HIST 3815A: Group Practicum

HIST 3815A: Group Practicum; Picturing Queerness in Ottawa
Winter 2026

Scope & Objectives: The group practicum course is designed to give students the opportunity to work with an external partner to produce a tangible and deliverable outcome that serves the community.

For Winter 2026, we will partner with the City of Ottawa to produce a digital archive of photographs that depicts expressions of queerness and queer gender expression in Ottawa. Drawing upon individual collections of photographs, we will interrogate, record, and digitize images that speak to the blurring of gender boundaries and the queering of self-representation. Ranging from official photographs of drag performance to everyday images of daily life, this project aims to produce an accessible visual record for future use.

This is a hands-on project course. Working in teams, students will digitize photographs, collect stories, enter information into an archival database, and consider how metadata and labels shape the historical record they are producing. No technical expertise in photography or digital imaging is required: only a willingness to learn and reflect on how these tools shape what histories can be told through them.

Class Format: Students should expect to commit to approximately 7 hrs per week on the project (including the official class time). Some of the work will take place off campus (but still within Ottawa).

Some weeks early in the course will be devoted to reading about the queer history of Ottawa, archival queer theory, and considering issues around photographs, digital archives, copyright, and digitization. But most weeks will be dedicated to the actual project work, with a set schedule of deliverables and a possible presentation to stakeholders. It is important that we meet our timelines in order to deliver a useable and meaningful final product to our external partner.

Assignments: A final individual reflection paper will be due in the exam period at the end of the term. Other required elements are still being determined with the external partner, but will likely involve occasional progress reports, group presentations, and of course, the final product itself.

For more information: Contact Prof. James Opp at james.opp@carleton.ca