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...

With regard to the main question of the 3rd ACHS Biennial Conference, "What does heritage change?" the convenors of this session propose ethnographic evidence of contradictory spheres of value by showing how encounters between official rhetorics of heritage and borderline/illegal ethics and objects produce social change. In particular, they explore, through an inclusive approach, the social and political constructions of heritage by questioning the aesthetic dichotomies of beauty/ugliness, pr...

Directed by Tom Fassaert and presented by Marc Jacobs. ___ Doel, a Belgian village near the Dutch border, is disappearing quickly and deliberately. Not because of the four old nuclear reactors on its territory, but because the Flemish government decided that the village might block projects for new docks for the Antwerp harbour, plans developed since the 1960s. In the 21st century this process of officially encouraged depopulation is coming to an end: 2500 inhabitants i...

Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical and historical contexts. Since the late 1980s, the phenomenon of contestation in heritage has been increasingly recognized. However, there is still little detailed and situated knowledge about the range of actors present in contestations, the variety of strategies they pursue, the reasoning behind their choices, the networks they develop, and how, from all this, heritage has been and is constructed. More often than not, con...

De l’ère du Maire Drapeau et de ses interventions autoritaires sur le tissu urbain de Montréal dans les années 1960 et 1970, à l’instauration d’une démocratie municipale dans les années 1980 sous l’administration Doré, la population est de plus en plus sollicitée dans les grands débats concernant la transformation du patrimoine urbain de Montréal (Drouin 2005). Notons l’instauration en 2002 de l’Office de consultation publique de Montréal, tribune où les citoyens peuvent donner leurs avis ...

Directed by Christine Walley and Chris Boebel Presented by Michelle Stefano When the steel mills began closing on Chicago's Southeast Side, residents could feel the American Dream slipping away. Decades later, the loss of the steel industry has left permanent scars. The documentary film, Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story, is named for the highway exit number for Chicago’s old steel mill neighbourhoods and captures the feeling of a region passed over. In poignant and some...

L’art contemporain, lorsqu’il est en relation avec le patrimoine culturel, que ce dernier soit bâti ou qu’il mobilise d’autres matériaux ou supports, tend à reconfigurer les rapports de la société à ses patrimoines et à son histoire. Il est ainsi à même d’ajouter, de modifier, de détourner ou même de transformer les valeurs historiennes ou esthétiques communément associées au patrimoine culturel d’une nation, d’une région ou d’un groupe social ou ethnique; y compris d’ailleurs en ce qui conce...

The 1970s witnessed a flourishing of living experiments in space, place and community sharing broad ambitions to bring about transformed human social and interpersonal conditions, to re-envision relationships between people and the environment and ecology of their habitats, and to reject a growing mainstream vision of people as passive consumers in favour of a role as creative and adventurous agents of their own destinies. While some expressions of these experiments were non-spatial or intend...