The papers of Professor Celia Brackenridge Papers relating to Celia Brackenridge’s research, publications and advocacy work in gender equity and child protection. PERSONAL INTRODUCTION BY CELIA BRACKENRIDGE I have always felt it important to respect ‘living history’ and to try to record the processes of our studies as well as the content. This is all-the-more important for women, whose lives are so often marginalised or rendered invisible by the male machine that governs our public and private lives. This feeling was reinforced when I discovered the many books based on the Mass Observation project that started during World War II. The value of these works, for me, is that they capture the widest possible range of views and experiences from people from all walks of life but, especially, those who might otherwise be considered ‘ordinary’. A catalogue of academic papers of course bears little relation to those experiences but is also an important adjunct to the conventional historical record: in particular, it helps to plot one’s thinking over years of application to the everyday politics of research. In Spoilsports (2001, Chapter 8) I wrote a deliberately reflexive piece that attempted to untangle some of the personal challenges of my research on sexual abuse. That chapter turned out to be one of the most important transitions in my research career. I had kept as far as possible a complete set of papers and communications from this research from the late 1980s but the discovery of reflexive sociology led me to do more than simply store papers: it prompted me to keep diaries for my larger projects and to ask my PhD students to do the same during their studies. Not much from my diaries appear in this archive but the research reports and books are infused and, I hope, enriched by them. There is a great deal of secondary material about abuse cases: this is because the subject of abuse in sport was so poorly recognised and documented in the early years that I felt compelled to collect cases histories from the public domain. As described in Spoilsports and in the correspondence files, I was barred from conducting a prevalence survey in the UK so had to resort to amassing qualitative material that could then be used both for research analysis and for advocacy and lobbying. There are very obvious limitations to using media reports of abuse but when primary data are thin on the ground they are a very useful starting point. I hope that you find this material of use and that it might impel you to use your own studies for advocating positive social change. Celia Brackenridge, September 2013 [updated Aug 2016] 1985 - 2013