Toby Butler (Royal Holloway, University of London)
The author will present the project which discusses the experience of devising an ambitious oral history project on the Environmental Movement in the United Kingdom in partnership with a national archive at the British Library. The project involves the creation of 100 publicly accessible life-story interviews spanning 50 years of activism, and a seven-strong research team which includes representatives from the environmental movement itself who instigated the project.
After a short history of oral history collecting in the UK by National Life Stories at the British Library, this project explores the difficulties of choosing interviewees and developing a methodology to deliver a sufficiently diverse picture of a large movement that has effected change at local, national and international governmental level. What issues arise between environmentalists, academics, and a national library in joint collecting partnerships of this nature? What insights can recording whole-life story interviews give to understanding how people have formed grass-roots movements to effect change at state level? What are the difficulties of recording radical and anarchist, as well as more conventional NGO-related life stories for a national, state-funded archive? The author will discuss the research from the perspective of a project leader, currently in the interviewing phase of the three-year project.