Coordinators:
- Rebecca Dolgoy (Curator of Natural Resources and Industrial Technologies, Ingenium)
- Emily Putnam (Cultural Mediations PhD Candidate)
Memory Studies is an increasingly transnational discipline: people, images, practices, and ideas move beyond and between borders. However, scholars have begun questioning the ethics of the proliferation of these transnational memory practices and their accompanying discourses. Our project is examining the ethics of these transnational lenses and practices in our local/national environment. Our program explores intersections. In 2019, our participants started preliminary work on building bibliographies and potential course syllabi that engage with Memory Studies both from transnational and from the situated settler-colonial contexts. This material will be made available in the future. Among our past activities included a partnership with The Carleton Centre for Public History, with whom we collaborated on the Cultural Memory Workshops.
In addition, during 2019, several of our research project participants (Rebecca Dolgoy, Jerzy Elżanowski, and Marie-Catherine Allard) attended the Memory Studies Association 2019 Conference in Madrid. Not only did they present on their research, but they participated in several working groups. Rebecca co-organized the Methodologies Workshop with local scholars and community partners, and co-founded the Methodologies Working Group. Our Carleton-based collection of scholars will also begin working with the nascent MSA Canada in order to cultivate and support Canada-based research and public engagement in Memory Studies.
Spearheaded by Emily Putnam, one of our project coordinators, the CTCA has also partnered with the Ottawa Japanese Canadian Association (OJCA) in order to facilitate the development of a community exhibition that explores transgenerational memory and community activism in relation to redress campaign. This project, Inheriting Redress exhibited at CUAG from September 2019-January 2020, alongside Sites of Memory: Legacies of Japanese Canadian Internment, curated by Emily. More information can be found at CUAG’s website.
In March 2021, Rebecca and Emily were invited by the University of Ottawa’s Department of English Graduate Students to convene a virtual keynote roundtable on “Memory Entanglements: Dialogues on Memory, Community, and Remembrance in Local/Transnational Contexts.” Roundtable participants included members of CTCA’s Memory Studies research collective, Trina Cooper-Bolam, Marie-Catherine Allard, Anna (Ania) Paluch, and Jessica Marino. A recording of the roundtable will be made available in the future.