like I just want to briefly touch on some of the motivations we'll have for participating in an interview so actually contributing to the collection directly it's evident from the content of the interviews and the evaluation we gather that the experience of doing an interview is incredibly beneficial to those who've been interviewed they describe the value of being listened to being asked to be listened to and being heard about feeling empowered and also reflecting how therapeutic it can be to make sense and document their experiences for many people these experiences have been incredibly difficult at times the next part of this paper will consider these experiences and the expectations of the people we've interviewed focusing in particular on Covid 19 by using oral history methodology to record personal testimony we're ensuring that people both have the agency and the space to have their experiences listened to and recorded as part of the historical narrative this is empowering and meaningful to people on many levels we've positioned the experience of the interviewee though in participating in something which is as meaningful as the content of their individual contribution and the legacy of the collection as a whole so I'm going to play here a clip from Cindy who's a nurse based in Belfast her retirement to work during the pandemic and it's her reflections on being interviewed and my final question how has it felt to be interviewed for this project very emotional Ruth which is a good thing I think as I said I've never felt that I've needed counselling but in many ways this is a reflection of that almost of having a session this has helped me I think emotionally and I know I think about it for quite a while afterwards and I'm working first thing in the morning which is great and I haven't been able to work has been an absolute godsend to me because I don't think I'm somebody even if my job allowed that I'd be very good working from home because I need people around me and I think I'd probably drive myself crazy working from home all the time hopefully nobody will ever have to do that unless they really really want to but yeah so it's been very good and I must say thank you very much for that because it will push me into another dimension of thinking again about it I have started to write things down because we all need to do that I think we do we need to think about things and reflect on things and it is a form of it's a form of self-preservation really you know we need to do it as human beings so thank you very much again Ruth Philip it's clear here for Cindy the process helped to make sense of her experiences as it forced to reflect something she might otherwise not have done during the interview Cindy did talk about a number of challenging issues for example the physical and emotional toll when the pandemic had taken on her under colleagues but also the parallels with nursing during the troubles yeah for Cindy it is clear that this reflection was also a bit of self-preservation I'm now going to hand over to Stephanie thank you Angela so what I'm going to pick up on is the idea of oral history as a catalyst for change so Covid has already become a major focus for contemporary collecting and reflection in the broader glam sector worldwide and this recognises very much the social responsibility that I think many of us feel across historians, archivists and academics and that we do have a responsibility to document the far-reaching impacts of the pandemic that we're living through but we've also found through doing the project that Covid has produced a new imperative for public engagement with the value and social purpose of history Owen pictured here is head of programmes at Future Men and is a charity that supports men and boys to become dynamic models of masculinity and in this clip he expresses the ambition shared by many of our interviewees that the collection itself can be a catalyst for broad social change so Angela will play the clip Angela I can't hear the clip I'm not sure if anyone else can Sorry it was because I muted myself and assumed it would play Let me start again No I just really hope that the record is utilised and used in the way that it should be that my voice is one of I'm sure from what I've produced conversations before we've done anything you've managed to reach out to many other people to approach the Church of British society but it doesn't just sit there gathering dust that it's utilised and turned into tools and resources that help people whether that be from history lessons in school, whether that be through continued professional development and training of NHS staff and social care staff it's important that politicians listen and hear these accounts of what happened and that we don't lose the kind of the knowledge lovely, we have the next slide please So the power of oral history lies very much in its capacity to capture so much more than overarching narratives that we might find in other sources such as political commentaries or journalism or the details of dates and events that can be found in other places and one of the distinctive aspects of Covid is that it is the first global pandemic that is taking place in the context of global live media platforms so it is a point when we have much more access and material that comes from individual perspectives than we've had in earlier periods Now across the world generally oral historians in the US have embraced the value of capturing crisis oral history so for example there are landmark projects around recording and documenting New York's 9-11 tragedy the natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans but generally in the UK the oral history community is much more conservative the UK doesn't do crisis oral history interviews are some of the comments that we've had because they are no different to journalism so what I want to do here is just try and tease out some of the ways in which oral history is very different to journalism and other sources by exploring one of the interviews that we have with Rupert Pierce Rupert is a research professor and consultant in intensive care medicine at Queen Mary's in London throughout the pandemic he's been involved in online discussion as well as contributing to the cutting-edge research on the treatment of Covid-19 and his role on the pandemic at the front line of intensive care is very much visible to future generations and will be preserved through his Twitter account he has almost 35,000 followers he regularly post reflections and observations on the pandemic but there are two clips here which I think really illustrate strongly the difference between this sort of output and what oral history captures so the first one is at the beginning of the interview when Rupert explains why he's keen to share his experiences with us Can I ask why did you agree to take part in this project? I think it's so incredibly important that we write the history of what's happened so that people in the future can look back and see the experiences as they were lived and felt in real time and there's so much to learn for people to hear all of that and I think it's important what you're doing and why the sense is incredibly important So the next clip you'll hear is Rupert speaking at the end of the interview and I hope you will be able to hear that the tone of his voice expresses his surprise in a positive way that the interview had actually been much more personal than he had expected How has it felt to be interviewed for the project? Catholic In questions to what I thought I might be asked much more personal to me I guess rather than observations or personal experiences but it's lovely to know that you're doing this it's lovely to not have to worry that the history will get it forgotten I think it's so important that what you're doing we're really happy to support it So I hope this just brief example really emphasizes the value of oral history it places the individual at the centre of the narrative in which Covid is part of their broader life experiences rather than defining people by their role or the experience itself which then becomes restrictive in terms of how they construct and develop their stories developing understandings of the way in which Covid has changed and shaped people's lives and the consequences of these changes we will only be able to do that if we do contextualise Covid as a major experience but within a much longer life history and this is where the power of oral history lies So if we can have the next slide Can I ask why did you It's very difficult with clips getting a clean transition but anyway some brief conclusions and I hope that we'll be able to pick some of these up in the Q&A I think the first thing we'd say is that our experiences of responding to Covid is to encourage people to be agile and curious and to really think about the changing situation that they're in if that occurs in the middle of research and collecting and think how it might be adapted to capture important things ethical considerations that obviously at the fore of anything we do but these can be addressed by giving agency to participants and by involving stakeholders in decision making and by collectively developing support systems and opportunities for regular check-ins about the well-being of all involved The social purpose of all research and collecting should inform the process and outputs So by interviewing people we are creating a source that can have equal authority alongside other sources Longitudinal data and holistic approaches means that we can capture Covid in multi-layered and complicated ways and it means that the evidence is being produced to inform policy and practice and influence change in real times thereby hopefully making a future in which we can put lived experience at the very heart of policy and practice So thank you very much for that Great, I'd just like to thank both Stephanie and Angela for that talk I found clips hearing the audio of some of the oral histories was incredibly moving really takes us back not just at the time of what was happening but what is still unfolding and how we're really taking people's histories experiences and emotions and well-being on board as well So I'm just going to move on to the Q&A and put some questions to our panellists I just wanted to very quickly first ask Vicky before we go forward In terms of the work you said that you paused some stuff because you know agencies were very busy responding to the crisis and I just wondered where do you hope to take this work next? Is it going to be more sort of work within the archives to uncover more stories or is it to maybe start to try that sort of larger outreach and collaborative work Yeah, thank you for that question I would ultimately love to take forward the collaborative work working with the collections and the current sex workers but I'm conscious that I want to do that at the right time so I definitely think I guess that's slightly paused but definitely what I ultimately want to be doing so I'm hopeful maybe next year but equally I think it gives me time to think about funding and things like that that could help support such a project so yeah I'm very keen to take that forward but just hesitant we don't know quite how everything's going to play out so yeah keen to pick that up when possible and then at the same time in the meantime I'll absolutely be doing more archival work to support this so that there's the records there when something can pick up that can be taken forward So that's fantastic, thank you and somewhat tied to this we have a question from Melinda Haunton It was interesting to see the difference between the ongoing activity, code collecting with participant support and Vicki's decision of necessity to pause collaborative work during the pandemic do you think this kind of project is more therapeutic for participants or more an additional emotional burden I can pick up on that I think partly because of the collections I'm working with, with the state perspective there's very loaded collections quite challenging and tricky I'm not trying to do all histories with participants I guess I'm trying to engage them with the collections and that didn't feel like a priority right now in the current situation but I do think it's interesting to reflect on both sides of this and I can certainly see the NHS project we could hear from some of those quotes had a real emotional impact in a really positive way and I guess part of the reason for the foundation work I wanted to do around records and things like that is to know the challenges up front of the material that I've got because I do think that's quite a different kind of project and it just didn't feel like the right time to take that on I also think given the challenges of a government archive and collections doing that virtually would have been very challenging developing those new relationships from scratch so that was part of my thinking as well Great thanks and Stephanie Yeah can I come in on that Vicki first of all great paper really enjoyed it and I think it resonates really nicely with our project and I think one of the things that we would stress is that each project and the decisions that you make around it have to be absolutely specific to that context we were only in a position to respond as we did because we've got that three year track record of working with Stakehold in the interviewees developing a real community in which we had a very sort of supportive space to thresh out the ethical considerations did it feel right is this is something we should do and things and I mean I think from your project actually you will have the benefit of having a sort of longer perspective because you will have seen how the pandemic plays out so that when you then do go back and pick it up you'll actually be able to build all those nuances in in a way that will really add value to what you're doing so I think every project has to be fit for the purpose. Thank you and we have a question from Maria Gaten you've mentioned the collections inclusivity how did you get your interviewees stroke monitor this is this aimed at us Karen it's not specifically saying what collections it's aimed to but if you'd like to reflect on it I mean Angela might want to say more but our strategy has very much been to identify gatekeepers to communities that are not currently very much involved on the historical record and in fact the motivation for setting up the NHS at 70 project in the beginning was because as a researcher I was really frustrated that the sources that were available the archives that we had certainly oral history archives simply reflected the voices of white elite male decision makers rather than many of the other communities that make up the history of the NHS and you know the wider history of patients so our model has very much been to think about charities, communities and to build relationships with those and then through engaging with them to develop the space in which we can create relationships and trust with potential interviewees Angela do you want to add some more to that? Just in terms of how we monitor it it's as Stephanie was saying it's very much about the gatekeepers and the stakeholders and also the volunteers themselves like said there's 140 plus different people who interview for the project so they're themselves are also gatekeepers in their own way and are able to work within their own communities and bring in their own expertise but yeah we do also in addition to having like a kind of abroad everyone's got an NHS everyone's got a Covid story which they do as a team we also strategically plan for where there are gaps and part of the way that we've been doing this this year is to actually include people in conversations so we've been holding a series of Covid conversations which are free online events and they're all on our website as well which are where people are talking about what needs to be in this national collection what voices need to be there and that's also kind of an active participatory way in which we can encourage people to get that full range of experiences. And just to follow up on that from Alan Sudlow who says all great talks wanted to ask Stephanie and Angela to what degree participants situated their own experiences in relation to the national story as told by journalists and politicians in brackets Stephanie's distinction. I could see the power of lived experience in comparison with other sources for future historians stroke sociologists. Thank you. I mean I think one of the first examples of that that comes to mind is in the events that happened around the roll out of the vaccination programme last December in the beginning of the year because initially when the vaccines were licensed for clinical use they were licensed under the condition that the two vaccines would be given within a three week period and so when the first cohorts of patients were signed up to be given the vaccines those that was the basis under which they consented. Now very rapidly the government changed policy on this and because of the shortage of supplies and the shift to a strategy of trying to vaccinate as many people as possible with the first dose rather than giving a smaller cohort the two doses the policy was that the period should be extended to 12 weeks. Now we now know that this is absolutely fine that the don't seem to be any more clinical risks from this and in fact there might be benefits but what we have on record is responses of doctors and patients and nurses during those few weeks when there was a lot of confusion about the change in policy recording how they felt that it was really impacting on relationships of patients in terms of trust patients saying that they felt sort of very confused about it and they weren't quite sure sort of why it had happened. So I think it's things like that the sort of overall narrative in a couple of years time will be that the UK's vaccination program was one of the successful things in response and it was rolled out and people were done with a 12 week gap and I feel these sorts of aspects might well be lost as we develop a sort of stronger and more sort of collective narrative around it and I hope this is very much where our project will sort of challenge and open that up that it's much more difficult to get sort of consistency around one voice when actually you've got thousands of voices saying it was slightly different and it felt different from their point of view. Thank you I have a couple of questions for Vicky the first one is how did you identify the marriages of convenience? Yeah great question so actually initially I guess I hadn't considered searching for them but actually just that marriages of convenience as a search term does bring back a few things on our catalogue and then looking at those more I've got a sense of kind of other language as well that was being used so essentially it was metropolitan police records predominantly that are kind of observing women coming into the country that's part of the reason there were occasionally passports and documentation like that to kind of get kind of people at the borders to look out for certain individuals and again that's the reason for photographs but I guess that question also makes me think one of the really challenging things in the archive was actually around the trafficking of women and sex workers so I was very much coming from the point of view of trying to use sex worker-led organization definitions of what sex work is but there are these tensions in the archive where some women have been trafficked for sex work and also some assumptions have been made about who is being trafficked and who's not and we can't ask those individuals in the past what their lived experience was so there's these really tricky grey areas where we don't know if people were choosing necessarily to engage in sex work or kind of being forced into it but the majority of things were generally more clear cut than that and there was also times kind of testimony from women to the police at the time explaining their individual circumstances but again how accurate that necessarily was given the pressures on individuals at the time is hard to know And this feeds into a secondary question or maybe an elaboration on it saying it was fascinating to hear how you've interrogated state records to find missing perspectives were there any voices you hoped to find in government archives but didn't despite your best efforts and if so how do you address this or is everything there if you really look it's a great question so I guess I was lucky with the scale of our collections that there is a lot of opportunity to interrogate them in different areas and there is the potential to kind of find a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily think would be there but yeah I definitely there were definitely voices that were missing men soliciting women for sex work as clients it wasn't really present but I believe the historiography kind of says that was very rare anyway so it was kind of a slim chance to find that in the archives and then the black Asian ethnic minority voices were much harder to find in general but I was pleased to find quite a lot of these kind of migrant experiences that were very interesting and ultimately a lot of our records don't necessarily comment on the colour of someone's skin they might say where they were born but not the full depth of detail that sometimes is helpful to get that inclusive view of history so in a collection at our scale it's possible to find quite a lot if you interrogate the records a lot enough but I can appreciate that it's not always possible with everyone's collections and I think of course the way people are actually referred to in documents can be both harsh but also very misleading as well so I wish you well with your future endeavors digging deeper into the archives back to Angela and Stephanie I have two questions that are interlinked the first one as such an important resource should the NHS COVID voices project be shared and are you still planning to collect material on an ongoing basis as the pandemic continued and this feeds into another one which is how do you sustain the momentum with the project and communicate the value of oral history to your participants Shall I start off and then Angela can come in I think taking this sort of second question first I think the idea of sort of momentum is something that we have found is coming from the outside anyway and I think that's what's enabled us to keep going as a team we're all working remotely still we haven't been able to be face to face together for months and months and that really is very hard when you're working on creative things but I think it is the commitment and the enthusiasm and the conviction from all the people who are working with us that really does sort of keep us going so I mean I don't think it's us that generates the momentum I think it's all the people who are involved Angela do you want to pick up on that? Yeah so at the moment talking about this the idea of momentum and people just picking up on what Stephanie said we're rolling out a piece of work in partnership with both NHS Northwest and also NHS England patient experience team so thinking about oral history as a method in which people can make sense and also as a catalyst for change so we're actually delivering a bespoke kind of oral history story talent to help make sense so using some of the material that we have so actually using the evidence from our existing collections to work with stakeholders within the NHS to train them in oral history skills and methods but also that enables them to have difficult conversations that need to be had that can feed into their learning and hopefully obviously feed into our collection to make it as broad as possible so I do think that momentum is something that we feel like we could do this forever with the appropriate funding so that is talking about uses of the collection the collection has been used to inform policy practice reports that we've got a member of the team that is working on in particular so Esther's working on that and also looking to the future at how we can creatively use this in different ways yeah with different partners and with different stakeholders to help everyone make more broad sense of Covid and I just wondered as well talking about the collection you mentioned that the NHS at 70 is being preserved by the British Library and that this has been taken on as part of their Covid collection going forward are those materials available yet and if for when they are going to be available how publicly available will they be and will it be through the British Library will it be through a sort of dedicated website and they're really more with the preservation part of it well it's a combination of both and it's actually really exciting so as part of the project funding that we got from NHS Voices of Covid from the HRC UKRI we've actually been able to build in a project archivist who's based at the British Library and is cataloging our collection at the moment so we are in the middle of transferring our collection over in batches so for what we would call a closed interview so one that we're not going to pick up again and by next January we'll have transferred our entire collection of recordings over to the British Library we have a catalogue number and it didn't think about putting this on the screen but C 1887 the catalogue number but it's basically so we added to the catalogue but the audio isn't there to listen to yet but you can obviously request to go into the BL and listen to the audio and obviously as the catalogue's populated and as we send sensitivity review all that kind of broader collection it will be available through the British Library we also have a dedicated website which is NHS70.org.uk which highlights some clips and audio and we're in the process of kind of building different exhibition style pieces and we will continue to do that as well so it is a two-part thing there is the accessibility the preservation and legacy in terms of the British Library and there's also kind of us doing our front-facing things we're making a film we're building policy documents we're doing emotional literacy toolkits so it will be for a range of audiences across a range of working with different stakeholders I hope that answers that that certainly did answer that I'm just putting your website in the chat could you just give me again the call number for the British Library it's 1887 and that was at C 1887 I think if you just search within the sound heritage our interviews will be the last uploaded probably at the moment anywhere I hope none of the archivists are actually listening to me try and explain this it's taken me longer to put this in because I'm not used to typing for live streams and my abilities have gone all right our websites in there as well thank you great and I just wondered also as well you mentioned that you've got 100 interviews that are captured in real time an ongoing experience with these interviewees their experience and their perspective and I just wondered how long do you see that initiative going on for it's because it's hard to explain this because when we first started recording last March it felt like it was going to last for 3 weeks maybe 6 weeks so it was like 3 months and now we got to January this year and we had a work plan this is what January looks like and then obviously we're into another phase so we did a bit more kind of more recordings with people who were being interviewed as well as new recordings and I think this because COVID is very uncertain our kind of ongoing interviews the timeline for them has shifted and changed but the people that participate have bought into that and want to be part of that so we're in the process of doing what we're calling year on final sum up interviews with most of those participants but with a kind of an open door for both them and us if there's another one that needs to be added because it is Stephanie's written about this and spoke about this elsewhere we're all actors in this crisis and no one knows where we're going how we're going to end up, Stephanie what are your thoughts about that in terms of ongoing ones I think one of the values that we realised that we had from the position we were in last March was that we already had a baseline of hundreds of life histories pre-COVID so that talked about people's health people's experiences as patient staff what the NHS meant to them how it is interwoven with their lives different sorts of epidemics and health crises like HIV and AIDS or like particular outbreaks of small box or TB or whatever in earlier generations but I think the idea of sort of longitudinal collecting around COVID is going to be an increasingly important thing because it's easy to see immediate impacts but actually what the long term effects on people's lives and communities are is something that will develop over time so I think our ambition is that our current funding finishes at the end of January 2022 but we're certainly looking for possibilities in which we can keep a longitudinal cohort going over an indefinite period so that once every six months perhaps to start with and then once every 12 months we can pick up with the same people and capture the change in the legacy of COVID Just to give you an example of how things changed I literally got a text saying pick me son up from reception now because out there bubbles burst so from beginning to the end of this kind of call at my perception of COVID has changed again and I think this is the thing with people participating is that it is actually in real time and things do change and perceptions do change and I think the privilege of being able to record that has been one of the most interesting things I think about working on the project and thanks to Alan for putting the BL stuff in there and I think we have one other which is have any individuals restricted access to the recordings now I would imagine once people have done the recording they just feel that they can't really allow it to be fully committed once they've gone through that emotional journey it's I'll let Stephanie pick up on this in a minute but the majority of people who take part in an interview have done so using their name and with full permission to use that interview there are some people particularly working maybe within the NHS who are a younger point in their career and more reluctant to commit fully to that but that is actually a minority I would say that actually the agency to speak and the freedom to speak because it's neutral we aren't part of the NHS we're independent we're not a national organisation neither we're across the four nations actually gives people the freedom and lots of people are actually just saying things or reflecting on things that they want in the public domain there's this need for them not only to reflect personally but for people to understand and yeah, Stephanie do you want to pick up on that? Yeah so in terms of our sort of ethical permissions we basically give people the option to participate and give consent for their full interview to be used or to think about whether or not they wish to close particular sections or indeed the whole interview and this is very much something that we feel we need to offer because different people at different points in their lives will have different considerations so we have got some junior clinicians contributing who are speaking out very forcibly about things that have gone wrong in their institutions things that they are really critical about but obviously feel that at that point in their career they don't want that to be broadcast publicly because it might well impact on future employment and things but by and large most people are committed to their views and their experiences being put at the centre of public and social use and response to the pandemic so I think again it is just about having that flexibility and this is the advantage of course of working with the British Library you know the interviews are going to an archive where all of that can be managed thoroughly and with proper attention to the needs and the concerns of interviewees and just a few more questions before we wrap up I'm just coming back to Angela and Stephanie before I ask another one of Vicki about the COVID project did you experience any differences in the response disposition to answering questions during pre-COVID and COVID interviews? I think that there is a slight difference in not necessarily in terms of how able or willing people are to answer questions but actually in the idea of urgency and the fact that it just needs to be done it's really of vital importance and I guess pre-COVID people did sort of buy into yes there is a social purpose and we do need to capture the longer history and it is really important to have lives and experiences at the centre of things but I think the fact the experience for everybody of living through this totally unanticipated global pandemic has enforced that to the point when you know that's why they're participating they're doing it for a reason it's not just that you know we've invited them and yes they'd like to sort of support us that that purpose of doing it is very much of the heart I think of every interview that we do at the moment. Yeah and also just going back to kind of the initial roots of the project three years ago it was very much centred around the NHS being 70 and the kind of tone of what in which we were collecting so the spaces in which we were inhabiting as a project to work with different stakeholders was very different to what is at the moment so I think that's kind of reflected in again that kind of sense of urgency but also the what we might call the broader feeling in the country at the moment anyway. Thank you both and one final question for Vicki I know this was addressed somewhat in your brilliant paper but how have you navigated the challenges and politics of working for a state institution when building a relationship with sex workers who have been victims of state oppression and state violence. I'm thinking especially doing this in the first instance before you know one another. Yeah I think that's really at the heart of a lot of the work I took on with the fellowship I knew it would be a challenging topic to kind of broach but yeah definitely that kind of under I guess that's under everything that I was working on and I think for me that's why developing the ethical principles was so key to make sure there was the right framework and work in place but also the same with the records related stuff to make sure that we were breaking down as many barriers trying to find as many voices and experiencing as possible because ultimately that is a huge challenge but I think we need to find ways a state archive of mitigating the absences and difficulties with our collections so although it's certainly very challenging yeah that seemed key to me so I didn't want the extra barriers of having to do these things virtually and the kind of problematic ethics that I discussed of doing that during a pandemic but I think no matter what time I take that work forward it's always going to be a challenge and it's going to be testing and because of those complexities of the records and the relationship between the state and sex workers historically so yes I'm sure as things go forward I'll share more about that experience and the tensions and how I work around them hopefully