Pierre Botcherby
M
y
name is Pierre
Botcherby, I’m a PhD
candidate in the History department
working on the impact of de-industrialisation and post-industrial
regeneration on community in St. Helens (Merseyside). I am also the
Administrative Assistant for the Warwick
Oral History Network, a post I have
occupied since the beginning of the 2018-19 academic year.
I was initially brought onto the Then & Now project in March by Kathryn Woods to provide some guidance and support for the interview team, for instance with ethics forms and interview technique. I subsequently sat in on several of the team’s weekly meetings and found myself getting increasingly hooked by the project. With Kathryn taking on a new role as of mid-April, I was asked to take over management of the project, as it moved from its research and resource-gathering stage to preparations for the launch of the exhibition.
With the unprecedented situation we now find ourselves in, this exhibition has moved online and we have been holding meetings remotely via Teams. This has presented challenges for the students, for instance having to adapt interviews to video-calling software such as Skype and no longer being able to readily access the full body of archival material.
However, it has presented a greater degree of flexibility in terms of the exhibition as an online space can accommodate far more material than a physical space ever could.
It has also lent a particular prescience to the ‘Now’ element of the project, with the students inviting their peers to document life under lockdown, almost certainly a student experience without parallel.
I am really excited to see how the online exhibition will turn out. It’s great to see how invested and enthusiastic the students have been, and I’m sure they will all take a lot away from the experience of working on this project.
I’m a big fan of broadening involvement with research projects, whether through collaboration between different groups within the university (undergraduates, postgraduates, full-time academics, different departments, etc.) or between the university and the wider public (as has been the case on a separate project about the former Binley colliery in Coventry, with which Warwick Oral History Network is associated).
I hope to remain involved with this project after the launch of the online exhibition, into its write-up as a special edition of the Exchanges journal, the possible (hopeful!) resurrection of the original physical exhibition post-pandemic, and beyond!
