Oral Histories and Internet Essays

Tuesday 28 March, 1-2.30pm

On Zoom

Please note: this event is only open to members of our Research Network, which you can join here.

Speakers: Professor Margaretta Jolly, Charles Pidgeon

Convenors: Dr Kate Kennedy, Dr Alice Little

Abstracts and Bios:

'Let's start with Fi Glover: Using Oral History to Rethink Public Access Media in the Connected Histories of the BBC project'

Margaretta Jolly

Fi Glover hosted The Listening Project (Radio 4, 2012-2022): an audio archive of conversations recorded by the BBC in which people across the country were invited to share an intimate conversation, forming a picture of lives and relationships in the UK today. 2,000 plus recordings are now archived at the British Library and championed by the Oral History Society for their democratising of the archive and diversifying broadcasting. Glover is also known for her smash-hit podcast series with former Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey, ‘Fortunately… with Fi and Jane’ and her work with lobby group Sound Women, intending to improve the profile of women in radio.

This presentation will debate what we can learn from Glover’s life and work, especially with The Listening Project, to rethink the BBC’s efforts to diversify and to include and support public participation in making as well as consuming media. Drawing on a new oral history I undertook with her as part of the Connected Histories of the BBC project in 2020, I will also introduce the public catalogue through which the recording in full can be heard. We will follow this with a discussion of the value of oral history and digital humanities approaches in uncovering broadcasting history in general.

Margaretta Jolly is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex and directs the University's Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research. She is editor of The Encyclopedia of Life Writing (Routledge, 2001) and author of Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement (OUP, 2019), based on the archive she helped create in partnership with Polly Russell at the British Library 2010-14. She is also Principal Investigator for the Connected Histories of the BBC project taking over from founder-director David Hendy, and for The Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing.

Life-writing, the internet, and the essay

Charles Pidgeon

Life-writing (as a practice and a field of study) is often characterised as wide-ranging and expansive. The literary essay (as a form of writing) is often characterised as slippery and all-encompassing. And the internet (as a technology and a cultural concept) is often characterised as rapidly changeable and massively sprawling.
So, how are we meant to talk about these three nebulous terms together? What foothold can we latch onto when thinking the contemporary internet essay and its relationship to autobiography? In this presentation, I’ll explore how and why autobiographical writing about the internet often turns away from traditional memoir and instead embraces the essay form. By looking at essay collections by writers like Jia Tolentino, Roisin Kiberd, and Cathy Park Hong, I will show how essays about the internet can give us insights into contemporary life-writing more generally.

Charles Pidgeon is a doctoral researcher at Oxford University’s English Faculty. He researches contemporary writing and thinking about the internet and networked technologies. Until recently, he was Events Administrator for the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Previously, Charles was the producer and part of the writing room for award-winning theatre company Poltergeist (Samuel French New Play Award 2018; The Untapped Award 2019). He received Oxford University Dramatic Society's New Writing Festival Award for Best New Play 2019 (as co-writer). His writing appears in Post45 ‘Contemporaries’ (forthcoming), The Oxford Review of Books, Voiceworks Magazine, and Oxford TechTribe.
@CharlesPidgeonA