With Nalini Mohabir
Take part in an active listening session with Nalini Mohabir, inspired by artist Joyce Joumaa’s SIGHTINGS 45 installation. Together we will listen to previously restricted audio excerpts from a 1969 rally in the Hall Building’s mezzanine at the outset of the Sir George Williams Affair. Mohabir, associate professor in Concordia’s Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment and co-editor of Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation, will guide participants through the recording, attending to the voices and perspectives of its speakers while situating the material within a broader political moment and localized space. We will also reflect on the act of acute listening to institutional archives, and the implications for transcribing the past into the present.
Hosted in the immersive Acts of Listening Lab, the session will consider how we listen to and work with archive, sound, and modes of register. Please sign up in advance at the email address above.
This event is presented in conjunction with SIGHTINGS 45: POWER. FORWARD. REVERSE. REWIND., a project by Joyce Joumaa on view on the ground floor of the Hall Building until February 1st, 2026.
Nalini Mohabir is an associate professor in the department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. She teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial migration geographies, and her research is primarily in the field of Caribbean studies, with a focus on indentureship. She has published articles in various publications including Small Axe, Habitat International, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, and Interventions. She has been working with long-time collaborator Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), on a series of publications about the Sir George Williams “Affair” including the edited collection, The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation (Montreal: Black Rose, 2021), a special issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (March 2022) on the legacies of the 1969 Sir George Williams student protests, and an upcoming anthology (with Ronald Cummings and Christiana Abraham) on the visualities of the protest.
REGISTRATION
To register, please contact: juliaeilers.smith@concordia.ca
LOCATION
In-person in LB-1042 (ALLab), COHDS COHDS/ALLab is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.
