Towards an agenda for oral history and geography: (Re)locating emotion in family narratives of domestic abuse in 1970s East Kilbride

Abstract

This paper sets out a research agenda for oral history in/and geography, with a particular focus on emotional historical geographies. With three families' relocation from inner-city Glasgow to the new town of East Kilbride as the empirical backdrop, I argue that oral history methodology is uniquely well placed to capture both the emotionality and spatiality of historical narratives. Whilst previous reviews across geography and oral history theory have considered important emotional markers such as tone of voice, the expression of feeling and body language, I intervene by focusing on different narrative strategies employed throughout the interview and argue that the geographical remit of an interviewee's memories is inseparable from their emotional brevity. The focus of the paper is therefore threefold. Firstly, I consider the subjective temporalities and spatialities that oral history narrators employ when seeking composure, considering how they might “re-place” their narratives (and thus themselves) in the interview setting. Secondly, I argue that how interviewees might “re-place” themselves is inextricable, and as such so is any emotional reading of the interview, from the inter-subjective relationship produced by such an encounter. Finally, I explore the implications of this methodology for carefully elaborating on the intersection between the intimate geographies of the home, and geographies of violence. How the interviewees witnessed domestic abuse among their families was moulded by the context of their relocation. Moreover, the inter-subjective relationship, an analysis of which I argue is crucial to the findings of the paper, was also distinctly moulded by that same family context – as I was conducting these interviews with members of my own family.