Historical ethnography: education and gender in a former coalmining town

  Photo by  Amy Elting on Unsplash Some days, I'm so interested in everything that I try to do as much as possible at the same time. I start drafting an abstract I want to submit for a conference at the same time as I am re-reading interview transcripts. I decide I want to go over a paper I'm working on, but that I also want to draft the methodology chapter of my thesis (perhaps prematurely). On these days, I am pulled in so many different directions that it's difficult to get anything done.  I want to reframe this though - I think I have a tendency to beat myself up over it: 'why am I so fickle?', 'why can't I focus today?', 'why can't I just do things properly ?' So, today, I'm going to celebrate the fact that I've done all sorts of different things. I've submitted that abstract for the conference I hope to present at (that's a 'done' thing, right?). I've watched some videos from an archive that I want to visit ...

My research project is an historical ethnography of working-class women's experiences of education in a former coalmining town. But it's also about more than that. I want to explore what it means to live, learn and work in one place - one place that has its own stories, but which is also talked about in the stories of others.  I'm an interdisciplinary researcher and I draw on Doreen Massey's work on space and place in my study. For Massey, a place is 'a simultaneity of stories-so-far' (Massey, 2005, p.32). It is these stories - overlapping and contrasting - that I am looking for in my research. Alongside Massey, I use Bourdieu's work to consider how places simultaneously shape and are shaped by the social world. How does the organisation of specific places link to social class or gender? Why are some places seen as 'nicer' than others? How are places shaped by people over time? How are people shaped by places?  I am shaped by the place where I grew ...