In this chapter I provide an outline of the methods and methodological strategies employed in this project. Drawing upon field notes taken during the course of the research, I report the practical, ethical and theoretical dilemmas I encountered; and the ways in which I comprehended, wrestled with, and sought to resolve vexed issues of this sort. It is here, in this chapter, that I seek, on the one hand, to explain my reasoning behind various methods and decisions which needed to be resolved pragmatically and, were, so to speak, encountered at ‘ground level’; and, on the other, to justify the wider rationale and logical consistency of my research methods and methodology.1
Broadly speaking, this chapter can be seen as falling into two parts: the first dealing with a range of methodological issues generated by my use of condolence books; the second exploring a commensurate set of issues generated by the writing and analysis of my own autobiographical ‘memory work’ (Haug et al, 1987). In this first half I begin by outlining the ‘textu(r)al’2 nature of my analysis of epistolary data gleaned from condolence books, and its merits over various other, more conventionally sociological, research strategies, such as interviewing, which might otherwise have been adopted in this project. I continue by describing the day-to-day practicalities involved in –– and the methods selected for ––
1
I distinguish between the the termsmethodsandmethodologyby regarding methods as the practical means by which methodology, as a systematic theory of methods, is implemented.
2That is to say, the textural approach to textual data. An alternative would be to suggest simply that my research in
general is textu(r)al for it attempts to provide a textured reading of textual data taken from two different sources: condolence books signed during the two public mourning events which this thesis considers; and my own autobiographical stories produced using the method of ‘memory work’.
gathering, storing, coding, and analysing the data from condolence books signed during my two case-studies in ‘public mourning’. In the second half of this chapter I reflect upon a range of practical and methodological issues that I encountered whilst undertaking the innovative method known as ‘memory work’. Here I attempt to explain what I did, how I did it, and to outline my adaptation of memory work as first outlined by the group of German feminist researchers who pioneered this method. In addition, and in the interests of methodological clarity and explicitness, I provide the reader with an outline of the routine stages of coding which were passed throughen route to the subsequent analysis of the data produced using memory work. Before this, however, I discuss the intellectual origins and epistemological premises of memory work and locate this within the wider paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1960) and series of ‘turns’ (‘cultural’, ‘linguistic’, ‘narrative’ and ‘biographical’) occurring within the social sciences. In so doing, I discuss the role and function of memory itself and the ways in which a focus upon individual lives can illuminate wider social ‘structures’ and cultural processes in which the individual is enmeshed.
I begin this chapter in earnest, however, by providing a brief history of the project: of how I came to undertake it and shift its orientation away from my plans for the project as I had originally conceived them. Here too, I seek to explain my rationale for choosing two alternative, yet complementary, sites of meaning: condolence books and my own autobiographical memories, as points of entry for exploring the public mourning events which are the principal foci of this thesis. In so doing, I discuss a range of issues connected with the ethics of social research. Here I suggest that the increased recognition of the social identity and ‘subjectivities’ of the researcher, are key in determining not only the outcomes
of research but the motivation for choosing to research a particular topic; as well as the researcher’s relationship to the data generated throughout the process of research itself. Various attempts to incorporate such ‘recognition’ within research design, through the greater reflexivity of the researcher, are, I suggest, a welcome addition to empirical practices across the social sciences and humanities.
The History of the Project and the ‘Cultural Circuit’
We will recall from my introduction to the thesis the shift in orientation which this project has undergone since its inception. Principally, this involved a change in focus from a proposed concentration upon the public mourning following the death of Princess Diana in 1997, with a consideration of the mourning which attended the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Here it was my intention to attempt to trace out the historical changes in form of public mourning; to provide an archaeology of mourning (and mourning practices) by exploring ostensible shifts in the ways royal figures are mourned. Such a project was premised upon an attempt to research these events from a position of presumed objectivity and value-neutrality; exploring comparatively one event against the other from a position of critical detachment. Yet, as we have also seen from the autobiographical vignette which I provide in the introduction, my real interest and motivation lay elsewhere, in a project which this proposal as it stood was decidedly not. The moment during a routine supervision meeting with my Ph.D supervisor, when, during a discussion of other public mourning events similar to the Diana ones –– including the mourning which followed the Hillsborough disaster –– was a key turning point or ‘watershed’ in the history of the project. For here I became animated by the discussion of an event which I had, as a teenager,
mourned but never before considered exploring as a topic of research.It was a turning point not least because it set in train a number of changes in orientation fundamental to the new questions which my research was now asking. This shift in orientation amounted to more than simply a subtle shift in focus or the substitution of one particular public mourning event for another. For it involved a fundamental epistemological shift from a position of presumed value-neutrality towards harnessing my own subjectivities which my ‘involvement’ in these two events generated. The two events which became the new foci of my thesis: the public mourning following the Hillsborough disaster and the death of Princess Diana, were both events by which I was affectively moved, albeit in seemingly opposite directions; experiencing a profound sense of shock and sadness following the Hillsborough disaster, whilst experiencing a profound revulsion for the public mourning that followed the death of Princess Diana. Once my dis/investments in these events had been acknowledged it became a central intention of the project to critically reflect upon my own involvement in them as a source of research in itself. Following these acknowledgements; of feeling, as many others did at the time, ‘deeply alienated’ (Wilson, 1997) by the ‘Diana events’ but ‘profoundly moved’ by the Hillsborough disaster, it seemed both unthinkable and untenable that I could explore the topics which were the previous foci of my research from a position of critical detachment, especially given my disinvestments in royalty, of which I later wrote during memory work and which are reproduced in chapter 7.
This shift in orientation of the project inevitably led to a shift in the sorts of research questions I was asking. Principally, what were the meaning-making processes involved in
my own mourning and not-mourning of these events? In what ways was the meaning- making involved in my own mourning of Hillsborough similar or different to that of the people who signed condolence books for the victims of Hillsborough? And how might the messages people wrote in both sets of condolence books which I intended to analyse tell us something of meaning-making during, and previous, to these events within particular communities and culture at large? In other words, what sorts of meaning-making were involved in the mourning of these events and how might condolence books signed following them reveal processes of identification with, and ‘interpellation’, by aspects of culture? From this perspective, my decision to explore the mourning which followed the death of Princess Diana and the Hillsborough disaster, as particular points of focus, quickly became an attempt to trace out the processes at work within culture, and especially, my own negotiation of selfhood, and the production of subject-positions into which I was both inserted and worked myself into.
Aside from attempts to reconcile the inevitable imbalances in power between researcher and researched which my choice of condolence books and memory work –– as particular sites of meaning –– allowed me to attempt to bridge, and of which I shall say more shortly, my choice of complementary methodological research strategies can usefully be explored using Richard Johnson’s (1986) notion of a ‘cultural circuit’. In this way, the events which followed the death of Princess Diana and the Hillsborough disaster can be perceived as ‘moments’ within a wider circuit of culture through which meaning is produced. Each moment in this circuit: of production, representation, ‘reading’ and lived relations, are dependent upon earlier ‘moments’ within the overall circuit. This concept of the cultural
circuit, as Peter Redman (1999: 30–1) explains, suggests a ‘complex and uneven process of exchange, appropriation and re-presentation’ made between cultural texts (be they romance novels routinely read by women or the sports magazines read by men), and lived cultures and identities in which they have a particular resonance yet from which they remain independent and distinct. In this way, narratives that have a specific resonance within particular communities may find themselves taken up in more public representations. This can be evidenced from the ways in which the local vernaculars of the street are routinely appropriated and taken up and used in public representations such as television commercials. In turn, these narratives, when played back to a wider public audience become dispersed and much more widely available as a public resource. In this way, as Redman (1999: 31) again puts it, such narratives ‘may be absorbed into the “little cultural worlds” of new and different local’ and/or global publics, becoming transformed and deployed in substantially new forms.
From this perspective, and for the purposes of this project, the Diana and Hillsborough public mourning events can themselves be seen as particular ‘moments’ within an overall circuit of cultural production, representation, ‘reading’ and lived relations. The public mourning which followed the death of Princess Diana quite clearly depended upon earlier ‘moments’ in this circuit: of media commentaries, narratives and general representations about Diana’s life; of subsequent ‘readings’ of these narratives; and their incorporation and use within everyday social practices and lived relations, in say, popular conversation or positive identifications with Diana as a feminine or feminist source of iconicity. Such a model of cultural production can also be used to explain the negative reactions and
disidentifications with Diana following her death: what Richard Johnson (1999) has elsewhere referred to as ‘not-mourning’, which is to say, that many of those, including myself, who did not mourn Diana did not do so passively but as a form of resistance to various aspects of what Diana as an icon of official culture appeared to stand for. My resistance to the mourning for Diana can be seen as a resistance to various aspects of culture through which Diana’s image was mediated and with which I could not identify. In this way, alternative representations or ‘readings’ of narratives about Diana’s life can be seen as ‘dis/incorporated’ within lived relations by the different publics to whom Diana did not appeal
At the same time, the mourning (and not-mourning) which followed the Hillsborough disaster, although much smaller and more localised, yet no less intense amongst those whom it affected, can be viewed through the optic which Johnson’s notion of a cultural circuit provides. For in this way, meaning can be seen to be produced not only through representations of narratives and discourses about football (whether positive or negative) but through the particular meanings which football (as so often reflective of something else), embodies and which are maintained by and within particular sets of lived relations as situated in place and time. Football, I will argue in chapters 5 and 7, is so often reflective of something else, as say, a reflection of a community itself within which a club is based and comes to signify. That is to say, it contains the potential for totemicity. In this way, for example, my grandfather’s verbalised stories (and others like them) told to me as a child about watching football at Hillsborough in the 1930s, were taken up, reproduced and re- presented in some of the local media narratives within Sheffield following the Hillsborough
disaster. So too, nefarious tales about drunken Liverpool fans which circulated in some tabloid newspapers following the disaster can be seen to trade in historically situated discourses and narratives about Liverpudlians. Such representations, as I will argue in chapter 5, of Liverpool’s ‘outsider-ness’, are themselves central to constitutions of discursive identity within the city, to the extent that they become routinely inhabited as lived identities and cultures.
Nevertheless, the two events which I have chosen as case-studies in public mourning, whilst they can be seen as particular ‘moments’ within the model of a ‘cultural circuit’ which I have previously outlined, are too complex and multi-faceted to represent any one of these moments –– of production, representation, ‘reading’ and lived relations –– alone. For many of these ‘moments’ occurred simultaneously during these two events as the circuit undertook endless and rapidly speeded-up revolutions. In this way, the events themselves, spanning roughly a week in duration, and comprising widespread media representations from which ‘readings’ could be made and mourning ‘lived’ –– as mourners came together to share public space and engage in social practices symptomatic of the communities who mourned –– can themselves be see as a mini-circuit existing within the endless flow of circuits of cultural discourse. The Diana events provide countless examples of representations of Diana (from phrases Diana herself coined in the 1995 BBC Panorama interview, to the Burchill/Campbell coined epithet of the “People’s Princess”) which were later taken up and transformed in the messages people wrote in condolence books, in the cards people attached to bouquets of flowers, and in conversations amongst mourners who gathered to share public space with others who felt the same way. So too, the Hillsborough
condolence books in particular provide countless examples of the ways in which aspects of culture, such as the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, have been taken up and transformed to became a source of discursive identity and of lived relations on Merseyside. Suffice it to say at this point that the condolence books which I analysed were but one of a series of ‘moments’ within each of these mourning events, each of which were dependent on ‘moments’ from outside of the temporal frame of reference and ‘happenings’ which occurred during the actual period of mourning.
Having established these two events as ‘moments’ of cultural production –– albeit ones which can be readily identified, for everything that goes on within life as such can be so incorporated with the cultural circuit –– let me now explain the rationale behind my choice of condolence books and ‘memory work’ as related yet distinct sites of meaning. My choice of condolence books as an under-explored resource of cultural production, summoned by the death-events and public mourning which followed as the principal foci of this thesis, were chosen primarily for the data they might yield as to the meaning, symbolic or otherwise, which these events contained for the people who mourned them. As well as providing a ready-made sample of mourners, they allowed me a unique opportunity to explore not only contemporary cultural and epistolary practices of mourning but the textual representation and transformations of meaning as was manifested in epistolary condolence writing. It would also hopefully allow me to identify earlier ‘moments’ within the circuit of cultural production as well as the wider significance of ‘things’ being mourned besides the obvious referents of mourning. For as I began to suggest in chapters 2 and 3, loss routinely triggers and awakens echoes of losses encountered elsewhere, be they at the cultural or
inter-personal level –– the two are also inseparably linked. For our relations with other people are mediated by culture, whilst our relations to culture are similarly mediated by other people with whom we engage in conversations about everyday aspects of culture, thereby reproducing the aspects of culture about which we talk.
My choice of memory work, meanwhile, as a site of meaning allowed me an alternative and retrospective vantage point (Denzin, 1970) from which to view my own relationship to these two events. If, generally speaking, my analysis of condolence books provided access to the distinct ‘moments’ of cultural production in which condolence messages were written and conceived, the practice of memory work and its critical focus upon the text, provided an effective tool for the interrogation of ways in which (my own) selfhood and subjectivity is, and was, brokered and maintained. In this way, the stories produced using memory work provide a source for the exploration not of subjectivity as such, for as Redman (1999: 75) reminds us, the self of unconscious desire is never quite the same as the self expressed in language, but of the ways in which subjectivity is narratively constructed in and through language.
At the same time, and whilst more closely approximating to, but never the same as, aspects of lived relations within the cultural circuit, memory work allowed me to trace out my own navigation and insertion within culture and cultural processes more generally, including the cultural production and mediation of memory itself. It is these processes, which have a wider resonance than the focus upon the individual life which my memory work seemingly
provides, that have been of particular interest to sociologists3and those working within the field of cultural studies. Taken together, memory work and my analysis of condolence books, provided two different yet complementary vantage points from which to view the mourning and not-mourning following the Hillsborough disaster and the death of Princess Diana; one allowing me access to the immediacy and poignancy of the ‘moment’ in which