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Prof. Elaine Cheasley Paterson

Associate Professor of Craft
Department of Art History, Concordia University, Canada
Participates in 2 items
Dr. Elaine Cheasley Paterson is Associate Professor of Craft History in the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University. She holds an MA in Canadian Art History from Concordia University (1999) and a PhD from Queen's University (Kingston, 2004). Her current funded research concerns women's cultural philanthropy in early twentieth-century British, Irish and Canadian craft guilds of the home arts movement and for tracing a lineage from this historical material to the current resurgence in DIY and craftivist practices. She has presented this research at many international conferences, including in Britain, in Ireland, in Canada and in the United States. Her writing and teaching are focused on the relationships between material culture and feminist theory, with an emphasis on the decorative arts and craft history. Another significant stream of research, emerging from her teaching, centres upon questions of skill, hybridity and pedagogy within a post/interdisciplinary contemporary craft milieu. Some of her publications include Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), with Susan Surette; ‘Crafting Empire: Intersections of Irish and Canadian Women’s History,’ Journal of Canadian Art History(2014); ‘Decoration and Desire in the Watts Chapel’ in Gender and History (2005); ‘Crafting a National Identity' in The Irish Revival Reappraised (2004); as well as a special issue of Cahiers métiers d'art - Craft Journal on Craft and Social Development (2012), with Gloria Hickey. She is on the editorial boards of RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review and Cahiers métiers d'art - Craft Journal (Montreal), a member of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (CWAHI) and the Quebec Quilt Registry Project at Concordia, a Research Fellow of the Canadian Art Institute (Concordia) and she sits on the board of Centre des textiles contemporains de Montréal/Montreal Centre for Contemporary textiles and TRAMES, la galerie (CMTC).
 

Sessions in which Prof. Elaine Cheasley Paterson participates

Sunday 5 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 - 12:30 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Changes in Heritage (New Manifestations)Notions of HeritageArts
Changes in heritageNew manifestations of heritageNotions of heritage

Russell Staiff argues that heritage discourse and practice are tightly interwoven with the theoretical legacy of the visual arts, specifically citing the shared concerns of formalism, iconography, aesthetics and modernism (“Heritage and the Visual Arts” 2015). Yet craft, as a field of knowledge, is often subsumed under the visual arts, when in fact its materialities, functionality, concerns about skill and preoccupation with the local (whether understood as geographically or politically const...

Monday 6 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 - 12:30 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Changes in Heritage (New Manifestations)Notions of HeritageArtsPublic event

Architectural historian John R. Stubbs suggests that architectural conservation is concerned with historic buildings and their sites as well as their associated accoutrements, such as furnishings and fittings. But what happens if the building itself is not seen as “historic” or even worthy of a heritage designation, much less conservation, while its site and furnishings are significant in aesthetic, cultural or social terms; in other words what happens when a building’s decorative arts tru...

Sessions in which Prof. Elaine Cheasley Paterson attends

Friday 3 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
17:00 - 19:30 | 2 hours 30 minutes
Festive Event

Welcome addresses and cocktail, followed by the Concordia Signature Event "The Garden of the Grey Nuns". As the opening ceremony and cocktail take place in the former Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, recycled into campus residence and reading rooms by Concordia University,  delegates will also have the possibility to discover the video Three Grey Nuns (3 minutes, by Ron Rudin and Phil Lichti. Three Grey Nuns recount their memories of communal life in the Grey Nun’s Motherhouse.  Built...

19:30 - 21:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Research-Creation Installation or PerformancePublic event

Working with archival documents and the current-day morphology of the Grey Nuns' site, Dr Cynthia Hammond, Dr Shauna Janssen, in collaboration with Dr Jill Didur, will curate a series of installations and performances that speak directly to the rich heritage of a specific urban landscape: the gardens of the Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, now part of the Concordia University downtown campus. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the lost working gardens of the Grey Nuns. As with other such...

Saturday 4 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
11:00 - 15:00 | 4 hours
Heritage Changes the Local SocietiesCitizenshipTourism
Heritage changes the local societiesheritage and mobilityPost-colonial heritageGlobal vs local

Much is being made of the perceived breakdown of the nation-state, which was historically configured as a “container” of heritage formations, adopting and perusing local traditions where possible but oppressing them where deemed unsuitable. Migration is seen as eroding the rigid boundaries of this configuration, potentially liberating identities and heritages in the process. This session addresses the relationship between critical heritage and redefinitions of self, other, community and place...

11:00 - 12:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Changes in Heritage (New Manifestations)Notions of HeritageIndustrial HeritageOral History
Changes in heritageNew manifestations of heritageNotions of heritage

Industrial heritage in Britain has tended to be romanticised in museum ‘cathedrals’ and ‘theme parks’ (like Beamish), with workers’ lived experience subordinated to the machines, buildings and physical artefacts that dominate these spaces. Here workers’ lives are more often than not celebrated rather than critically reconstructed and interpreted. The politics, class relations and struggle, violence, poverty and murkier side of working life is increasingly being neglected as the past is san...

13:30 - 17:00 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Changes in Heritage (New Manifestations)Notions of HeritageMuseums
13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Local Societies
Heritage changes the local societiesheritage and mobilityPost-colonial heritageGlobal vs local

Many people are actively using working class heritage as a resource to reflect on the past and the present, and there is a growing tendency for the heritage of working class people to be interpreted and presented to the public in museums and heritage sites—see for example the Worklab network of museums. Working class communities and organizations also play active roles in creating a memory of their own past, and mobilizing this to sustain political action in the present. Drawing on scho...

Sunday 5 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
8:00 - 13:00 | 5 hours

Le patrimoine, ça change quoi ? Ou plutôt, qu'est-ce que c'est ? Et pour qui ? Ces questions sont à l'origine de cette exposition conçue par les étudiants à la maîtrise en muséologie UQAM-UdeM. L'opinion de la communauté uqamienne y est confrontée à des citations de chercheurs, avec comme résultat une mise en perspective originale du discours sur le patrimoine. __ How is heritage important? Or rather, what is heritage? And for whom? Those questions are at the core of this e...

Monday 6 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Changes in Heritage (New Manifestations)Notions of HeritagePublic event
Changes in heritageNew manifestations of heritageNotions of heritage

This proposal makes the case that heritage’s capacity for change may be dependent on a paradigm shift in how heritage is interpreted. With this paradigm shift in play, a question is then asked: Can authenticity be used as a design driver to resolve how best to incorporate the four pillars of sustainability in a building’s design? The proposal begins with a discussion about the difference between using heritage reactively and proactively. It then presents a brief introduction to the...

Tuesday 7 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 - 17:00 | 8 hours
Public event

Milan Tanedjikov (Concordia University) and six LaSalle College students. A Material Culture & Fashion Exhibit June 6 and 7 The garments are part of a collection, titled Odesza, designed by six LaSalle College students under the artistic direction of Milan Tanedjikov.  The collection: an artisanal Montreal-based clothing collection that is part of the slow-fashion movement. The clothes are made by hand with environmentally friendly material and workers are ...

9:00 - 15:00 | 6 hours
Heritage as an Agent of Change (Epistemologies, Ontologies, Teaching)Notions of HeritageHeritage Changes Itself (Geographical and Linguistic Processes of Transformation)
Heritage changes itselfHeritage and geographyLinguistic transformation of heritageNotions of heritage

Heritage has multiple, concurrent origins. It is performed and produced by individuals, groups and organizations, or institutions on various scales. It is a transformative process and thus closely connected to the transitional. In heritage, transitionality may be usefully conceptualized under the rubric of the liminal, which at its core anticipates change and transformation, structure-agency relationships, affect, and human experience—all significant issues in recent theoretical debates in th...

9:00 - 12:30 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Heritage as an Agent of Change (Epistemologies, Ontologies, Teaching)
Heritage as an agent of changeEpistemologiesOntologiesTeaching

Among other aims, the Critical Heritage Studies (CHS) Movement, most exemplified by the promotional efforts of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), seeks to push heritage studies beyond its more traditional, longstanding "borders" of investigating the progress, as well as shortcomings, of the museum and heritage enterprise. Indeed, in the manifesto for ACHS, it is noted that heritage studies ought to expand to include a broader range of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) the...

9:00 - 15:00 | 6 hours
Heritage Changes the Social OrderCitizenship
Heritage changes peopleActivist vs expertHeritage-makers

In exploring the broader question “What does heritage change?” this session presents work that is extending heritage policies and practices beyond elite cultural narratives. Using diverse disciplinary perspectives and drawing from case studies around the world, the presenters explore contexts in which stakeholders’ perspectives and choices have been catalysts for change, democratized knowledge, or exposed gaps in contemporary heritage practices. The case studies reveal complex and often conte...

9:00 - 15:00 | 6 hours
Notions of HeritageHeritage Changes Itself (Geographical and Linguistic Processes of Transformation)
Heritage changes itselfHeritage and geographyLinguistic transformation of heritageNotions of heritage

As the interface between past and present, heritage is deeply involved in articulations of personal and group identity, working to unite and harmonize group relations, and, simultaneously causing frictions, fractions, and violence. Critical heritage theory reveals that values and approaches to heritage are articulated both within and across regions (such as Asia, or Europe). A vital, and as yet unanswered, question centres on the degree to which heritage in Asia fundamentally differs from ...

11:00 - 12:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Local SocietiesMuseumsHeritage and Mobility
Heritage changes placeCo-construction of heritageCommunity-based heritageHeritage makersPostcolonial Heritage

In November 2014, artists and thinkers including Jimmie Durham, Michael Taussig, Rebecca Belmore and Paul Chaat Smith convened in Calgary and Saskatoon for “Stronger than stone: (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument,” an international symposium which served to foreground the most critical issues facing Indigenous memory-making and cultural preservation today. Propositions for new types of monuments (or anti- monuments in many cases) were made that were specific to the Indigenous worldview and...

13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes RightsMuseumsPublic event

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights opened to the public in September 2014. Yet this "first museum solely dedicated to the evolution, celebration and future of human rights," met serious criticism from a variety of stakeholders before it even opened its doors. These stakeholders included Indigenous and Ukrainian communities, anti-poverty activists, feminists, gay rights activists, and disability advocates who questioned some of the museum's key curatorial choices in framing issues of righ...

15:30 - 17:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Living EnvironmentArtsActivists and Experts
Heritage changes the environmentHeritage values

Canada is often pictured as vast territory of wilderness and wide-open spaces. Yet most of Canadian life plays out in interior spaces. These spaces dominate our daily life, frame memories, and can hold the traces of our histories. Interiors are also particularly challenging spaces for traditional heritage policy, as they are notoriously fluid, changing, and ever evolving to meet new needs and desires. Compounding the problem, the ‘designers’ of interiors—interior decorators and interior de...

15:30 - 17:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Policies
Heritage changes the policiesHeritage policiesGlobal vs local

What is the future of the UK and what is the role of heritage in this shifting political landscape? How have debates on heritage in the UK changed since the influential critiques of Hewison and Wright in the 1980s? How can those engaged in Critical Heritage Studies in the UK negotiate the difficult relationship between academic critique and sector relevance? How do current debates in the UK relate to and differ from those in Western and non-Western contexts? This workshop will bring ...