I’m the Action Officer for CALL. I’m currently working on the “Blue Dot to the Sea” campaign as part of the funding we have received from LAWPRO under its Catchment Support Fund (2024). I explained a bit about the blue dot designation for water ways in my recent post “CALL’s Blue Dot to the Sea Campaign” https://callclimateaction.ie/2024/09/05/calls-blue-dot-to-the-sea-campaign/↗. I’m conducting interviews with members of the community who live and work with our rivers. How did I devise the interview questions?

I’m not going to reveal the questions I ask in case you are one of my interviewees in the next few weeks. I like to have spontaneous rather then pre-prepared answers where possible. The questions I ask are intended to be open and basic. The idea is to encourage my interviewee to say anything they like, really, about the river they are familiar with. Obviously there is no such thing as a completely “pristine” response, untainted by external influences. Everyone has some idea before they start the interview about what they might say, and anything I ask, or say, as the interviewer is bound to influence the interviewee’s response. That’s just how it goes: It’s a two way process, I influence the interviewee, and they influence me. together we form “cultural knowledge”

I record the interviews. They’re between 30 and 60 minutes usually, so each interview provides quite a substantial amount of “unique data” to analyse. The interviews represent significant pieces of “cultural knowledge”

Actually I have thought quite a lot about the ways that cultural knowledge is formed. When I was doing my PhD, over twenty years ago now, I was very influenced by an ethnographer called Johannes Fabian. One of my favourite books is Remembering the Present. Fabian produced some very thoughtful work on the “intersubjective” processes involved in the formation of cultural knowledge, and the ways that knowledge formation is performative rather than only informative. In other words, when my river interview is in progress, the interviewee is performing their role and I am performing mine. That’s “performativity” in action. The product (the data I have recorded) is way more than simply information. It has within it stored codes about our perceptions of the focus of our conversation (rivers) and our relationships to them ….. Does that make sense to you?