Okay, full disclosure: I just signed up for this the day before Ottawa Pride week starts, as part of my multi-pronged strategy to get people to talk and write to me about their memories of Ottawa's queer community (the impetus to get this started is over the next week I am going to be putting up posters and handing out cards, and I need a place for anyone interested to contact me and to read up on my project). Why? I am doing a history of the GLBT community for my master thesis in history at Carleton University. I want this site to be a place where people can contact me, or engage in discussions with me and others about places and people they remember from their time in Ottawa's GLBT community.
I am going to make this brief and post parts of my official letter of information that I had to do for Carleton's Ethics panel to get clearance to do oral interviews for the paper. Hopefully these exerts will give everyone a good idea of what my project and I am all about.
Over the next few weeks I am going to figure out how all this blogging stuff works... patience please.
Thanks for reading.
Re History Project: A Queer Capital: A History of Ottawa’s GLBT community
My name is Grant Burke. I am a Masters student in the department of history at Carleton University. I am being supervised by Dr. Patrizia Gentile, associate professor at Carleton university’s Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies/Department of History and recent co-author of The Canadian War on Queers. I am conducting interviews with older and/or long-term residents of Ottawa and members of its gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community (for now on to be referred to as GLBT) so to write a history of it.
The purpose of this project is to describe the uniqueness of Ottawa’s GLBT community in comparison to larger cities with established villages, and how it’s history of using certain types of spaces and scattering those spaces across the region both reflected and helped to shape Ottawa’s unique gay culture. The study will also look at how Ottawa as a capital city has played a role in how GLBT people have interacted with each other and with the city as a whole.
The history of Ottawa’s GLBT has never been written, thus collecting the ‘stories’ of GLBT members is a central feature of writing this history. Your participation and willingness to be interviewed is voluntary. It will involve a conversation from 2-3 hours maximum. The language of the interview can be either French or English. Please be advised that you may be asked to participate in a follow up interview. If this is the case, I will ask you to re-read this letter of information and sign another consent form. All participants have the right to refuse a follow-up interview. All consent forms will be stored in a safety deposit box.
You may decline to answer any of the interview questions if you so wish. Further, you may decide to withdraw from this study at any time. I will ensure that all information acquired will be destroyed once you withdraw. You also have the option of choosing whether you agree to be recorded during the interview. If you choose not to be recorded, I will take notes for future use.
In order to minimize any possible social risks to participants, and to ensure any expressed desire for confidentiality and anonymity, I will use pseudonyms in both the labeling of your interview and in any research or conference papers produced based on your interview. All electronic files that contain personal information acquired during the interview will be password protected, and will be on a separate hard drive other than my computer. In the event that a researcher other than me transcribes or translates your interview, this person will be obligated to sign a confidentiality agreement indicating that any information learned during the transcription will be held in total and complete confidentiality.
Once my project is done, I would like to store these interviews at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto as a source for future researchers to use. If you do not wish your interview to be part of a permanent collection of records, you can choose to not have your interview archived. It will be destroyed upon the completion of my degree.
Please note that this study has been reviewed and received ethics clearance by the Carleton University Research Ethics Committee. If you have any questions about this letter, the research project, or if you wish to withdraw from the study, please do not hesitate to contact me at:
Grant Burke
Department of History
Carleton University
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