Stories Beyond Borders: Mapping the Imaginative Spaces of Movement and Migration
2024-04-02 11:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
with Stéphane Martelly, Maricia Fischer-Souan, and Kelly Norah Drukker
English
In this panel presentation and discussion, writers and scholars working within the disciplines of oral history, sociology, and creative writing share different approaches to “mapping” stories of movement and migration—from intimate ethnographies to those told within broader communities. What role does place play in the interview process, and how does it shape the stories that emerge from oral history interviews? What strategies can we use, informed by a range of disciplinary practices, to capture some of the felt dislocations—the distances between “here” and “there”— that emerge from our research? Through conversation and sharing works in progress, this panel explores how places can be (re)imagined through different modes of writing, and how various forms of mapping can serve as useful tools to convey the stories that emerge from places, both present and past.

Chair: Stéphane Martelly, Université de Sherbrooke (TBC)
Writer, painter and scholar, Stéphane Martelly was born in Port-au-Prince and now lives in Montreal. Through a profoundly transdisciplinary approach, she confronts theory, critical reflection and art in her work. She has published poetry [La Boîte noire suivi de Départs 2004)] and children’s tales [Couleur de rue, 1999 and L’Homme aux cheveux de fougère, 2002]. Her pictorial works are showcased in the digital art book Folie passée à la chaux vive (Madness spent in quicklime) (Publie.net, 2010).
Her scholarly work notably includes working in the Montreal-based Life Stories Of Montrealers Displaced By War, Genocide And Other Human Rights Violations as a researcher and coordinator. She also wrote a monograph on Haitian poet Magloire-Saint-Aude (Le Sujet opaque, 2001) and several articles on Caribbean literature. Her latest essay in research-creation is: Les Jeux du dissemblable. Folie, marge et féminin en littérature haïtienne contemporaine, Nota Bene, 2016. Her recent publications are La Maman qui s’absentait (Vents d’Ailleurs, 2011), Inventaires (Triptyque, 2016) and L’enfant gazelle (Remue-Ménage, 2018).
https://www.usherbrooke.ca/dall/departement/personnel/personnel-enseignant/stephane-martelly
Maricia Fischer-Souan is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po Paris (October 2021-2024) and affiliated with the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CÉRIUM), Université de Montréal. Her postdoctoral research project, “IM.MAGINE – Mapping Immigrant Imaginations: Comparing North Africans in Montréal and Marseille”, examines representations of and relationships with space and place in migrant identity construction. She has a PhD in Social Sciences (2020) from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Her dissertation “Becoming a Migrant in Europe: Accounts of Motive, Meaning, and Identity Formation” studied various processes of mobile subjectivity among both postcolonial migrants and European Union ‘free-movers’ in Berlin, London, Paris, and Madrid. As part of her current IM.MAGINE project, she is exploring lyrical and imaginative approaches to ‘everyday’ migration narratives, both methodologically and thematically and is working on a book manuscript that charts the use of figurative language in both individual and public migration narratives. Her most recent research article, “Belonging to the Nation, Belonging to Europe? Varieties of Particularism and Universalism in Migrant Identity Negotiation” is published in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies (2024).
Kelly Norah Drukker is a poet, nonfiction writer, and doctoral candidate in Concordia University’s Humanities PhD program. As a research-creation scholar working at the intersection of creative writing, oral history, space and place, and memory studies, she has presented her projects at Concordia University, Rutgers University, the University of Ulster, the University of Jyväskylä, and Sydney Catholic University. Kelly’s first collection of poems, Small Fires, was awarded the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Grand prix du livre de Montréal (2016). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. Petits feux, the French-language translation of Small Fires by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné, was published by Le lézard amoureux in 2018. Kelly’s doctoral Project, “Naming the Traces: (Re)Constructing an Irish-Canadian Family Narrative of Emigration, Place-Making, and Return,” has received the support of a Faculty of Arts and Science Graduate Fellowship, a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship, a United Irish Societies of Montreal Scholarship, a School of Canadian Irish Studies Bursary, and a Fr. Thomas Daniel McEntee Graduate Scholarship. She continues to live, write, and teach creative writing workshops in Montreal.

REGISTRATION
Please note that all of our events are free and open to all, but you need to register! To register, contact us at: cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS

COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

The Archive of the Future: Oral History and Community Archiving
2024-04-04 14:00 - 16:00 | Online
with Po Ki Chan, Sonia Dhaliwal, Eliot Perrin, and Carla Rodeghero
English
Join us for a conversation regarding lives of learning, experiences with oral history, and community archiving. Increasingly, we seek to break down institutional barriers and include participants in the archival process. What does this process look like? How does community archiving differ from state archive/academic archives? How does the role of shared authority translate within the archiving process? This conversation will speak to these challenges, but also the opportunities afforded to community-grounded archival practice that seeks to build an inclusionary archive for the future. In doing so, we seek to speak to the best practices that can help us to achieve this. Our panellists represent diverse academic and professional backgrounds that highlight the various approaches to answering these questions.

Po Ki Chan is a PhD student in INDI at Concordia University. She holds an MSc in Multimedia and Entertainment technology from the Design School of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where she started her journey in exploring possibilities in a virtual representation of the heritage of cultural significance. Her research focuses on heritage conservation by leveraging oral history to provide an effective understanding and cultural presence for the global audience.
Sonia Dhaliwal is an information professional who has worked as an archivist and librarian in academic institutions. She has a keen interest in developing archives and research collections reflective of diasporas through community led digital scholarship and research-creation based initiatives. She graduated from McGill’s School of Information Studies and has an MA in History from Concordia.
Eliot Perrin is the archives coordinator for the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. He is also a History PhD candidate at Concordia. His research focuses on the impacts of urban renewal and deindustrialization on a historically Francophone neighbourhood in Sudbury, Ontario.
Carla Rodeghero is a History Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she teaches history of Contemporary Brazil, and oral history methodology. Between 2012 and 2014, Carla was editor of the Brazilian Oral History Association Journal (História Oral) and in the following biennium, she chaired the national organization. Since 2018, she coordinates the UFRGS’s Oral History Repository, a website and a collaborative team that aims to gather, organize and publish interviews carried out by students, professors and other researchers from the History Department of the university. Carla is currently involved with two projects: 1) she is comparing some oral history institutional experiences in Brazil, Canada and Italy; 2) she is a co-coordinator of the inter-institutional project Documenting the Covid 19 Experiences in Rio Grande do Sul, that is been carried out for 14 institutions in her state.

REGISTRATION
Please note that all of our events are free and open to all, but you need to register! This is an online event, register on zoom to attend.

COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Palates & Passages: Navigating the Intersection of Food and Oral Histories through Migration
2024-04-11 14:00 - 16:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
with Cassandra Marsillo, Hannah Pinilla, and Amanda Whittaker
English
This panel discussion delves into the rich crossing of food history and oral history by exploring the connections between migration, the concept of home, and food narratives. Each of the panelists’ research focus on the storytelling found within the pages of cookbooks, identity and memory formation through food practices, and the enduring weight of emotion and trauma throughout migrant lives. The event aims to highlight the significance of preserving and sharing stories related to food, migration, and family, and ultimately contribute to the growing research on diverse and interconnected migrant experiences.

Cassandra Marsillo is an educator and public historian, based in Tiohti:áke (Montreal), telling and listening to stories about immigration, identity, collective memory, food, and folklore, particularly in relation to the Italian-Canadian experience and traditions from her family’s region, Molise. She has an MA in Public History from Carleton University, in Ottawa. Currently, she is teaching in the department of History and Classics at Dawson College.
Hannah Pinilla is an oral historian and MA student in public history with a specialization in digital humanities at Carleton University. Her SSHRC-funded master’s research project, “El Sabor del Hogar: The Transformation of Identity and Memory Through the Food Practices of Colombian Migrants in Quebec,” engages nine Colombian migrants, living in Montreal and Longueuil in oral history interviews facilitated through cooking sessions, to explore how the narration, preparation, and consumption of ‘home foods’ is a form of embodied and interactive diasporic memory work. Her research question was guided by my own lived experiences as the granddaughter of a first-generation Colombian-Canadian: how does the dialectical relationship between identity and memory manifest through food practice and what impact does it have on the process of home-building?
Amanda Whittaker is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto in the Department of History. Her research is driven by her interest in the field of food studies, gender studies, and migration history. In her doctoral thesis, she examines the experience of migration and how it may have altered the development and preservation of migrants’ foodways. Using the oral history testimonies of over 60 first and second-generation migrants, her project is a study of métissage that explores the cultural negotiations, preservation, and exchange that occurs when migrants arrived in Montreal in the post-1960 period. The conceptual framework of her dissertation centers on the notion of “emotional transnationalism” which refers to the rupture as well as the nostalgia of migration, and considers the embodied forms of remembering and reimagining, where food and cuisine play a central role.
Currently, she is teaching and in the process of writing her dissertation, but she gains most of her insights from afternoons with her interview partners where quips, memories, and shared emotions are never in short supply. Her professional experience includes course instructing at the John Abbott College, the University of Toronto, and guest lecturing at Marianopolis College and UTSG.

REGISTRATION
Please note that all of our events are free and open to all, but you need to register! To register, contact us at: cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS
Register on zoom to attend online.

COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Gaming & Oral History
2024-04-17 13:00 - 15:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
with Carl Therrien, Jonathan Lessard, and Dany Guay-Bélanger

English

Videogames are a fairly young medium. Emerging as a commercial good in the early 1960s, they have slowly made their way into the mainstream. What was once seen as toys for young boys has become so widespread that many of us have them in our living rooms or basements, and even close to us at all times in our very pockets. There has been interest in the history of the medium for quite some time, as can be seen with the many publications by fans and journalists and the recent resurgence of retrogaming. But academia lagged behind in investigating videogame history and it is only around 2010, about a decade after the emergence of game studies as a discipline, that this area of research truly gained momentum. Since then, scholars from across disciplinary boundaries have endeavoured to analyse the complex and fascinating history of a medium that is at once art form, culture, and technology. Still, oral history remains underutilised in the study of videogaming even though many scholars have argued for its potential. This event will give a brief overview of the history of videogames and of historical research on this topic. It will then bring in conversation two approaches to oral history as it relates to videogames. The first, presented by Carl Therrien and Jonathan Lessard, is to interview game developers, and in this case early practitioners of what would become known as the independent game development scene. The second, presented by Dany Guay-Bélanger, is to interview players to preserve their memories and experiences of playing and appropriating games.

Jonathan Lessard is a game designer, professor, and researcher at Concordia University. For the past ten years as leader of the LabLabLab, he has been exploring the playful affordances of various technologies and concepts such as natural language processing and possible worlds theory. His main research interests include emergent narratives, complex simulations, and game design history.

Carl Therrien is Full Professor in games and film studies at the Université de Montréal. In The Media Snatcher (Platform studies, MIT Press, 2019), he proposed a critical view of videogame historiography through a comparative study of the PC Engine platform, confronting American and Japanese perspectives of this technology. He has written numerous papers on immersion and on the history of popular genres (such as adventure games and first-person shooters). His research projects seek to integrate more video games into the canon, hoping to assist archivists and historians in their efforts to engage with the diversity and complexity of this culture.

Dany Guay-Bélanger is a FRQ-funded PhD candidate in Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. By combining his training as a public historian and a game scholar, his research aims to develop a methodology favouring a holistic approach for the preservation and study of videogames as cultural heritage artefacts that allows players and researchers, present and future, to access videogames from every era of this medium’s history. Dany is currently the Francophone Representative of the Canadian Game Studies Association and scholar in residence at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) of Concordia University.

Dany Guay-Bélanger est candidat au doctorat en études cinématographiques à l’Université de Montréal et est financé par le Fonds de recherche du Québec. Combinant sa formation d’historien public et de chercheur en étude du jeu, sa recherche vise à développer une méthodologie favorisant une approche holistique pour la préservation et l’étude des jeux vidéo en tant qu’artéfacts d’héritage culturel. Cette méthodologie a pour but de permettre aux joueu·euse·s et aux chercheur·euse·s, présent·e·s et futur·e·s, d’accéder aux jeux vidéo de toutes les époques de l’histoire de ce médium. Dany est actuellement le représentant francophone de l’Association canadienne des études des jeux et chercheur en résidence au Centre d’histoire orale et de récits numériques (CHORN) de l’Université Concordia.

REGISTRATION

Please note that all of our events are free and open to all, but you need to register! To register, contact us at: cohds.chorn@concordia.ca

In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS

COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.
