Meet the Story Fellow Marsha O’Mahony

Marsha is a journalist, writer, author, and oral historian. It was her first published work, ‘The Burakumin as caste: Japan’s untouchables’, that led her to focus her storytelling skills on the underrepresented. 
She has worked for local, national and international news organisations, and has written four books (and an appearance at Hay Festival!) based around her oral history work. This has covered such diverse areas as the Gwent Levels, the River Wye, social housing in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, the Irish diaspora, and hop growing in the West Midlands (to name a few). It is her oral history experience, expertise and skill set, that she brings to her Story Arcs project.

The Challenge

The Channel VIEWS story project is designed to support residents as they transition from high-rise apartments (long promised for demolition) to newly constructed homes. This initiative focuses on the tenants, emphasising the importance of maintaining community ties during this transition. The project will explore how residents can translate the values and strengths of their current community into the new development and public spaces ensuring their voices are at the forefront of this transformation. She will use oral history and reminiscence to hear their story on a more personal level. However, the challenge is engaging with a disengaged and wary group of tenants, who have been through countless consultation exercises, and exploring just what community means in this area of social housing. 

Marsha’s First Steps

Marsha ethics submission was approved in August, and she was good to go. She’s enjoying the opportunity to explore and have time to think about the project. She wants to develop herself professionally and secure future work out of this. However, she’s not sure if she has managed to achieve that yet. She bases herself at the tower block twice a week to make herself available and visible. It’s interesting that the brief was clear about the community being preserved during the transition, because there she has seen very little evidence of communal activity or areas of community gathering. So she is searching for pockets of community within the tower block. There is a community room, but it is never used and far away from any thoroughfare, so now she bases herself outside the lifts with a table and chair and invites people to sit with her. She’s having a different theme each week and s-l-o-w-l-y tenants are getting used to her being around. Using excerpts from her research, she is guerilla postering around the block to pose questions, provoke debate and surprise. Anything to get people talking. Key to this all is Chris the caretaker, who has taken me under her wing.

In the past, social housing design and architecture has often been at the detriment of tenants. Marsha’s research indicates that tenants’ voices are often missing at the design stage. While Channel View tenants have been consulted (often resulting in consultation fatigue), she wants to measure, through oral history, how much their thoughts, experiences, and concerns, have been translated into the design of their future homes. Ultimately, she wants to see if this could be used as a tool of engagement in other social housing builds. 

Marsha is quietly determined, and she’s going to have to be in this challenge in getting tenants to engage. She is an active listener, thoughtful, interested, has good interviewing skills, a careful listener, cultural sensitive, and a strong ethical grounding in respecting the interviewee’s perspective. These skills involve preparation, the ability to use recording and archival equipment, critical analysis of information, and strong communication abilities for the preservation and sharing of personal experiences and community stories. Her biggest hope is to believe in her skills and abilities and experience to secure future work in this field.