Five of the students involved in the Scholars in Residents Program, May 2017: from left to right, Alisha, Mac, Zohar, Caleigh, and Amal.
one of the archival items concerning Desh Pardesh (1988-2001), one of the three digital exhibitions researched and produced by the students in the May 2017 Scholars in Residence Program
Scholars in Residence Program, May 2017
This project was a partnership with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Scholars in Residence program. We ran an intensive digital collections lab with five undergraduate students to create three digital collections: 1) “Not a Place on a Map,” Desh Pardesh Festival oral history project (partnership with South Asian Visual Arts Centre); 2) The Mirha-Soleil Ross Archives; 3) Foolscap Oral History Project. Our community partner, where the students were based, was The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, and the exhibitions they created are on the ArQuives’ Omeka site.
Not a Place on the Map Desh Pardesh Oral History Project
Project Lead: Saj Soomal, SAVAC
Toronto’s Desh Pardesh festival (1988–2001) was a multidisciplinary arts festival that showcased underrepresented and marginalized voices within the South Asian diaspora. In collaboration with SAVAC, we will produce a digital collection that streams these already complete born-digital interviews with artists and activist of colour, and brings additional context to the interviews through digitized visual materials that document the festival.
Foolscap Oral History Project
Project Lead: Zohar Freeman
Further information about this will be added shortly.
Mirha-Soleil Ross Archives
Project Leads: Dr. Cait McKinney and Sid Cunningham
Collaborators: Nora Butler Burke, Aaron Cain, Trish Salah
Mirha-Soleil Ross (b. 1969, Montréal) is a transsexual media artist, activist, and sex-worker, who lived in Toronto from the early 1990s until 2008, the period covered by her fonds at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. The Collaboratory has partnered with the CLGA and Ms. Ross to processes these unparalleled records of trans art and activist histories in the city. The first batch of processing was completed in April 2016 and the collection is now open to researchers. We are building digital collections based on these materials as part of our Scholars in Residence Digital Collections Lab (May 2017), and will be completing oral history interviews with Ms. Ross later in 2017.