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1. Ethics and the role of the researcher in history-writing

1. Erla Hulda Halldorsdottir
University of Iceland

Thoughts on the ethics of letters and the researchers

In my paper I would like to discuss two ethical questions related to my newly begun doctoral research on the construction of gender in Iceland 1850-1920.

First. In my resarch I will use personal sources, such as letters, in order to approach the ideas and attitudes of women themselves, their feelings and notions. I have used personal sources (letters, autobiographies, biographies) before: When researching the status of women in 19th century Iceland, focusing on women´s perceptions about their sex roles and the image og 19th century women. In that research I had to deal with ethical questions on if and how to use information I found in letters - information that shed a light on the position of women, on the image of women, their identity and on different views on the role of men and women - but these information were sometimes also very personal (as letters most often were written for one person only to read). These ethical questions will be even more important when researching an individual, fx. when writing a biography.

Second. The usage of these sources and my desire to come as close as possible to the minds and experiences of these 19th century women, and exploring the (re)construction of gender, does also implicit the question on my own relation with my research topic and the sources I use. I have considered if/what influence my feminist point of view and being an equal rights activist has on my choice and interpretation of sources - and if that point of view is good or bad for my research.

The bottom line is that when using personal sources such as letters the researcher has to show the long gone writer (and the source) respect. The ethical questions, which will unevitably awaken, can only be answered by the researcher her/himself. Is the usage of these information necessary for the research or not - are they worth using? Therefore this is a question about the awareness the researcher has about her/his sources. And the reasercher also has to be aware of her/his own position in the research and the influence her/his views, grounded in her/his own life and opinions, can have on the research. The final question is if feminist researchers have to better aware about these ethical questions than many of their academic colluages because of the close connection that has long been between women´s/gender studies and equal rights activism.

2. Eve Annuk
Estonian Cultural History Archive/Tartu University

Ethics and close history: what is behind scenes of stalinism? A case study

Stalinist era in Estonian (cultural) history poses a variety of questions about possibilities for researching that what is behind the scenes: how stalinism seems at the level of, for example, textual representations in public sphere (newspapers etc.) and in comparison, in private sphere, as in personal letters. Is it possible at all researching stalinism without digging in private documents because of the low truth value of official documents as they may present the reality in distorted way? Private documents are valuable historical source but they also pose complicated ethical questions for researcher: the more close to the present day they are, the more problematic they may appear.

In this paper I am dealing with private documents of Estonian poetess Ilmi Kolla (1933-1954) who was very talented but died young because of tuberculosis. She left a lot of manuscripts of unpublished poems but also letters to mother and friends. Her manuscripts and letters sent to her by other persons disclose the hidden face of stalinism, the way it manipulated with people in ideological and material way and people's reactions to it, but they also reveal intimate aspects of Ilmi Kolla's private life which up today have been hushed up, as for example her femininity and sexuality. In dealing with those issues, complicated questions arose as for example: does doing research mean making use of the other persons life and if so, up to which point? Is the researcher's endeavour to gain truth about historical situation and about concrete person and to be honest in research, conflicting with (or in some sense violating) the right to privacy of research object? How close should researcher become with her object of study and how much of her discoveries could she reveal to others, to public? Considering the closeness of Soviet era to nowadays, the problematic aspect lies also in the fact that people whose private documents may be in archaive are our contemporaries. How should one relate to using letters (for example reading half-official letters, as letters of journal editors) of living persons who actually do not know that their letters are in archaive? Could researcher do that because these letters reveal intruigingly intresting and relatively new viewpoints toward the understanding of stalinist era and its mechanisms?

If there is no violation of data protection law, the role of the researcher becomes crucial deciding the use of such documents: the balancing between research interests and will to know (whose will it is anyway and which are the power mechanisms behind it?) and the rights of the subject who speaks through letters and other private documents. Last but not least important decisive factor which influences the use of other persons private documents, is the researcher's own idea about how she would like her own private documents to be treated in future: should they be destroyed altogether (for example by herself), "lost in archaive" or be treated in respectful way?

3. Maarit Leskelä-Kärki
University of Turku/Cultural History

Writing a Biography - Facing the Other

In my paper, I will introduce my ongoing (and hopefully in August nearly finished) research by reflecting some questions and ideas on the ethics of writing about other people's lives. My dissertation deals with three writing women: the sisters Helmi Krohn, Aino Kallas and Aune Krohn, who all became professional writers in different literary fields. My analysis focuses on writing as an action in the society, as a skill and personal talent, and as an everyday practice. The main source material consists of the sisters' mutual correspondence.

The ethical questions have arosed from the use of personal, intimate material and the problems in writing their life-stories. Although my research is not a biography as such, I constitute certain life-stories. During this process, I have become more and more interested in biographical writing, both as an empirical and theoretical problem.

Doing research is always a personal process involving emotions. Writing about others means always also writing about our-selves. Meeting the other and her emotions, and reflecting our own feelings, are about balancing between empathy and criticism. A biographer must face her own limits and positions, and acknowledge that there always remain other possible interpretations, too.

One of my answers in dealing with intimate sources and life-stories has been the method of hermeneutic and empathetic reading. The ideas of Emmanuel Levinas have also been valuable. Facing the other and writing about the other brings us over and over again in contact with the questions concerning ethics of researching. Like Lisbeth Larsson (2001) has said: Telling about the other, defining and naming the other are an essential part of our culture.

5. Jaana Loipponen
University of Newcastle, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology

Translating Encounters with War Widows

My research on war widows started from the attempt to try to understand what it means to lose. Thus, I defined my goal as collecting stories of loss. As I was interviewing war widows, I believe I still was attempting to hear and to understand what had happened, nearly 60 years after the Second World War ended. During the process of encounters with widows, not just in the interviewing situations, but also with texts and other sources, I have come to perceive that the real focus of my research is exactly on the encounters themselves. The material produced while collecting is never "just as it was"; it is, as it is. Like in the interviews that I have made, everything that is told is told from the perspective of the present moment, in a new meeting, between two previously unknown people to each other (Stanley 1992; Portelli 1997).

In this paper, I will analyse how and what type of knowledge is produced in those encounters. My aim is to try to understand how dialogic knowledge is given birth to. This approach includes gathering information on what both parties might have carried along into the meetings. I have interviewed Karelian war widows, from the area ceded to the Soviet Union, and thus there is the large story of "Karelia", with its mythic background, and nation building qualities, as well as Karelia as paradise. In connection with this, there is the longing, not just for a piece of land, but for a return to the state of original harmony, and the need to belong. Homes were destroyed and lost, which cannot but have influenced the telling. There are the lives of my interviewees, before the time of the war, and after it, during the years of reconstruction. There is my life, being a granddaughter to a war widow, daughter to a war orphan who missed his father severely. Then there came the time when I longed forewee get
s to tell her story, the interviewer gets the story - but how and what are the affecting factors (see Merridale 2001, and how she reveals even her irritation).

Many of the above mentioned departures to dialogic knowledge have only become visible during the process of translating encounters to texts. For example, my childhood maternal environment had to be translated into the absence of men, before I realized that I had missed something. Contingencies of wartime caused silences, absences and untold memories that even the third generation has carried, and this I hope to try to approach. Malkki (1997) uses the concept of "accidental communities of memory", to describe people who have experienced war together. Traces and afterlives, of structural, social and political kind are left behind. She quotes Gramsci: "'Knowing thyself' (is) a product of the historical processes to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. (Gramsci, sited in Gilroy (1990), by Malkki 1997, 95)

6.Minna Uitto, Eila Estola & Leena Syrjälä
Department of Educational Sciences and Teacher Education, Oulu university

Gender, body and emotions in school memories - ethical challenges

In our presentation we ask how gender, body and emotions are present in school and teacher memories. We also consider why a researcher should take into account these particular issues. Since the big majority of memories were told by women, one of the basic interest in our research was how to be sensitive enough to find out how these memories were told and what they tell about women's way of knowing.

We have two sets of material. The first set of material consists of teacher memories written by university students of education during a course titled 'Orientation to Educational Sciences'. This set of material consists of forty-nine essays. The second set of material was collected in the course of the INTO (Inspirational Narratives of Teaching as an Opportunity) -project carried out in 2004-2005. The project aims to develop a novel, caring discussion culture as support for teachers. A group of eleven female teachers of different ages and from different school levels were recruited to meet sixteen times during the project. The group participants shared with each other stories and memories of their work and lives. A variety of narrative methods were used, including discussion of concrete situations, diary writing, manual work and functional methods. The group work was characterized by peer support, commitment, confidentiality and voluntariness. In this presentation, we will analyse the material collected during one particular session, in which the teachers recalled their childhood and especially their school time.

We consider the entire narrative research process as ethical (Elbaz-Luwisch 1997). After all, the researchers enter to study participants' lives for a limited period. In addition, narrative inquiry on teaching practices is essentially a moral rather than a technical enterprise. For that reason the research must be sensitive to the whole gamut of knowing such as gender, body and emotions. As far as we can see, the ethical principles of such research cannot be presented as exact, pre-determined rules but rather by describing the constant negotiation of these issues in the course of the research practices.

7. Leena Rossi
University of Turku, Cultural history

Power in oral history interviews

Every historian usess power in a way or another in all phases of the research process - planning, collecting / creating the research materia, analysing, and interpreting, as well as writing, publishing, and distributing the final text. Of course there is the academic community and there are the sponsors who exercise their open or hidden influence, but the individual scholar is always the main agent, the subject, that has most power over her / his research.

In my paper I discuss the topic of power in oral history, where the situation is more intricate than in traditional history that uses in the first place written sources. In addition to the scholar, there is always at least one other agent or subject, the interviewee. (Usually there are several informants but, for heuristic purposes, I only speak of one.) While the historian uses her / his power throughout the research process, the informant's possibilities to use or misuse power are most obvious during the interview when (s)he, together with the scholar, creates or produces oral reminiscences, the most important sources in oral history.

In my presentation I concentrate on the oral history interview sessions but make also some remarks on the other phases of the research process. I discuss various ways the historian and the informant exercise power not only over each other but also over the oral material and thus over the interpretations of the past and the final text. I clarify my presentation with examples from my own fieldwork.

It is important for all the subjects in oral history to be aware of the risk of power struggle unless they want deliberately - and thus unethically - to distort and bias the reseach. Feminist scholars, e.g. Katharine Borland in her article "That's Not What I Said" in Women's Words, Routledge 1991, have especially paid attention to the discrepancy between the researcher's and the informant's interpretations. In my presentation I also compare their observations with mine.

8. Pia Maria Ahlbäck
Åbo Akademi, litteraturvetenskap

Readable historians. Reality effect and other tropes of addressivity in historical writing.

In its motivations and from a literary studies perspective, 'main-stream' historical writing can be seen caught up in an unhappy ambivalence between the desire for an imagined, 'genuine' mimesis on the one hand, and the violent repellation of the mimetically effectual on the other. Historiography is doubly estranged from that imagined real of the past which it sets out to write. In a constructivist perspective, mimesis is hardly possible in the first place and historiography, of course, could never be mimetic anyway, since historiography always must refer to language, precisely because of its consideration with the past. Nevertheless, as Hayden White has shown, historiography thrives on tropes which carry the imaginative and the narrative potential of the text (1973, 1978, 1987), and historiography can be mimetically illusive, i.e. it can produce (the experience of) the effect of the real (1999, 2003). From a literary studies perspective, the working of the mimesis effect has been considered equivalent with the fictitious character of the narrative text. Thus the literary phenomenon of reality effect becomes an indicator of the power of the imaginative and the aesthetic to activate the emotional and experiential.

So far the discussion of the 'narrative' or 'literary turn' in historiography has taken place acknowledging only the writers of history and their relation to historical research and writing. Surprisingly enough, the reader of history does not seem to have been noticed at all in the discussion. Still, history is sold and read widely and is today one of the most popular literary genres even in its so called academic variety.

In this paper, I shall pose the question of what implications for historiography readers' expectations might have. More precisely, I shall focus on how it is possible that despite the academic status of many historical works they manage to successfully capture the reader. I shall argue that there is an intricate relationship between the reader, the historical text and, in the end, the historian, energised by those demands and expectations that readers have on historical writing. Introducing the reader to historiography is a deconstructive move. If we presume that one of the commonest reasons for the reading of history is the desire for knowledge, the wish to find that 'this is the way it was, this was what happened', then the reading of history would take place in terms of an implied mimetic contract between the reader and the historian. The expected result would be that several tropes of addressivity, invitation or persusasion can be found in historical texts, tropes of which the reality effect would be a major example.

Highlighting the literary device of mimesis effect in a reader-response context, I wish to discuss whether women's history is likely to show a greater openness and above all a more conscious handling of this literary phenomenon than what can be found in 'main-stream' historiography. Are there instances in women's history which allow the returning (of the experience) of a 'real' as a historiographical method in order to involve the reader in historical processes?

9. Kontturi Katve-Kaisa
University of Turku/ Art History

Transmaterial Ethics: Rethinking the subject-object interaction in art history writing

Interweaving epistemological and theoretical angles with a case study this paper analyses the effects and advantages of participatory approach and the so called new feminist materialism (e.g. the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz) on the ethics of art history writing. It focuses on thinking beyond representation which is to say that the aim of this paper is not to analyse what art represents but what it does and to be more precise how art does what it does. This kind of thinking, in which a work of art is understood as an active agent, challenges the poststructuralist - "post death-of-the-author" - view of the human subject as the only actor in the process of meaning-making. The paper argues that this profoundly shakes the boundaries between an active researcher and her/his passive - "mute" - object. Much more so than in the research practice in which the researcher's situated position more or less explicitly points out the meanings of an artwork. What I am proposing here is not to abandon the awareness of "tuated knowledges" ut to combine it with approaches that also put emphasis on the active materiality of art, thus embracing the interaction between (at least) two actors, the researcher and the work of art.

The case study discussed is a part of my research data gathered during the past two years by observing and taking part in the art processes of painter Susana Nevado. The aim of my project is to create new conceptualisations with which to handle the processuality of art so often taken for granted in present art history writing. However, in the confines of this paper, I concentrate on a particular case dealing with my personal, even corporeal interaction with a work of art (still) in progress. The interaction with the work takes place on various levels, the most concrete of them being perhaps the fact that I modelled for it. Hence the image traditions with which the painting is concerned, i.e. Catholic iconography and western pornography, are literally tied to my bodily materialities.

Analysing the piece through new materialist feminism does not direct the attention to the common question of how a woman's body is represented in the intersection of these iconographic traditions. The attention is more focused on what the process of painting does to the understanding of traditions. And Since I am very involved in the art process the question then becomes: How have the materiality of paint and the lines and curves of Nevado's brush merging with the image traditions changed my understandings and my bodily experience into something new?

To answer this question it is important to realise that what actually happens could better be described by transaction than by interaction: things and understandings are not just interconnected, they are transformed through the art process. It is the sensitivity to active, creative potential of all socio-material encounters that I want to stress with the concept of transmaterial ethics.

10. Laura Saarenmaa
University of Tampere, Media Culture

Ethics of Interpreting Texts as Practices

The paper focuses on celebrity interviews in Finnish popular women's magazine Jaana in the 1960's and 1970's. I am interested in the journalistic angles and framings of the interviews written by female writers of female celebrities, or, the women the popular press "made" celebrities during the late 60's and 70's. Who where chosen to be written about? What kinds of issues were brought up? How the stories dealt with the current debates concerning gender, sexuality and women's changing role in society?

The late 1960's and 1970's is considered as a period the private and intimate burst in to the public in Finland - mainly through the popular magazines competing the market shares. In Finland, the period was also the time when the celebrity journalism started to find its form in the field of popular mass culture, even though film stars and beauty queens had certainly been written about also earlier. The difference lies in the ways of approaching the celebrities; getting closer the person and her inner thoughts and feelings.

In my paper I presume that the celebrity branch and the style of "closeness"- nowadays the orthodoxic way of writing celebrity interviews - was partly established by the female women's magazine journalists, who wrote often about their own friends and acquaintances, being practically close their interviewees.

Magazine interviews are written texts stylized and titled by the writer. As such, the stories are always results of multiple practical, journalistic choices and circumstances. But how much can be said about the journalistic choices and situations by reading the texts? How am I as a researcher able to interpret stories as cultural discourses, and still give credit for the individual journalistic creativity?

In my paper I will discuss the problems of making cultural analysis of texts written in a certain historical and particular situation, and challenges in taking the situations into consideration in text analysis.