⌈SESSION 1: Emotion and Place in Imagining Collective Pasts⌋
Students at the Moroccan Division Monument, Canadian National Memorial Park at Vimy Ridge. Photograph: Dr. Graham Broad, May 9, 2025. Author’s collection.
“Spirit in Heaven, Body in France, Memory in Canada:” Student Emotions and the “Power of Place” on Tour
Olivia Holland is a second-year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto; she researches Canadian nurses during the First and Second World War through the lens of tourism and has had the privilege of travelling to France on battlefield study tours as a student and a teaching assistant.
From the wind whistling across the fields of northern France to the scars of battlefields etched into the earth, sensory experiences are an essential component of the “power of place.” Based on my experience as a teaching assistant on a battlefield study tour, I explore how heritage sites along the Western Front mediate memory, commemoration, emotion, and history. What does it mean and how does it feel to be a Canadian student at a European battlefield?
Eating ćevapi. Credit: Amanda Skocic
The Politics of Palatability: Yugoslav Foodways and the Taste of Belonging
Amanda Skocic is a second-year PhD student at the University of Toronto, where she studies History with a Collaborative Specialization in Food Studies.
This project examines how the edibility and palatability of diasporic food is linked to the metaphorical digestibility of migrants, focusing on how Yugoslav migrants negotiate foodways and identity within the boundaries of Western taste. Drawing on oral interviews with workers at Balkan food establishments in Windsor, Ontario, I use Lucy Long’s culinary tourism framework of the exotic, edible, and palatable to examine these negotiations through the popular Balkan dish, ćevapi. By centering sensory food memories and migrant food establishments as heritage sites, this research highlights culinary experience as a means of documenting and transmitting diasporic histories while challenging traditional historiographical methods. By centering sensory food memories and migrant food establishments as heritage sites, this research challenges traditional historiographical approaches and highlights culinary experience as a means through which diasporic communities document, interpret, and transmit their lived histories.
The smell of warm apple pie wafts from this oven in the kitchen module of a streetscape exhibit at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. Out of frame, a placard prompts visitors to think about “what kitchen smells take you home?” Image courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, Human History Galleries.
Nostalgia in the Sensorial Streetscape: Exclusionary Fantasies of “Home” in Canadian Museums
A second-year History PhD student at the University of Toronto, Rebecca Hartley examines the history of representations of the past as depicted in museum exhibits, personal recollections, and popular media.
For decades, Canadian “streetscapes” – walkable museum exhibits with half-sized building façades staged with artifacts – have immersed nostalgic visitors in partial historical narratives of the early twentieth-century. While the sounds, smells, and other sensory elements of streetscapes are powerful tools for capturing visitors’ imaginations, the emotional responses they elicit have contributed to exclusionary senses of belonging within these representations of the past. This paper explores how experiential museum exhibits such as streetscapes have used sensory ebects to instil nostalgia around a collective sense of Canadian heritage, and how that nostalgia risks replicating settler colonial fantasies.
⌈SESSION 2: Giving Voice to Local Experience⌋
Prototype of The Puzzle Interface, developed as part of the master’s thesis Learning to See at the Crossroads. Credit: Andrée-Ann Langevin, 2026.
Making Experience Count by Mapping Perception
Andrée-Ann Langevin is a recent Master of Architecture graduate from Carleton University and candidate to the architectural profession at DMA Architectes in Montréal, whose work focuses on adaptive reuse, heritage conservation, and integrating lived and perceptual experience into how the built environment is understood and transformed.
The GIS-based perceptual mapping methodology uses an icon-driven language to enable participants to identify lived experiences and relate them to spatial conditions. It addresses site-assessment processes shaped primarily by physical, visual, economic, and performance-based criteria, where experiential knowledge remains difficult to account for. By gathering shared, open-access observations, the method translates perceptual experience into measurable spatial data that can inform more precise, incremental, and democratically informed transformations of the built environment.
Monastery of the Servantes de Jésus-Marie, Photo: National Capital Commission.
Putting Words to Paper – How Oral History Can Shape Conservation Planning
Carolyn Bouffard Lima, B.Arch., M.Sc. is Heritage Manager at Public Services and Procurement Canada; she specializes in the conservation of federal heritage buildings and national historic places. Heather Thomson, MCIP RPP CAPH is the Manager, Heritage Conservation Programs at the National Capital Commission and an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University.
In 2016, the National Capital Commission purchased the monastery of the Servantes de Jésus-Marie, 210 Laurier Avenue in Gatineau, Quebec. Recognizing the importance of memory as a significant part of the heritage of this place, the NCC, the congregation and local heritage partners undertook an oral history project to document the lived experiences of the nuns. This work helped to inform the development of heritage conservation guidelines, including “mapping” of the intangible values of spaces within the building and the site.
Credit: William James Topley/Library and Archives Canada/PA-009430 (copyright expired)
Sight, Sound and Feel: Preserving the Memory of the Alexandra Bridge
Walid Elgazzar is a member of the project management team for the Alexandra Bridge Replacement Project at Public Services and Procurement Canada, focusing on sustainability and the interpretation and commemoration program; he holds a Master of Engineering from Carleton University and participates in his personal capacity.
The Alexandra Bridge (1901), a crossing of the Kichi Zībī (Ottawa River) and a component of Confederation Boulevard, delivers a layered sensory experience and carries a load of social history; it is nearing the end of its life, and the project is committed to preserving its memory. The regulatory instruments recognize the multi-sensory experience as character-defining but prescribe only the visual, leaving the program to transmit sound, touch, and feeling through preservation, oral histories, and audio recording. This paper examines what each tool can hold, what escapes all of them, and how to measure whether the memory crossed over.
⌈SESSION 3: Sonic Heritage Practices⌋
Sonic Enhancements: Case Studies in Adding Sounds to Museums and Heritage Sites
Morghen Jael is a PhD student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, with a research focus on the embodied experiences of visiting and interfacing with exhibitions at museums and other display sites.
Museums and heritage sites are increasingly offering soundbased exhibition elements—including soundscapes, sound effects, and sound-making interactives—to engage visitors beyond artifacts and text panels. This presentation summarizes findings from case studies of Ontario museums and heritage sites that recently implemented sonic enhancements, particularly to exhibitions on topics other than sound. I present example tactics, practitioner insights, and analytical reflections on both the challenges and possibilities for adding sound to enhance meaningmaking in museums and heritage sites.
(insert image)
Reimagining Heritage through Interdisciplinary Research-Creation: The Diefenbunker Artist Residency
Jesse Stewart is a composer, improviser, percussionist, artist, musicologist, and educator. His music has been documented on over twenty recordings, he has been widely commissioned as a composer and artist. He is a faculty member in Carleton University’s School for Studies in Art and Culture.
Heritage sites are often understood as collections of objects and spaces that communicate history primarily through visual interpretation. This paper argues that interdisciplinary research-creation offers another possibility—one in which heritage is encountered not only through looking, but also through listening and embodied engagement. Drawing on my year-long artist residency at the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum in 2015, I examine how interdisciplinary research-creation can activate the sensory dimensions of heritage, enabling visitors to develop new relationships with place, memory, and the material remains of the Cold War.
René Lussier and Reza Yazdanpanah in the backyard of René Lussier’s studio during the recording of Reza et Moi. Photo courtesy of Reza Yazdanpanah.
Improvising Heritage: Cultural Mediation, Migration, and the Transformation of Oral Tradition
Reza Yazdanpanah is a former music faculty member in Iran and a community music instructor, composer, improviser, and PhD researcher in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University whose research-creation explores oral tradition, intercultural improvisation, cultural mediation, migration, and embodied forms of knowledge.
Persian classical music is a living oral tradition transmitted through listening, memory, embodiment, and improvisation rather than through fixed notation alone. Drawing on my experience as an Iranian musician who migrated to Canada, this presentation explores how intercultural improvisation can function as cultural mediation, allowing inherited musical practices to be transformed through encounters across cultural and linguistic difference. Through discussion and musical examples on the Persian tar, I consider improvisation not simply as a means of preserving heritage, but as an embodied process through which oral tradition is remembered, negotiated, and continually remade.
Image clipped from Lassen, B., Artist, and U.S Federal Music Project. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection
Conservation as Riff: Musical improvisation as metaphor and method in built heritage preservation and interpretation
Amy Hetletvedt, architect and author of Preserving with Purpose: Reimagining Buildings for Community Benefit, is a contract instructor at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton.
How should conservationists and communities address buildings when material has been lost or left behind? This presentation examines interpretive reconstructions through the metaphor of musical improvisation, exploring how cultural preservation and production can intertwine. (Image note: WPA Federal Music Project presents songs and piano music everybody should know Free to the public. )
⌈SESSION 4: Accessing Heritage through Embodied Knowledge⌋
The complex stereotomical main entrance to the former U.S. Embassy in Ottawa (100 Wellington), recently transformed into a national space dedicated to Inuit, Métis Nation, and First Nations communities. Designed by Bassam Daoud of Norr Architects to conceptually allude to a traditional wigwam, the structure was engineered and executed by Patrick Moore and Amor Construction. Credit: Image courtesy of Patrick Moore
The Art and Science of Stereotomy – An Organic Holistic Technology
Patrick M. Moore is an internationally acclaimed carpenter, construction manager, and stereotomy expert who holds the unique distinction of being the first native English speaker accepted as a “Compagnon Passant Charpentier” in France’s elite, UNESCO-listed 13th-Century Compagnonnage guild.
Stereotomy is an empirically based, manual drawing method used for millennia across Europe and Asia to design and construct structures like cathedrals, temples, and UNESCO World Heritage monuments. Its profound cultural significance is recognized by UNESCO, which has inscribed both the French tradition of “L’Art du Trait” and the Japanese tradition of “Kikujutsu” on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Grounded in practical work site applications, this method uses concrete working drawings rather than abstract mathematics, empowering modern builders to unleash their creative potential and problem-solving skills without relying on digital software. (Image note: The organic geometry required over 500 unique compound cuts in glue-laminated marine-grade plywood and utilized over 93,000 individual stainless-steel fasteners.)
Haitian Pavilion, architectural design by Chloe Maignan. Through spatial immersion, embodied movement, and textile-based materiality, the pavilion imagines Haitian heritage as something experienced and transmitted through the body and cultural memory. Credit: Chloe Maignan, [2026]. Original architectural design and image by the author.
The Body as Archive: Afrofuturism, Embodied Memory, and the Multisensory Experience of Heritage
Chloe Maignan is a Master of Architecture student at Carleton University with a background in History and Theory of Architecture and a research focus on decolonial approaches to diasporic architectural history, memory, heritage, and conservation.
This presentation positions the Black diasporic body as an archive through which heritage is remembered, transmitted, and continually reimagined, asking whose bodies heritage conservation recognizes as carriers of cultural knowledge. Drawing on Afrofuturist thought and multisensory approaches to heritage, it examines how embodied memory can challenge conservation frameworks that privilege archival, material, and institutional forms of knowledge. By centering embodied and diasporic ways of knowing, the presentation proposes heritage conservation not simply as preserving objects and places, but as an active practice of sustaining the people, memories, and sensory relationships that give heritage meaning.
Mrs. Evelyn Borden, Truro, N.S. Copyright of Black Legacy Collective Inc. Voices of the Past, Echoes of the Future: Black History Across Canada’.
Who’s in the Room? A Black Curator’s View through the Looking Glass
Keisha Cuffie is the founder of Black Legacy Collective and an author, curator and public historian dedicated to preserving and celebrating Black history in Canada from the 1600’s to today.
I have worked inside three Canadian heritage institutions as a Black curator, and in each one I brought knowledge the institution has no mechanism to hold – bodymemory, the diasporic archive transmitted across generations through oral tradition, gesture, sounds, and sensory recognition, which does not arrive through the acquisitions process but in the body itself. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s concept of garreting, Funké Aladejebi’s feminist orality framework, and the Holocaust memory scholarship of Nechama Tec and Natalia Aleksiun, this paper argues that the failure to access body memory as heritage knowledge is not an oversight but a structure – one in which embodied and oral knowledge is rendered institutionally invisible because it does not arrive through channels the institution recognizes as authoritative. Grounded in three curatorial projects, a permanent Black history exhibit at Upper Canada Village, “Reclaiming Leisure: Black Life as Celebration” at the Canadian Museum of History, and a community research partnership tracing Black life in Ottawa from 1809 to 1855, this paper asks what heritage institutions must become to hold what embodied knowledge already knows.