Fragments: Living with Other People’s Lives as Analytic Practice

I began carrying out empirical research in 1980. The work I did then was for my PhD and it was my first experience of fieldwork, interviewing local solicitors and magistrates in Sheffield, as well as undertaking historical documentary research. Thereafter I started a range of other projects which entailed more interviews with a very diverse range of adults and children on topics of divorce, cohabitation, same-sex marriage and civil partnership, family life, transnational relationships, and donor conception. In addition I have carried out archival research in university libraries, the Wellcome Institute, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), the Fawcett Library (now The Women’s Library) and the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University. In so doing I got close to the lives of many different people. These may have been relatively brief encounters and I may have accessed only fragments of these lives, captured at specific and possibly fleeting moments; but nonetheless our lives touched. Although the research encounter was undoubtedly quickly forgotten by most of these people (and of course unknown to those encountered in the archives), I have not just forgotten them. The meetings (and the boxes of transcripts and notes that document them) have stayed with me in some form or other.