Difficult Feelings - Researching Sensitive Material
Professor Emilie Pine, Dr Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh and Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD) - 7th April 2021, online
In this webinar, we focussed on the experiences of researchers working with challenging subjects; particularly in relation to researchers in Arts and Humanities and cross-disciplinary research. Our Panel discussed concrete examples of their experiences in researching sensitive material, outlined methodologies for undertaking this research and dealing with the outputs, as well as ways of safe-guarding the feelings of researchers and their subjects.
Professor Emilie Pine (School of English, Drama and Film) was PI of the IRC project Industrial Memories (2015-19), a combined digital humanities and oral history project on the legacies of institutional child abuse. She has also written of the pressures of working in academia. Emilie's talk is entitled "Deciding to work on sensitive material & Managing your own feelings".
Dr Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh is Director of the National Folklore Collection, UCD Library. Interviewing individuals and groups has been a key research tool of his for many years. Recent collaborations include a series of interviews (with Emilie Pine) of survivors of institutional abuse, and (with Deirdre Nuttall) of minority religious denominations in independent Ireland. Crístóir's talk is entitled "Managing potentially difficult or distressing interviews: Ethics and boundaries".
Associate Professor Catherine Cox (School of History and Director of the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland) presented a talk entitled "A Public History of Prison Psychiatry: Vulnerable Subjects and Sensitive Material".
The slides from this webinar are available (opens in a new window)on request