COHDS

COHDS Choir: Sounds of Home, Sounds of Elsewheres
2026-01-15 18:00 - 2026-04-23 20:00 (America/New_York) | Concordia University, LB-1042 (COHDS), 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd O, Montreal
With Sara Lucas
“Sounds of Home, Sounds of Elsewheres” is a community choir project led by Sara Lucas, open to COHDS members who want to sing together beyond their research. The repertoire will explore storytelling through song, focusing on how personal and community histories are shared and passed down.
The project embraces the idea that everyone can express themselves through sound and movement, using an inclusive approach to developing natural voices. Songs will be learned mainly by ear, so no singing or music-reading experience is required. Rehearsals will emphasize breathwork, harmony, and unison singing, encouraging diverse forms of expression and joy. The group will work toward a performance for COHDS’ 20th anniversary in October 2026, with participation encouraged but not mandatory.
Sara Lucas is a composer-performer and vocalist with twenty years of ensemble experience. She has toured internationally with Callers and LADAMA, produced multiple albums, and taught community-based music programs worldwide. More at: https://www.saralucas.net/
We will be meeting from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. on the following dates:
January
Thursday, January 15 Thursday, January 29

February
Thursday, February 12 Thursday, February 26

March
Thursday, March 12 Thursday, March 26

April
Thursday, April 9 Thursday, April 23
If you’re interested in participating, please reach out to Sara Lucas at: sara.lucas@mail.concordia.ca

REGISTRATION
Register now with this link
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but registration is mandatory. For any questions, please contact cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
LOCATION
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom) and LB-1042 (Acts of Listening Lab), Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia University, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, J.W. McConnell Building (Library Building).
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Faire parler les sons de la ville. Réflexions sur les ambiances et les paysages sonores en tant que récits géographiques
2026-04-01 13:00 - 15:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
With Violaine Jolivet

What story (city) sounds tell us? Reflections on ambiances and soundscapes as geographical narratives
This research presentation aims to show how the sounds produced and perceived by individuals and groups can be understood as possible narratives about the places we inhabit and study. Based on interviews conducted as part of my research in urban geography, I consider ambiences or soundscapes as narratives about territories, allowing for a descriptive and analytical approach to the neighborhoods and cities I study. Whether produced, designed, or experienced, sounds depend on our architectural, social, aesthetic, political, and technical environments, but above all on our sensory experience of space.

Violaine Jolivet has been a professor of geography at the University of Montreal since 2012, after obtaining a PhD from Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne 1 and completing postdoctoral studies in New York (CUNY). Her expertise lies at the intersection of urban and migration studies, using comparative methods. Her research focuses on transnational mobility, gentrification, and resistance to displacement in Havana and Montreal.
Documentaries – video and audio, sound maps, narrative cartography, and hybrid methodologies strongly influence her research.Looking on several of my past and ongoing research projects, she would like to discuss how sounds have influenced her practice and methods, particularly field recording and sound maps, and present some more general reflections on sounds as narratives.

REGISTRATION
Register now with this link
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but registration is mandatory. For any questions, please contact cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
LOCATION
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia University, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, J.W. McConnell Building (Library Building).
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Montreal Book Launch of Gaza: The Dream and the Nightmare
2026-04-10 13:00 - 15:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
With Julie Norman

In this urgent and compelling book, Julie M. Norman and Maia Carter Hallward tell the story of Gaza from its early foundations, across decades of occupation, to the devastation of the ongoing war. Rather than focusing on elites or abstract politics, at the book’s heart are ordinary Gazans – students, aid workers, journalists, and teachers – whose first-hand testimonies vividly illuminate the realities behind the headlines.
Refusing to sensationalize or oversimplify, the book reckons with the legal, moral, and humanitarian debates surrounding Gaza, from war crimes investigations to the contested meaning of resistance and the politicization of aid. Combining a nuanced narrative with hard-hitting reflections from everyday Gazans, the book serves as a timely and necessary disruption of media cliches and political binaries, and from the perspectives of its own people.

Julie Norman is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at University College London and Senior Associate Fellow on the Middle East at the Royal United Services Institute. Previously she taught in the Political Science Department at
Concordia University and served as Co-Director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.

REGISTRATION
Register now with this link
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but registration is mandatory. For any questions, please contact cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
LOCATION
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia University, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, J.W. McConnell Building (Library Building).
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

COHDS Postdoctoral Oral History Showcase: A Roundtable
2026-04-15 10:00 - 12:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
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.

REGISTRATION
Register now with this link
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but registration is mandatory.

LOCATION
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia University, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, J.W. McConnell Building (Library Building).
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Ethics in Research: How to Apply for Ethics Certification
2026-04-17 14:00 - 16:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
With Barbara Lorenzkowski, Tesfa Peterson, Franklin Bonivento Van Grieken and Derek Xavier Garcia
To obtain the informed consent of our research participants is both an ethical and institutional obligation for oral historians working at Canadian universities. This workshop seeks to demystify the process of applying for ethics certification. Three emerging scholars will reflect on their experiences in navigating this process and discuss how they have translated the ethos of “sharing authority” into the formal language of their ethics applications. Meanwhile, Lead Co-Director Barbara Lorenzkowski will provide hands-on guidance on how to prepare an ethics application for your own thesis research at Concordia. Registered participants will be provided with examples of successful ethics applications, including consent forms.
Barbara Lorenzkowski is an oral historian of childhood and youth whose work explores the ways in which global processes of migration, displacement, and violence have shaped small people’s lives in outsized ways. She recently published the co-edited anthology Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (with Kristine Alexander and Andrew Burt, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023) and is currently completing a FQRSC-funded book project The Children’s War, a large-scale oral history project on children’s sensuous and emotional life-worlds in Atlantic Canada during the Second World War. Dr. Lorenzkowski is the Lead Co-Director of COHDS.
Tesfa Aki Peterson is a public humanities researcher and community-based scholar whose work centers Caribbean history, feminist postcolonial thought, and participatory storytelling. As a student in the PhD Humanities program at Concordia University, her current project traces the life and legacy of Helen Louise Langdon Norton Little, a woman born in LaDigue, Grenada in the late nineteenth century, whose life connected Grenada, Montreal, and the American Midwest. Helen Little was active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Montreal and was the mother of eight children, including civil rights leader Malcolm X. Grounded in community knowledge and Caribbean feminist and postcolonial perspectives, her work asks how public humanities can preserve and honor lives that have been marginalized by colonial archives, while creating inclusive, intergenerational spaces for learning in both Grenada and the diaspora. Since 2020, she has collaborated with the Institute for People’s Enlightenment in the Grenadian village of LaDigue to organize lectures, storytelling sessions, and public conversations that center local voices and oral histories. Additionally, the project also extends to Montreal through an oral history and ritual storytelling podcast documenting Grenadian women’s community organizing. Across storybooks, podcasts, workshops, and public events, Tesfa’s work models a decolonial public humanities rooted in care, collaboration, and community memory.
Franklin Bonivento Van Grieken studied Anthropology (honor degree, 2019) and has a master’s degree in History (Cum Laude thesis, 2022) at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, Colombia. As a son, and grandson, of indigenous Wayuu women, and as a son of a Jewish man, his academic life has been focused on comprehending his own roots and finding ways to communicate them, as well as on Caribbean history, Wayuu people cosmovision, oralities, migrations, frontiers, and musicology. In that respect, he has explored different formats such as essays, creative narratives, and since 2015 he has been engaged in radio broadcasting and podcasting. This experience of creation has served as a form to make and show research: exploring the sound-essays, radio-documentaries, podcasting, among others. He has worked, too, in museography, writing books, fieldwork, and has always considered interdisciplinary work more of a conviction than an option, jumping between the boundaries of disciplines to have big conversations and to find methods and techniques to apprehend our reality, therefore finding new questions, new responses, and new audiences.
Derek Xavier Garcia is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Concordia University, Montréal, and a 2025–2026 Scholar-in-Residence at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He was previously a 2023–2024 Mellon Foundation Resident Scholar in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His research falls at the intersections of the culture, memory, and history of Mexican American activist movements, particularly at the first Mexican American college in the United States, Colegio Jacinto Treviño (1969-1976). He has published in American Quarterly and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

REGISTRATION
Register now with this link
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but registration is mandatory. For any questions, please contact cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
LOCATION
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia University, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, J.W. McConnell Building (Library Building).
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Introduction à l’histoire orale
2026-04-20 15:00 - 17:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
Avec Lea Kabiljo
Cet atelier vous permettra d’explorer certains des éléments fondamentaux dans le domaine interdisciplinaire de l’histoire orale. Les participants découvriront une approche aux entretiens spécifique à l’histoire orale, l’éthique de la recherche et les nombreuses façons dont les histoires orales sont partagées avec le public. Cet atelier est fortement recommandé à tous nos nouvelles.eaux affilié.e.s, car il a pour but de présenter la méthodologie et l’éthique suivies par notre Centre.
Cet atelier offre des conseils sur la réalisation d’un projet d’histoire orale du début à la fin, y compris la planification du projet, les méthodes d’entretien, la gestion des données et le traitement des dossiers, ainsi que la diffusion de ceux-ci. L’atelier comprend également des moments interactif qui permettront aux participant.e.s de discuter des concepts clés et de mettre en pratique les stratégies d’entretien.

Lea Kabiljo, professeur à l’École d’art, Université Laval, est une chercheuse multidisciplinaire, dont l’expertise s’étend aux domaines des arts, de la pédagogie et de l’histoire orale. Elle porte un intérêt particulier à l’intégration de la photographie et de l’histoire orale dans sa démarche de recherche-création.
Titulaire d’un doctorat en éducation artistique de l’Université Concordia, sa recherche met en évidence une approche multidisciplinaire en examinant le potentiel pédagogique de l’histoire orale et de la photographie dans le domaine de l’enseignement artistique.
Ayant enseigné dans des milieux scolaires, communautaires et universitaires, Lea s’intéresse activement à la formation des enseignants, avec un accent particulier sur le développement des compétences socio-émotionnelles. Également reconnue pour son expertise en histoire orale, elle a dirigé de nombreux projets de recherche au Québec, ainsi que des initiatives d’envergure internationale.
Quadrilingue, ayant voyagé dans plus de trente pays et vécu sur quatre continents, Lea a développé une vision du monde ancrée dans les valeurs d’équité, de diversité et d’inclusion. Elle cherche constamment à appliquer ces principes dans toutes ses démarches, tant professionnelles que personnelles.

INSCRIPTION
Inscrivez-vous ici.
Veuillez noter que tous nos événements sont gratuits et ouverts à toutes et à tous. Cependant, vous devez réserver votre place. Pour participer à l’événement en présentiel évrivez à: cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
LIEU
Le CHORN/ALLAB sont situés sur le territoire non-cédé de Kanien’kehá:ka à Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal.
En personne à LB-1019 (salle Sunroom), Centre d’histoire orale et de narration numérique (COHDS), Université Concordia, 1400 boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, pavillon J.-W. McConnell (pavillon de la Bibliothèque).

Personal Archives in the Interview Space
2026-04-30 14:00 - 16:00 | LB-1019 (Sunroom), COHDS, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., Montreal, Québec, Canada
With Kelann Currie-Williams and Derek Garcia

Much of oral history interview preparation rightly (and evidently) revolves around the audio and visual recording of the event. But what happens when the narrator brings their personal archives into the interview space?
Drawing from Monica Muñoz Martinez’s “vernacular history making,” personal archives are the objects—photos, drawings, notes, documents, digital creations—that individuals collect to preserve historical perspectives which may not be considered by institutional archives. This workshop envisions these moments of sharing as opportunities to learn with the narrator; despite the surprise they may bring.
How do you include these objects in the interview? How do you record their presence? How might a researcher design ethics around this possibility? Garcia and Currie-Williams will discuss their experiences interviewing individuals who brought more to the interview than what was expected, and how they effectively included these materials in their dialogue.

Kelann Currie-Williams is a writer and PhD Candidate at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, working at the intersections of Visual Culture Studies, History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies. Their research focuses on the image-making and photographic preservation histories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Canada from the late 19th to late 20th centuries. Kelann was a 2023-2024 scholar-in-residence and 2024-2025 Student Representative of the COHDS Administrative Board.
Derek Xavier Garcia is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Concordia University. His research falls at the intersections of culture, memory, and history of Mexican American and Chicanx activist movements. His dissertation explores educational activism at Colegio Jacinto Treviño (1970-1976), the first Mexican American college in the United States. Derek was a 2022-2023 Student Representative on the COHDS Administrative Board and is currently a 2025-2026 Scholar-in-Residence at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.

REGISTRATION
Register now with this link
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but registration is mandatory. For any questions, please contact cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
LOCATION
In-person in LB-1019 (Sunroom), Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia University, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, J.W. McConnell Building (Library Building).
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.
