Steven High is a Professor of History and co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He is the author of eleven books including the Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Areas, One Job Town: Work, Belonging and Betrayal in Northern Ontario, and Industrial Sunset: The Making of the North American Rust Belt. He recently co-edited a special issue of Labor with Stefan Berger on (De-)Industrial Heritage.
Sessions in which Steven High participates
Saturday 4 June, 2016
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
Canal: Walking the Post-Industrial Lachine Canal (COHDS, 2013 - bilingual) is an audio-walk and booklet that takes listeners from the Atwater Market to the Saint Gabriel Lock, exploring the post-industrial transformation of a once heavily industrialized area. The Lachine Canal area has undergone dramatic changes, as mills and factories were closed and then demolished or converted into high-end condominiums. The adjoining working-class neighbourhoods ...
Monday 6 June, 2016
La Pointe: L’autre bord de la track / The Other Side of the Tracks (COHDS /Public History Students, 2015 - bilingual) takes walkers into a working-class neighbourhood that has undergone massive deindustrialization and is now gentrifying. Pointe-Saint-Charles is also known for its place-based activism and strong neighbourhood identity. Produced by the oral history students in Steven High’s Working Class Public History course, working closely with two other cl...
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...
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...
Tuesday 7 June, 2016
Fleur dans le fleuve (COHDS, 2012 - French) – À chaque année, en avril, la communauté rwandaise de Montréal se réunit pour commémorer les centaines de milliers d’homme, femmes et enfants qui ont été assassinés pendant le génocide de 1994. La marche audioguidée emprunte le parcours de la commémoration, de la station de métro Berri-UQAM (au coin des rues Berri et Ste-Catherine) jusqu’à la tour de l’Horloge qui surplombe le fleuve St-Laurent, dans le Vi...
Sessions in which Steven High attends
Friday 3 June, 2016
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...
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...
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
"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
Creator/performer: Lisa Ndejuru, Concordia University. Soundscape and projections: David Ward, Concordia University. Theatrical Performance with Projected Photos Le petit coin intact is a bilingual (FR/EN) performed monologue with soundscape and projections. The title of this series of short vignettes refers to a core of wholeness and strength so often contained in even the most extreme narratives...
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
While intangible cultural heritage is an important factor in maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization, there is still little appreciation of its value. UNESCO endorsed the importance of intangible cultural heritage not only as a cultural manifestation but also, and more importantly, as a wealth of knowledge and skills that are transmitted through generations. We invite paper contributions that address multiple ways of understanding, recognizing, valuing, and p...
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,...