Frances C. Galt
Researching around our subjects: Working towards a women’s labour history of trade unions in the British film and television industries
Galt, Frances C.
Authors
Contributors
Sarah Arnold
Editor
Anne O'Brien
Editor
Abstract
This article explores the opportunities and obstacles of researching women’s trade union activism in the British film and television industries between 1933 and 2017. The surviving material on women’s union participation is incomplete and fragmented, and so my research has combined an examination of archival material—the union’s journal and the meeting minutes, correspondence and ephemera of three iterations of its equality committee—with new and existing oral history interviews. Sherry J. Katz has termed this methodological approach “researching around our subjects”, which involves “working outward in concentric circles of related sources” to reconstruct women’s experiences (90). While “researching around my subjects” was a challenging and time-consuming process, it was also a rewarding one, producing important insights into union activism as it relates to gender and breaking new ground in both women’s labour and women’s film and television history. This article concludes with a case study on the appointment of Sarah Benton as researcher for the ACTT’s Patterns report in 1973, revealing the benefits of this methodological approach in reconstructing events which have been effectively erased from the official record.
Citation
Galt, F. C. (2020). Researching around our subjects: Working towards a women’s labour history of trade unions in the British film and television industries. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 166-188. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.20.12
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | May 8, 2020 |
Online Publication Date | Jan 27, 2021 |
Publication Date | 2020 |
Deposit Date | May 11, 2022 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 28, 2024 |
Journal | Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media; Doing Women's Film Television History |
Print ISSN | 2009-4078 |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Issue | 20 |
Pages | 166-188 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.20.12 |
Public URL | https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9305633 |
Files
Researching around our subjects: working towards a women’s labour history of trade unions in the British film and television industries
(608 Kb)
PDF
Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Copyright Statement
This is the published version. An online version is available:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.20.12
licensed under a CC BY NC 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Downloadable Citations
About UWE Bristol Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@uwe.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search