COHDS Postdoctoral Oral History Showcase: A Roundtable

With Martín Giraldo-Hoyos, Camille Robert, Florence Darveau Routhier

This year, we are proud to highlight three outstanding postdoctoral researchers at COHDS and to showcase their work. Together, their projects reflect the breadth and vitality of oral history–informed scholarship: from collaborative research with Black farming communities in Colombia using oral history and digital storytelling, to historical studies of women, labour, and feminist movements in Quebec, and place-based, creative ethnographic research on poverty and gentrification in Sherbrooke.

Martín Giraldo-Hoyos is an FRQ-SC postdoctoral fellow in Concordia’s Department of Geography, Planning and Environment. His current project examines the intersections of oral history, soundscape ecology, story mapping, and digital storytelling to support collaborative research with Black farming communities in Colombia’s Cauca River Valley. This work builds on his PhD dissertation at McGill University, which analyzed the environmental history of emancipation in the region between mid-19th and early-20th centuries through geospatial methods, political ecology, and social history. Martín also produces documentary podcasts in collaboration with Afro-Colombian organizations and participates in grassroots archival cataloguing initiatives.

Camille Robert is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at Concordia University. Her research focuses on the history of women, work, unionism, and feminist movements in Quebec. In 2017, she published Toutes les femmes sont d’abord ménagères. Histoire d’un combat féministe pour la reconnaissance du travail ménager with Éditions Somme toute. She also co-edited, with Louise Toupin, the collective work Travail invisible. Portraits d’une lutte féministe inachevée, published in the fall of 2018 by Éditions du remue-ménage. Committed to contributing to the dissemination of history, she is a member of the editorial board of Histoire Engagée and collaborates with several media outlets and organizations.

Florence Darveau Routhier conducts her research in the Alexandre district of downtown Sherbrooke, a working-class neighborhood where revitalization initiatives are part of the ongoing gentrification process. Her place-based research aims to deconstruct the managerial perspective that approaches poverty and related issues “from the top down.” She therefore addresses the issues of poverty and the historical struggles associated with it as closely as possible, examining how they are experienced, using creative ethnographic methods and situated perspective epistemologies. She is a member of the Collectif d’histoire, d’éducation et d’archivage populaire de Sherbrooke (CHEAP), with which she conducts her research.