Work experience: Ways of remembering a working life

Professor Suzanne Ewing, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
RSE Small Research Grant

Work experience: Ways of remembering (a) working life is an RSE Small Research Grant-supported project led by Professor Suzanne Ewing, Personal Chair of Architectural Criticism at Edinburgh College of Art, which challenges how working lives—particularly those of women in Scottish architecture—are recognised, remembered, and valued.

Through the critical examination of institutional archives—namely the Voices of Experience dataset, 2016-2024 archive of intergenerational conversations that foreground women active in architecture in Scotland from the 1950s to the present—and the curation of personally meaningful artefacts contributed by female architectural professionals, Professor Ewing’s project honed-in on participants’ agency, experience, and communities of practice; augmenting the dominant horizon of built environment archives organised by a single-author architect or celebrated building. Bringing underrepresented voices and experiences into public consciousness, the work has questioned the scope and limits of institutional memory and public records while asking what projects, people, places, experiences, ideas, or values are distilled as significant, who by, and how?

The project pursued three key objectives:

1. To review how working lives appear (or are forgotten) in educational and professional institution records and public cultures and discourses.
2. To reflect on how women or marginalised groups are recognised and remembered for their contribution to architectural practice in Scotland, extending ‘writing-in’ histories to articulations of cultural presence.
3. To explore ways of remembering everyday working lives that foreground participants’ agency and experience, such as ‘remembering in public’, conversation, and life stories, through creative, feminist methods, situated practice, and material culture interpretation.

“The research is action-oriented and aims to influence professional architectural culture and its practices. It does this through source-building, curation, creative presentation, and facilitating structured conversation. Emphasis on creative ways of remembering through personal experience and informal collections offers a vocabulary and approach to ways of reimagining current and future relations with architectural work.”

Audio, transcription, and visual documentation of intergenerational conversations and memento artefacts have been consolidated and added to an open-access repository [University of Edinburgh DataShare] to enable access and dissemination among existing professional communities and future researchers. The research was also shared through a curation of a public exhibition, which showcased archive boxes, each containing an artefact selected by a retired or near-retirement professional to represent an aspect of their working life, accompanied by the participant’s explanatory caption. In addition to the exhibition, which was held in a recently redundant engineering yard in Leith, Edinburgh, Professor Ewing and the Voices of Experience collective hosted a conversation event, Mementos of (a) working life, which offered intergenerational insight into an extended understanding of architectural work.

Speaking about her RSE award, Professor Ewing commented,

Building on her RSE-funded research, Professor Ewing will now contribute to the knowledge of creative methodologies in feminist accounts and archives of professional work through a journal article, ongoing advocacy work with Voices of Experience collective and exploration of collaborative publications that connect historical accounts with life-course perspectives on women’s working lives in Scottish architectural culture.