Holding On Together

BT: Oh yeah, sure... Let's go to this researching upwards issue which I think is a very interesting one. You said earlier that what's in it for them, the life history teller, is the possibility of, to use your term, empowerment, collective action, bla, bla, bla. What's in it for the elite? Why should the elite have you peril his life story?

IG: I don't know, but sometimes they do...

BT: OK, so if from this project you had two or three appointments with life history tellers and the issue of ethnicity, racism did not emerge, would that not prove troublesome to you?

IG: I think it would not worry me at all if it didn't emerge in the, what I call, early stages of narration of the script. It would worry me enormously if in the interactive collaboration and the discussion it wasn't raised because I would expect to raise it... One of my questions in that next phase would be, 'OK, you've told me your life story but I don't have any sense of you as a black man and that is what I see in front of me, why is that?' So yeah, I would pose it in that form, but the important point to grasp is, I would be posing that question in a very different way to the way we talked about using it yesterday. Where you go in and say, 'OK, you're a black man, tell me about it'. One way you'd obviously get that, the other way, you've got a longer run at the issue and I much prefer my strategy to yours.

BT: ...But the issue didn't come up with Walter (one of the life story tellers in Ivor's project).

IG: It didn't with Walter yet... but that's not over yet.

BT: But that's 300 pages (of transcript)!

IG: Yes that's 300 pages but what we've still got to do... is go back and raise a lot of other issues about location... Walter and I need a conversation about that before we push at some new questions.