The CEREV Digital Curatorial Workshop was officially launched last month on the warm and welcoming evening of September 22^nd. More than 60 people, including faculty, administrators, staff, graduate and undergraduate students from local universities, as well as community members, gathered to celebrate the opening of this unique space and experienced its potential through immersion in a visual and soundscape of curatorial works-in-progress by affiliated researchers and students.

CEREV’s director, Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Memory, Ethnography and Museology, Erica Lehrer, welcomed everyone, expressing her pleasure at seeing this dream become a reality. Erica first started thinking about a space like this while a graduate student in anthropology, as she struggled “to find ways to converse more directly with the people among whom and about whom I was doing research, to not only extract information from them and deliver the knowledge we then produce back to the academy” but actually put this knowledge back in the communities where it originated. CEREV was created in response to her felt need for universities to “devise spaces for experimentation at the intersection of historical & cultural analysis – on the one hand – and the production of forms of knowledge that can travel more broadly and speak to a broad range of audiences.”

CEREV is a place, Erica explained, “where researchers can experiment with curating the fruits of their research, or in other words imagine ways to make their research speak to or intervene in public arenas. The goal is not only communication, but opportunities for deepening the research itself through the new kinds and layers of conversation ‘publicness’ provokes.” Provost David Graham – apologizing for “crashing the party,” since his remarks were indeed impromptu and, as he put it, “from the heart” – commented that although Concordia is “a university that deeply cares about and is embedded in the community, when we look into the past we realize that we haven’t always been successful in doing what we think we have done or in the ways in which perhaps we would have liked to be.”

“But now that we are seeing centers and events like these come to fruition,” Graham added, “now that we’re seeing the activities in history and across the university in this area, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that we are really walking the walk, where that kind of scholarly academic community implication and engagement is concerned.”

History Department Chair Norman Ingram also underscored the centrality of CEREV’s “fantastic space” within the department’s mission and emphasized the productive synergy between multiple related initiatives: the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, and the recent appointment of Max Bergholz as the James M. Stanford Professor. The Chair spoke of his own sense of inspiration, noting that even “an old-fashioned logocentric historian” like him was imagining how he might use the workshop in his upcoming film-centered seminar on the legacy of the Great War.

Synergy was the theme of the evening. Guests were lively, interacting with the projects showcased and with each other. The CEREV launch was a delightful event during which the goal of what Dr. Lehrer called “interdisciplinary intellectual matchmaking” where humanists and social scientists can collaborate with artists and media experimentalists to devise new ways to engage in and with research and its products truly materialized.

Post by Florencia Marchetti

Posted on October 28th, 2011 in Blog |