Five of the students involved in the Scholars in Residents Program, May 2017: from left to right, Alisha, Mac, Zohar, Caleigh, and Amal.
one of the archival items concerning Desh Pardesh (1988-2001), one of the three digital exhibitions researched and produced by the students in the May 2017 Scholars in Residence Program
Scholars in Residence Program, May 2017
This project is a partnership with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Scholars in Residence program. For May 2016, we will be running an intensive digital collections lab with five undergraduate students, out of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, to create three digital collections: 1) “Not a Place on a Map,” Desh Pardesh Festival oral history project (partnership with South Asian Visual Arts Centre); 2) The Mirha-Soleil Ross Archives; 3) Foolscap Oral History Project.
Not a Place on the Map Desh Pardesh Oral History Project
Project Lead: Saj Soomal, SAVAC
Toronto’s Desh Pardesh festival (1988–2001) was a multidisciplinary arts festival that showcased underrepresented and marginalized voices within the South Asian diaspora. In collaboration with SAVAC, we will produce a digital collection that streams these already complete born-digital interviews with artists and activist of colour, and brings additional context to the interviews through digitized visual materials that document the festival.
TransPartners Project
Project Lead: Elspeth Brown
This project explores the experience of partners of trans* men, focusing on partners who were with their partner before and during at least six months of the transition, however defined (the couple does not have to be together now). 50 interviews have been completed in Canada and the U.S. so far
Mirha-Soleil Ross Archives
Project Leads: Dr. Cait McKinney and Sid Cunningham
Collaborators: Nora Butler Burke, Aaron Cain, Trish Salah
Mirha-Soleil Ross (b. 1969, Montréal) is a transsexual media artist, activist, and sex-worker, who lived in Toronto from the early 1990s until 2008, the period covered by her fonds at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. The Collaboratory has partnered with the CLGA and Ms. Ross to processes these unparalleled records of trans art and activist histories in the city. The first batch of processing was completed in April 2016 and the collection is now open to researchers. We are building digital collections based on these materials as part of our Scholars in Residence Digital Collections Lab (May 2017), and will be completing oral history interviews with Ms. Ross later in 2017.