Making Memories: Creative Research and Sensory History

This article explores the value of creative methods for historians, with a particular focus on how such methods may complement interviews and oral histories. It draws out the values of different creative methods – freewriting, close looking, collage, line-drawing, and mapping – in facilitating conversations about the sensory, embodied, and emotional aspects of the past. It also offers, more specifically, a case study of the sensory history of hospitals, in which creative research offers new understandings of sensory-emotional experiences of childhood in hospitals, work, visiting, and waiting, from the 1980s to present.