Oral history forms a key strand of the Caring Communities project. To help bring new voices and perspectives into the long-term history of care, we’re conducting oral history interviews with Care-Experienced people, their descendants and care workers, past and present. Oral history is more than just a methodology to recover these voices; rather, it’s integral to the ethics and ethos of our project. Since October last year, we’ve been discussing as a team what it means to undertake oral histories of care. We’ve been thinking about how we should recruit for and conduct these interviews, as well as how we should use them.
Caring Communities is a four-year project initially, giving us room to not only gather a wide range of oral testimonies on this strand of the project, but more time to ensure we involve people in the project in other ways too. This begins, as all oral history projects do, with what we might call procedural ethics: pulling together the processes and forms relating to aspects like informed consent, the right to anonymity and agreements as to how the participants’ testimonies will be used. It’s important for participants and collaborators on Caring Communities to retain as much agency as they wish to have over the interview process and the resulting historical record; we’ll determine the shape and direction of the interview together, and once the interview is recorded, they’ll have a say in how it’s used too. Beyond this, we’ll be offering our oral history interviewees the opportunity to be involved in steering committees and workshops that will shape the project’s design, activities and outputs, as well as our Care Historians programme which will support Care Experienced people to shape the broader heritage about the history of care.
Care voices in today’s context
The importance of centring these voices within the longer-term history of care should be located within the ongoing ‘crisis of care.’[i] Recent investigations into historical abuse within care settings, such as the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (2015 –), Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (2014 – 2016) and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (2014 – 2022) have shed further light on longstanding legacies of institutional abuse. As historian Michael Lambert has argued, these reports have foregrounded ‘lived experience within public understanding of the past’ and highlighted how children’s voices have often been elided in care records and the building of the care system.[ii] Equally, researchers and activists have criticised the ‘passive, individual and limited forms of participation enforced on victims and survivors giving testimony to inquiries.’[iii] In such contexts, it is now more important than ever to include the voices of Care Experienced people in research and in practice, and to do so in ways which acknowledges and attempts to redress the unequal power dynamics often inherent in both.
Equally, testimonies from care workers themselves can help read individual memory and emotion into our understanding of the modern ‘care economy.’ Writing on the privatisation of care in the US, Gabriel Winant observes that ‘care workers are at once everywhere and nowhere’, sustaining the modern economy and welfare system while occupying precarious, casualised positions with poor working-conditions.[iv] Recent research has also shown that within the context of austerity, care work – from elderly care to children’s social care – is under-valued as it becomes financialised, with this devaluation often a racialised, gendered and classed process.[v] In light of these shifts, it’s more important than ever to understand how we got to this point. Our long-term approach to the history of care, bringing together archival research from the 19th century onwards with more contemporary insights from oral histories and other modern records, seeks to historicise this systemic devaluation, tracing its roots and iterations through time in Britain.
In adopting a life history approach, our interviews will explore how people who cared and were cared for felt these shifts, if they felt them at all. What impact did shifting working conditions have on the lives of care workers and the lives of the people they cared for? Oral history helps us recover the fine-grained texture of these much bigger changes, and read people’s thoughts, feelings and experiences into the history of a system which often diminishes their value.
Defining ‘success’
In June of this year, three members of our team (Claudia Soares, Jim Hinks and myself) attended the Oral History Society conference. Our panel was posed the question: ‘What would success look like to your project?’ Caring Communities has outcomes we can and do define. These include aiming to ensure we bring in a broad range of voices and perspectives – of ethnicity, class, gender and place – to the history of care. We’ll also be producing traditional academic outputs like journal articles and monographs communicating our findings. At the same time, we’re planning for contributions which, at the moment, remain as yet less fixed and more nebulous. This is because these outcomes aren’t necessarily ours to define. Rather, these broader interventions – whether these eventually relate to policy change, supporting the work of existing networks of Care-Experienced people, or something else entirely – should be determined by our participants, drawing on the concept of shared authority in oral history research.[vi] What changes do they want to see enacted, and what shape should these take?
Equally, workshops discussing these outputs should be based on what people want and need from public services, as well as where they can meaningfully contribute their skills and knowledge to create change. Educator and theorist Paulo Freire, as well as generations of radical educators and workers who have drawn on his ideas, problematised the ‘traditional’ hierarchical teacher-student relationship, arguing that without ‘dialogue there is no communication and without communication there can be no true education.’[vii] I would argue that how we use our oral histories to shape future outcomes should follow this thinking. Communities – particularly marginalised ones – have vast existing knowledge and expertise which should shape and define their own education for action, and guide where we go next. As Patricia Lundy has shown, research projects which centre co-production and genuine collaboration in dialogic ways can facilitate spaces for survivors and those with experiences of care to ‘challenge power’, with the research process being transformative in and of itself.[viii] It is an important tradition of research and education, and it’s our hope that the oral history strand of this project can play some part in its continuation.
[i] Nancy Fraser, ‘Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism’ in Titthi Bhattcharya (ed), Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto, 2017): 21-36.
[ii] Michael Lambert, ‘“Daddy Knows Best”: Professionalism, Paternalism and the State in Mid-Twentieth-Century British Child Diswelfare Experiences’, in Caitríona Beaumont, Eve Colpus and Ruth Davidson (eds), Everyday Welfare in Modern British History Experience, Expertise and Activism (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2020): 120.
[iii] Danny Taggart, Katie Wright, Hannah Griffin, Lucy Duckworth, May Baxter-Thornton, Sheila Coates, Emma Lewis, Fay Maxted, Kit Shellam, Chris Tuck & Stephanie Ford, ‘Lived experience consultants to a child sexual abuse inquiry: Survivor epistemology as a counterweight to legal and administrative proceduralism’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 159 (2025): 3.
[iv] Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 2023): 2.
[v] Emma Dowling, The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (London: Verso, 2021); Freya Willis (2025), ‘Caring for the community on poverty wages’: care workers’ experiences of low pay, exploitation, and precarity in Britain (1979–2010), Women’s History Review, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2025.2515794.
[vi] Wendy Rickard, ‘Collaborating with Sex Workers in Oral History’, The Oral History Review, 30 (2003): 47-59
[vii] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (London: Penguin, 1982), p.65.
[viii] Patricia Lundy, ‘Pathways to Justice: Historical Institutional Child Abuse and the Role of Activist Research’, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 14 (2022): 550.