Monday, January 20, 2020 – 18:00 to 20:00
Dear readers,
I’ll be giving a free workshop at Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) this coming Monday, January 20, 2019 from 6 – 8 pm. The Centre is located on the 10th floor of the Webster Library building on DeMaisonneuve Blvd.
This workshop will discuss archival theories and practices rooted in my experiences digitizing, creating, and sharing audiovisual heritage in Quebec’s English-speaking minority communities since 2010. I will introduce the idea of “proactive archiving” and look at projects that myself and other researchers and community activists have undertaken in order to engage communities through archival materials. Proactive archival projects envision archives and their collections not simply as passive repositories of “raw” research materials awaiting discovery, but rather as an active resource for contemporary cultural life in the communities whose culture is represented in the collections. This will be an interactive workshop so please feel free to bring and share your own experiences and ideas about how we might make archiving a more proactive force in our communities.
You can register for the event here: http://storytelling.concordia.ca/events/theory-and-practice-workshop-proactive-archiving
About Me: I’m a multi-instrumentalist and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Memorial University (St. John’s, Newfoundland), living once again in Montreal. For the past decade I’ve has worked with the English-speaking minority of the Gaspé Coast to archive and make use of the musical heritage that community members shared through their personal home recordings made between the late 1950s and the early 2000s. This work resulted in two community-oriented blogs (websites) where this music is shared and discussed, and an ethnographic CD co-produced with fiddler and musicologist Laura Risk and the Douglas Community Centre in the eastern Gaspésie. My current project, “A Different Tune,” is sponsored by the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) and funded by Canadian Heritage. With the help of COHDS and a host of community partner organizations, I’m currently applying and adapting my proactive archival practices to work with other English-speaking communities in Quebec to similarly document, share, and strengthen community musical heritage. This work is motivated by my conviction that musical culture is a vital resource in the vitality and development of our communities.
A Different Tune 