Dr Victoria Dickenson
Sessions in which Dr Victoria Dickenson attends
Friday 3 June, 2016
What does heritage change for tourism? | Le patrimoine, ça change quoi au tourisme? Ce débat veut interroger les relations entre le tourisme et le patrimoine et dépasser ainsi les idées reçues sur l'antagonisme entre le tourisme "corrupteur" et le patrimoine qui en serait la victime. Il s'agit donc de repenser le tourisme comme un réel acteur du patrimoine, de sa valorisation et de son appropriation, y compris par les populations locales. Cela présuppose, au p...
Qu’est-ce que le patrimoine change à Montréal? Qu’est-ce que Montréal change au patrimoine? Ce débat vise à mettre en discussion l'évolution et le devenir du patrimoine dans la métropole du Québec en interrogeant les motifs de l'attachement (ou de l'indifférence) de la société civile et des décideurs, mais aussi en questionnant les moyens dont ils disposent pour agir sur le patrimoine. Au-delà de la fameuse "pierre grise" et des matériaux expressifs de l'identité historique de Montré...
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...
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
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...
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...
Heritage practices often lead to social exclusion. As an "Authorized Heritage Discourse" (AHD) (Smith 2006) may define what is considered to be heritage, a certain set of social values can come to exclude other values. By formulating heritage policies which reproduce the existing AHD government may further such exclusion. Every now and then AHDs are challenged, leading to what political scientists like Ross (2007; 2009) call "cultural contestations" between groups. These are surrounded ...
With sustainable development gaining momentum as a priority of UNESCO heritage policies, an increasing number of food-related nominations are being submitted for inscription on the lists of the Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage. The Mediterranean diet, traditional Mexican cuisine and the Japanese dietary culture of washoku are just some examples of this booming phenomenon. Since food and foodways are powerful references for self-representation and ident...
This festive event will offer delegates a taste of one of the iconic dishes of Montreal, the smoked meat sandwich, imported by Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. In particular, the tasting will allow a discovery of the products of the renowned international institution Schwartz's, the Hebrew Delicatessen for which Montrealers and tourists alike are willing to wait in long line-ups. During the tasting, “Chez Schwartz,” a documentary produced by Garry B...
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
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...
With his expression "ceci tuera cela," Hugo established almost two centuries ago a strong link between words and stones as transmission vehicles of human memory. We heritage experts would be inclined to consider stones as more reliable than words, what semiology seems to confirm: stones are clues, and clues are, according to Roland Barthes, tangible proofs of “what has been.” But the inspector Columbo has often shown how we can play with these clues, and Umberto Eco would easily forgive us th...
"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
As recent publications have demonstrated, the role of the expert in heritage conservation is a relevant, indeed imperative topic of discussion. On the one hand, the knowledge required to work in the field has evolved over time in response to changes in the definition of heritage. Once the exclusive domain of architects and historians, the expertise needed today draws on a broader scope of disciplines including urban planning, landscape studies, anthropology, economics and climatology, often m...
This session is committed to extending previous research collaborations on food and culinary systems as objects of political mobilization – ICA 52, 2006 (Seville); Mexico DF, 2009; ICA 54, 2012 (Vienna); Uqam, 2014 (Montreal). On this occasion, we will deepen and develop ongoing debates about the growing place of food in the cultural politics of heritage and its impacts on society, about which there is still scarce documentation. How are food and culinary heritages constructed and...
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...
As Canada shifts from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, small communities that were established to service the primary sector are faced with a complex and unique set of challenges. They are communities built on a culture of hard work, resourcefulness, and creativity; their residents are now tasked with developing strategies to deal with a lack of employment, depopulation and resettlement. Small is premised on the notion that leveraging the rich cultur...
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” is a collaborative multi-sited research exhibition about the Armenian and Roma genocides that proposes creative solutions to these museological and scholarly conflicts around commemoration. Our multi-sited event includes two pr...
Le patrimoine fait aujourd’hui l’objet d’attentions autant que d’agressions et de destructions. Cela peut s’expliquer par les difficultés de son identification ou de sa conservation. Cela peut plus profondément s’expliquer parce que, dès le départ, il célébre un événement ou conserve une mémoire qui peut être ou devenir une source de dissenssions et de conflits politiques. Enfin, sa reconnaissance suscite des gains économiques pour les uns mais des pertes pour les autres. Mais peut-être...
Tuesday 7 June, 2016
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...
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...
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...
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...
What is involved in presenting the past as a physical object in public space? There is a significant literature by scholars in various disciplines that deals with the array of decisions that need to be made regarding which stories should be told, and how they should be represented. Nevertheless, once constructed, there is a tendency to see these objects as natural, as if they had to be built and could not have been constructed any other way. The Lost Stories project is designed to involve ...
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...
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...