Accessing the emotional and intangible: combining family history, collaboration and subjectivity as a methodology

Abstract

How can we get at the intimate worlds of families in the past? This article reflects on a methodology of collaborative critical family history as a way to better understand both what families did in the past and how those histories have been constructed and passed on. Through a collaborative project with family historians and research into my own family, this research project involved a different kind of researcher subjectivity. This article considers how we might use concepts of feeling like, feeling with, and feeling for research participants, both living and dead, to write more ethical histories, and to write histories that are inaccessible through conventional archival methodologies.