Presenters
Susann Allnutt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University. Her doctoral research focuses on the intersection of memory, place and photography. In her work she raises critical questions about the topographical intimacy and ways of approaching the study of place through what is termed auto-topographic study. Her work, which is highly innovative, has been presented at a number of international conferences including the International Visual Studies Conference and the American Educational Research Association. With her supervisor Claudia Mitchell she has an essay on the uses of photography and memory in the Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research (eds. Knowles and Cole). She also has an essay on photo archives and memory work in Putting People in the Picture: Visual Methodologies for Social Change (Eds, DeLange, Mitchell and Stuart).
Cynthia Chambers’ research interests lie in the areas of Indigenous knowledge, curriculum theory, literacies, autobiography and memory. She is largely concerned with questions of identity, place and belonging, such as: How do experiences of place inform identity? Where do Indigenous knowledges belong within the field of Canadian curriculum, theory and practice? Where do I belong within this landscape, given my background and interests? She is interested in the relations between personal and collective knowledge, with memory as a primary source of knowledge. In her work, she has drawn on phenomenological, hermeneutic, critical, autobiographical and self-study methodologies so as to elicit memories that can contribute to an understanding of the present through a productive remembering of the past. Her work is also grounded in social action and has been pivotal in drawing attention to Canadian curriculum studies as rooted in a sense of place.
George Carani's doctoral research focuses on understanding the lived histories of people who have been living with AIDS for ten years or more. He is especially interested in uncovering those attitudes and beliefs that lead to medical adherence however in the course of conducting his research, he also found that many other aspects of lived experience influence patients’ deciding whether, when, where, and in what quantity to take their medication. His research is distinguished from other studies in the cognitive science domain (he is a doctoral candidate in educational counselling and psychology) by his conducting of in-depth interviews in the field (the lived context) and by drawing on visual memory prompts drawn from that context to create situations meaningful to the patient, who he perceives as co-researcher on his/her own condition. His research thus creates situations for productive memory. George has won a provincial award for his research, as that most likely to make a difference.
Sandra Chang-Kredl’s research interests originate in study of early childhood education and her own practice as a former early childhood educator; she is a doctoral candidate. Her doctoral work focuses on close textual analysis of how stories change from one medium to another, and how educational formation through popular texts challenges common conceptions of childhood and youth. Her work is currently moving in the direction of using a psychoanalytical approach to exploring how teachers’ memories of prior texts and images of childhood become a lens for their understandings of contemporary texts and children, and how they can more productively carry memory forward so as to expand their conceptualizations of children and youth in light of influences from new media. She has presented on her work in various conference venues, as well as been a conference organizer for a highly successful graduate student conference at McGill.
Peter Cohen has spent twenty five years as an educator in New York City, Mexico, Spain and China. He has a Masters degree in Political Science from Rutgers University and a Masters degree in TESOL from New York University. He is currently a Doctoral student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education of McGill University and an instructor in the Humanities Department of Champlain College in Lennoxville. He is also Program Director of the Cross Cultural Center at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Michael Corbett’s research interests are in the areas of rural life, teacher education and policy dialogue. A critical question within his work is the one: what does it mean to grow up in rural Canada? He is regarded as a key Canadian researcher in the area of rural life, particularly in Atlantic Canada. His recent book Learning to Leave is being regarded as an important text both about place but also about policy issues in relation to resources. In the book he looks at some of the ways in which rurality has become synonymous with an idyllic nostalgia – and as a tension in relation to some of the harsh realities of contemporary rural life in Eastern Canada, as marked by poverty, high levels of unemployment and migration. This work has important links to the idea of productive remembering, highlighting in particular the ways in which the work of ‘back to the future’ can have implications for social action through policy dialogue.
Myriam Gervais, a Research Associate of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women has been working in the area of women and development for the last 18 years, focusing specifically on issues of conflict and transformation in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Her work in Rwanda in particular began in the pre-genocide era and has continued on into addressing issues of post conflict reconciliation. In the course of her work she has conducted in depth interviews with girls and women around such issues as rape, gender violence, land inheritance, polygamy and HIV and AIDS. In this work she has looked at the ways in which memory and working with the past are central to dealing with the present and the future. What is particularly significant about her work is its cross-over between research and policy development and the contribution of memory work as method within the work of international aid agencies such as CIDA.
Elizabeth Goodenough studies childhood memory and those experiences of childhood that most evoke memories of childhood as pastoral, that is, as lived in relationship with nature. Her research builds on the work of Louise Chawla (In the First Country of Places; 1994), in which Chawla uses a form of literary phenomenology to arrive on those cultural memories inscribed in literature that are most evocative of childhood. Elizabeth is herself a consummate writer, and has been using writing on her own and others’ experiences of childhood as well as documentary video to explore her subject matter. Her most recent research has extended to school-based projects with teachers to investigate the spaces created for and by childhood and how to productively bring memory forward to create better spaces (rural; urban) in which children can play and grow. She is best known for her edited book, The Secret Spaces of Childhood (2004), but is also editor of a book series, Landscapes of Childhood (Wayne State University Press).
Maija Harju is a doctoral student at McGill University, Montreal, researching crossover literature as a bridge between children and adult culture. In particular, she is interested in how crossover literature can become a new source of intergenerational dialogue and a productive re-memorying of childhood. She teaches a Children’s Literature course investigating the phenomenon in McGill’s Faculty Education. She is also involved in a SSHRC research project on storied formation (“Changing Literacies, Changing Formations”). Recent publications include entries on crossover and S.E. Hinton, in Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia (Eds. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, 2007), a chapter (“Anthropomorphism and the Necessity of Animal Fantasy”) in Towards or Back to Human Values: Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy (2006), and an article (in press) on death and children’s literature in a special issue of English Quarterly.
Charlotte Hussey is a poet and lecturer in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. She teaches courses in the Writing Centre. Her dissertation was among those that broke ground by exploring arts-based inquiry before such inquiry had become commonplace. Her recent research has taken her into searching for an appropriate poetic form through which to investigate as well as express and bring forward memories grounded in her cultural Anglo roots. As a consummate word-smith and scholar of the English language and stories, she has published numerous poems and is presently working on a book of poetry.
Ingrid Johnston’s research has focused on issues of social justice and children’s literature through her investigations of South African literature and, most recently, Canadian multicultural literature however her interests also span curriculum studies and teacher education. She brings a post-colonial and de-colonizing lens to the work that she does, grounded in having spent part of her past life in South Africa. Her research has accomplished a “productive remembering” by bringing to light the ideological assumptions underlying the stories that we read and tell. She has been involved in numerous scholarly associations, most recently as president of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies. She has published extensively, and her book, Re-mapping Literary Worlds: Postcolonial Pedagogy in Practice (Peter Lang, 2003), was recently translated into Chinese.
Mathabo Khau has been working in the area of memory, first for her Masters fieldwork work carried out in Lesotho, and now in relation to her doctoral work which looks at sexuality and HIV and AIDS through self study and productive memory. She has already published several articles in well recognized feminist journals such as Agenda and has presened her work at several international conferences including the International Self-Study conference held in the UK in August 2008. Her work has application both to Canada and South Africa in its relevance to Sex Education. As an exchange student at McGill funded through DFAIT in 2007, she offered a number of seminars on sexuality and memory at McGill and Concordia.
Tony Kelly is working in the area of Literary Anthropology, Place and memory in his doctoral research. As a researcher interested in rurality, youth and teacher education, he asks questions about the significance of place and the ways in which one might excavate literary texts as ways of knowing. Many of the texts that he is drawing on in his doctoral study are memory/autobiographical texts of rural Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. What is particularly interesting in his work is its attention to the links between literary anthropology and policy dialogue. He has given papers at several national conferences where the issue of memory is critical and he has published a chapter “Our rural selves” in a book on self-study and memory: Just Who Do We Think We Are? Methodologies for Autobiography and Self-Study in Education (Mitchell and Weber, Eds.)
Ursula Kelly’s writings bring a post-structuralist and critical lens to the study of culture and loss, with her primary mediums being story and memory. She has published extensively on loss and attachment within the Newfoundland context. She has published two books and most recently, has co-edited two others, Narrating Critical Connections in Transformative Education and Despite This Loss: Essays on Place, Culture and Memory. She also has another single-authored book manuscript on loss and culture presently under review.
Maria Korpijaakko is a doctoral student at McGill University, Montreal. She completed an Honours BA in Linguistics and Comparative Religious Studies at Concordia University. This diverse background naturally led her to the field of Educational Studies where she would apply her social, cultural, religious, and linguistic knowledge to the field of critical theory and pedagogy. Her MA thesis entitled Social Transformation through Critical Technical Theory was a stepping stone towards her current doctoral research. Her current research explores how computer usage in classrooms relates to different types of cognitive theory and critical thinking. Her pursuit of ‘memory work’ is one facet of her interest in how people define themselves, how history comes to be ‘remembered’, and how memory affects present perspectives and actions. She feels that understanding how memory is formed may have an affect on curriculum formation and teaching methods.
Martha Langford is an associate professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal. Founding director/chief curator of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa (1985-1994), Langford received her PhD from McGill University in 1997, followed by fellowships held at the Institute for the Humanities of Simon Fraser University and the National Gallery of Canada. Major works on photography include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001) and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007), as well as an edited collection, Image & Imagination (2005), all from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her essays have appeared in numerous catalogues, journals, and edited collections, in Canada and elsewhere. Langford is a contributing editor for Border Crossings (Winnipeg), Exit (Barcelona) and Photography & Culture (London). An active independent curator, she was artistic director of the international photographic biennale, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2005.
Erica Lehrer holds a Canada Research Chair in Memory, Ethnography & Museology at Concordia University and is also the Founder and Director of CEREV: Center for Ethnographic Research & Exhibition in the aftermath of Violence, Concordia University. Working with material culture and the visual, her curated work offers innovative perspectives of memory and social action. Her focus is on Polish-Jewish identity, and she has written extensively in the area in such publications as “Bearing false witness? Vicarious Jewish identity and the politics of affinity.” In Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust. (Eds.) Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, “Unquiet Places: Taking a Hard Look at the Polish-Jewish Present.” Pakn Treger. Spring 2008, and "Jewish? Heritage? In Poland? A Brief Manifesto & an Ethnographic-Design Intervention into Jewish Tourism in Poland.”
Margaret Mackey’s research interests span from children’s literature to children’s and adults’ experiences with new media; she teaches in library studies but her work impacts on literacy, multiliteracies and children’s literature. Her work is internationally renowned for its close bibliographic study of childhood texts (as in her study of how Beatrix Potter’s texts changed depending on the medium in which they were published—text, CD-Rom, cutout game, performance, film, etc.) but primarily for her expertise in mapping the responses of children and adults to the variety of text forms presently available, from books to digital stories. She brings a deep knowledge of the influence of memory and storied formation on reader response. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Signal; Journal of Literacy Research), through book chapters and in single-authored books, such as Literacies Across Media: Playing the Text (2002) and most recently, Mapping Recreational Literacies (2007)
Alan McCully’s research interests focus on the preparation of teachers in post-conflict contexts such as Northern Ireland where he teaches. His work in this area has been influential within the European community but also within the context of the study of divided societies in Europe and North America. Dr. McCully is interested in questions of identity and intergenerational understanding. His Speaking Our Peace/Piece curriculum intervention is an important one for looking at how the past can influence the future. His current project on ‘The truth” will bring an important perspective to productive remembering because of its links to work around the various Truth and Reconciliation interventions underway internationally.
Farouk Mitha’s research interests lie in the influence of story, memory and culture on identity formation and in particular, how perceptions of “difference” (and in particular, of Muslims) affect how we perceive each other, especially in the school textbook. His doctoral work (recently completed at the University of Victoria) examined ideological assumptions informing the study of Othello in secondary school curricula. He has been extensively involved in post 9-11 debate around constructions of Muslim peoples, and has often been invited to speak in classrooms or at special events on the subject. His current work focuses on “strategies for remembering” so as to productively carry memory forward in constructing Muslim identity, a currently highly contested category. He has published a book (2001) as well as a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Canadian Studies.
Relebohile Moletsane’s research interests focus on gender, sexuality, teacher education and visual methods. As the director of the Gender and Development unit of the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, she occupies a key role in directing the future of gender and policy research that will be carried out in South Africa. Given her expertise in the area of sexuality and autobiography, she has a great deal to bring to the workshop, and has a great deal to gain in relation to influencing research methodology around memory and social action. As the lead author of a new book Methodologies for Mapping a Southern African Girlhood, she has highlighted critical issues around memory work as an approach to understanding and improving the lives of girls and young women.
Pontso Moorosi is a new postdoctoral scholar at the Centre for Developing Area Studies (CDAS), McGill. Pontso is from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where she teaches and researches education policy, gender and education leadership and management. Her PhD work was on the career paths of women principals. She is currently working on a gender and development project.
Susannah Radstone is an international leader in the area of memory and method, particularly in relation to feminist memory and cultural memory. She has been writing extensively in the area of memory and method for a number of years and her books on memory are cited frequently in memory work studies. She is responsible for heading up a centre in the UK on memory. What is critical about her work is its interdisciplinarity and its recognition of the ways in which a variety of cultural texts including film might also be read within the context of memory.
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh’s research interests span historical and contemporary childhood, and address critical questions around the links between 17th and 18th century media and the types of questions being taken up by media scholars such as Henry Jenkins and David Buckingham. She is the co author of Researching children’s popular culture which uses memory work as a way to study the afterlife of children’s popular culture. She has also co-authored several articles that draw on memory to study girls’ experiences (girl-method), and some of the links between the lives of girls and women. As co founder of the new journal, Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and the GirlCulture Encyclopedia, her work linking up memory and identity will have important linkages to the training of future scholars within Literary Studies and Media Studies.
Ran Tao, as a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education McGill University, is in the final stages of her doctoral work at McGill University focusing on youth and sexuality in the age of AIDS in China. What has been central to her work is its critical attention to the historical context of Sex Education, and the role of the collective (and historical) understanding of participants in her study. Her work spans issues of Generations and Body. She has already begun to present her findings at conferences such as the American Educational Research Association and she is currently preparing several articles for publication.
Michele Tanaka’s research is based on study of how student teachers re-memory their teaching and learning experiences in the context of a course designed according to Indigenous values and principles. She is interested in both what challenges their conceptions as well as identifying their “touchstone” understandings. Michele is a doctoral candidate at the University of Victoria. She holds a SSHRC doctoral grant and is supervised by Canada Research Chair scholar, Lorna Williams, whose innovative pedagogy using First Nations culture in undergraduate courses became the inspiration for Michele’s research. Michele has presented in national and international conferences and has initiated an active publication record in peer-reviewed journals, such as Teacher Development (co-authored with Lorna Williams) and the Canadian Journal of Education (for her part as a research assistant on another SSHRC-funded grant related to prevention of injury to Aboriginal youth, led by Ted Riecken).
Lisa Taylor (Bishop's University) teaches social justice education, sociology and philosophy of education, and social difference in literature education. She has taught English in China, Japan and the Whitehead Vietnamese Detention Centre in Hong Kong, and collaborated in Mapuche-Spanish bilingual curriculum in Chile. She taught ESL in Toronto (TDSB) for over 10 years during graduate studies at OISE/UT, University of Toronto: in her doctoral degree she coordinated and investigated a joint Antiracism Equity Leadership programme for ESL students between OISE/UT and the TDSB. Her research and publications focus on social justice teacher education, critical multicultural, multilingual and multiliteracies curriculum, with a particular focus on postcolonial feminist perspectives on language and literacy education. She has published on critical race and postcolonial perspectives in TESOL in TESOL Quarterly and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. She co-edited CONTESTED IMAGINARIES / Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns (Intercultural Education special issue) also forthcoming as an anthology.
Eliane Ubalijoro is an Adjunct Professor of Practice for Public-Private Sector Partnerships at McGill University's Centre for Developing-Area Studies. Her research areas of interest are innovation in Global health and Agriculture. She is a member of the Presidential Advisory Council for H.E. President Paul Kagame. She led a Capacity building workshop for bio-based products in November, 2006, at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology. This workshop brought together scientists from 14 institutions from East Africa, South Africa, India and McGill to develop an action plan for building sustainable bio-based economies for the region. She was a speaker and a member of the scientific committee at the First International Research Conference on Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Natural Resource Management in Rwanda, July, 2007. Her presentation at this research conference led to a full page feature in Rwanda's English Newspapers the New Times entitled: A double edged sword to fight poverty and conserve biodiversity. She is currently drafting a multidisciplinary integrated family planning/rural development program for Rwanda.
Sandra Weber is a well known senior Canadian scholar who has been working in the area of Childhood studies and Teacher Education, with both areas drawing on memory work as method. Her co-authored text Reinventing ourselves as teachers: Beyond nostalgia is used by teacher educators throughout Canada, the US and the UK. Her co-edited book Not Just Any Dress: Narratives of Memory, Body and Identity (with C. Mitchell) offers an innovative approach to memory through dress. For the past 5 years she has been teaching a course at Concordia on Children and Technology which has a strong memory-work and autobiography strand to it and she is currently working on a study on youth and social action. Critically this workshop on productive memory will inform her work, offering opportunities to work within and beyond teacher education, and will benefit from her work in the area of Childhood Studies.
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