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Dr. Cynthia Scott

Independent Historian and Heritage Scholar
Dr. Cynthia Scott is an independent historian and heritage scholar who completed a Ph.D. in Modern European History, and an M.A. in Cultural Studies, at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles. Her research interests center on post-colonial cultural diplomacy and debates over heritage and memory in comparative international perspective. Her writing is guided mainly by the questions: how do groups create a sense of the shared past, how do they navigate identity in the face of historical change, and how do they negotiate relationships of cultural cooperation and exchange in the aftermath of conflict and historical injustice? Her dissertation on the history of post-colonial cultural diplomacy between the Netherlands and Indonesia, 1949–1979, focuses on how Dutch officials handled demands from Indonesian leaders for the return of cultural property and, in the process, how they gave renewed meaning to the history of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. She is currently completing a book manuscript that compares how a decolonizing Netherlands and United Kingdom defined the renewal of cultural relations--both with and without the return of cultural property--in ways that gave new meaning to their histories of colonialism in Asia and Africa.

Recent Publications:

“Renewing the ‘Special Relationship’ and Rethinking the Return of Cultural Property: The Netherlands and Indonesia.” Journal of Contemporary History, Special Issue: Looted Art and Restitution in the Twentieth Century: Europe in Transnational and Global Perspective (forthcoming).
 
“Sharing the Divisions of the Colonial Past: An Assessment of the Netherlands-Indonesia Shared Cultural Heritage Project, 2003-2006.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 4 (February 2014): 181-195. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2012.738239]

 

Sessions in which Dr. Cynthia Scott 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)
8:00 - 17:00 | 9 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...

9:00 - 10:00 | 1 hour
Public event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

What if we changed our views on heritage? And if heritage has already changed? While, on the global scene, states maintain their leading role in the mobilization of social and territorial histories, on the local scale, regions, neighbourhoods and parishes have changed. Citizens and communities too: they latch on to heritage to express an unprecedented range of belongings that no law seems to be able to take measures to contain, often to the discontent of...

11:00 - 15:00 | 4 hours
Heritage Changes the Local SocietiesNotions of Heritage
Heritage changes the local societiesheritage and mobilityPost-colonial heritageGlobal vs local

How do borders shape heritage and its potential for change? Despite the growth of international connections in heritage studies, national, linguistic and disciplinary borders continue to structure scholarly and practical approaches to heritage. The aim of this session is therefore threefold. First we will address which borders limit our understanding of heritage today. What are the roles of linguistic, disciplinary, religious and national borders? Which methodologies are best suited to overco...

18:30 - 20:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Public event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

Most of what we experience as heritage emerges into conscious recognition through a complex mixture of political and ideological filters, including nationalism.  In these processes, through a variety of devices (museums, scholarly research, consumer reproduction, etc.), dualistic classifications articulate a powerful hierarchy of value and significance.  In particular, the tangible-intangible pair, given legitimacy by such international bodies as UNESCO, reproduces a selective ordering of cul...

Sunday 5 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
7:00 - 9:00 | 2 hours
Public event

Movement, stillness, and creation will be combined during this walk as participants are encouraged to attune themselves to the environment through conscious emplacement. We will awaken our sensory awareness by experimenting with deep listening, observing impermanence and slow walking. Weather permitting, participants will also be invited to create a cyanotype photogram with found materials. An in-situ photogram is an image made in collaboration with the environment and enhances our a...

9:00 - 12:30 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Living EnvironmentIntangible HeritageMuseums

We would like to propose a session, building on the one we ran at the 2014 CHS conference in Canberra, on how emotion and affect feature in the fields of heritage and museums studies, memory studies, public history, heritage tourism, studies of the built and urban environment, conservation, archives and any field of study that deals with the emotional impact and use of the past in the present. There is an increasing interest in how emotion is a form of judgement on things that affect ou...

14:00 - 15:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Co-Construction and Community Based HeritageHeritage Changes the Social OrderCitizenshipPublic event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

"What does heritage change?" is a multifaceted  question to which the answer(s) are in primary respects related to real-life negotiations among different groups of citizens, cultures, races, ethnic groups, sexual identities, and social classes about received, official and/or widely accepted or accomodated intangible attributes, cultural traditions, historic monuments, buildings, and other transmitted or revived historical legacies. Heritage designated by and for whom, for what motivations, an...

Monday 6 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 - 10:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes PlaceCo-Construction and Community Based HeritageIndustrial HeritageOral HistoryUrban HeritagePublic event
Heritage changes placeCo-construction of heritageCommunity-based heritageHeritage makers

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate surrounding so-called ruin gazing and the politics of representing industrial or urban ruination. Recent years have seen photographers, artists, film-makers, urban explorers, scholars and others flood into newly deindustrialized areas to record signs of ruins and abandonment, prompting a public backlash against the hipster commodification of misery. Some have gone so far as to call the voyeuristic appeal of industrial or urban ruinatio...

9:00 - 17:00 | 8 hours
Public event

Dominique Fontaine / Livia Daza-Paris,   A video and photographic installation. (All Day Installation) Livia Daza-Paris presents an investigative work, which considers grief, political displacement and how they inhabit one’s own body and place of dwelling. The visits (of which there were none) Episode N. 2; is a segment being developed in Montreal as part of On Antigone Steps: poetic forensics of t...

11:00 - 12:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes PlaceCo-Construction and Community Based HeritageIndustrial HeritageCitizenshipOral HistoryUrban HeritageActivists and ExpertsPublic event
Heritage changes placeCo-construction of heritageCommunity-based heritageHeritage makers

In a collaborative and image-rich conversational presentation, “Teaching/Learning/Living Post-Industrial Ecologies” outlines the potentials and problematics of “The Right to the City,” a multi-year transdisciplinary curriculum initiative that brings graduate and undergraduate students from Concordia University to Montreal’s historic South West borough. Through our tethered teaching, four professors have asked, “what does it change for the university to teach/learn on-site with the resident...

13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes PlaceCo-Construction and Community Based HeritageActivists and Experts

Involving communities, visitors or the public is frequently presented as one of the major tasks of museums and heritage sites in current global movements toward new collaborative paradigms (Golding and Modest 2013; Watson and Waterton 2011). Co-production is a highly current issue, and a proposed emancipatory solution to the authorized heritage discourse, which seemingly has reached a critical juncture. Scholarship has echoed calls from communities for more direct involvement in the presentat...

18:00 - 19:00 | 1 hour
Festive Event

To celebrate our film series dedicated to heritage, sponsored by the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland and the United States Chapter of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, this event will spotlight the iconic Sugar Shack, which is rooted from Quebec to New-England and which is both the place of maple syrup production and of friendly gatherings during the maple syrup season. In a festive atmosphere, delegates will be invited to taste one of the essential of...

20:00 - 21:35 | 1 hour 35 minutes
Public event

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...

Tuesday 7 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
7:30 - 8:30 | 1 hour
Public event

(in English, subtitled in French) The documentary Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture directed in 2007 by Teri Wehn-Damisch offers a lively and intimate portrait of Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her career as an activist and a visionary has contributed to the transformation of Montreal’s urban and cultural environment. _ Le documentaire Citizen Lambert : Jeanne d’Architecture réalisé en 2007 par Teri Wehn-Damisch propose le por...

9:00 - 17:00 | 8 hours
Heritage as an Agent of Change (Epistemologies, Ontologies, Teaching)Arts
Heritage as an agent of changeEpistemologiesOntologiesTeaching

Photography was recognized as an instrument of heritage preservation from the moment of its inception in the early nineteenth century, when projects such as Les Excursions Daguerriennes (1841-1843), a set of Romantic engravings of monuments based on photographic documents, established the links between sight and science, memory and history, hortatory reification and ‘ruin lust’ (Brian Dillon, 2014). This session was conceived in the certain knowledge that almost every speaker at t...

13:00 - 14:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Research-Creation Installation or PerformanceHeritage as an Agent of Change (Epistemologies, Ontologies, Teaching)Oral History
Heritage as an agent of changeEpistemologiesOntologiesTeaching

An experiment in moving memory, this live event bridges public and academic space to re-imagine knowledge exchange, creation and impact. Around the globe the planning of large-scale memorial-museum projects concerned with violent histories are frequently marred by conflict, omission, and competitions of victimhood. This problem also extends to scholarship on genocide and memory. “Moving Memory: difficult histories in dialogue” is a collaborative multi-sited research exhibiti...

15:30 - 17:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Local SocietiesMuseums
Heritage changes the local societiesheritage and mobilityPost-colonial heritageGlobal vs local

To date, very little literature explicitly explores the relationships of museums and heritage to historical consciousness, despite the overlapping concerns shared by these respective fields. This roundtable addresses the subject of museums as sites of historical consciousness by reflecting on a recent book project. Museums as Sites of Historical Consciousness: Perspectives on Museum Theory and Practice in Canada (working title, UBC Press, 2016) examines (1) ways that museums create and sha...

19:00 - 23:00 | 4 hours
Festive Event

The closing dinner of the conference, called “Pawâ” according to a French-Canadian tradition borrowed from the Native American lexicon, will be an opportunity to discover, in the heart of the Old Port of Montreal, an original culinary creation by the caterer Agnus Dei, from the renowned Maison Cartier-Besson in Montreal, leader in its field for its boundless creativity and event expertise. The dinner, in the form of stations, will offer delegates an exploration of Quebecois culinary heritage,...