Time: Thursday, November 14th, 2024 | 12:30PM – 2:00PM
Location: Hesburgh Center for International Studies, C103
Are you thinking of using interviews as part of your fieldwork? Wondering how to approach them? Or are you grappling with the ethical dimensions of using interviews in research?
In this workshop, Prof. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes will guide a collaborative and practical reflection on interviewing as a qualitative research method. She will encourage workshop participants to bring their own experiences and questions to the discussion and offer examples from her research on Chilean exile in the UK as well as her work at Notre Dame with the Legacy Project Transmedia materials on Colombian exile. The discussion will explore the extent to which the conduct of oral interviews in research might be envisaged as a form of care. Building on feminist notions of care as relational and lived experience, we will discuss the possibilities and limitations of this as a methodological and reflective framework, and the respects in which it might enable the researchers to negotiate some of the ethical questions that arise with the use of interviews.
Riberio de Menezes’s project, ‘Voices of Humanitarianism’ (funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council), studies Chilean exile in the UK following the 1973 coup d’état. A key goal of the initiative is to enrich the collections, and so contribute to the justice and memory work, of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago by constructing an archive of interviews with Chileans exiled to the UK. The Colombian Truth Commission was the first to formally address the consequences of exile and seek to rectify its invisibility in transitional justice discussions. Bringing these two cases together offers an opportunity to reflect on the conduct of interviews and testimonials within formal and informal peace building structures.
About the facilitator: Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, where she is also Deputy Chair of the Faculty of Arts with responsibility for Research. Her research interests lie in literature and film, and in the relationship between history, memory, and culture in the Hispanic world. While at the Kroc Institute and supported by a Keough-Naughton Legacy grant, Alison will be working with Josefina Echavarría Alvarez on collaborations relating to the Legacy Project.
