4thSpace Concordia

"We are dealing with a recording but we are bringing the recording back to life with the testifier, in her presence.."

As part of the COHDS-SOHC Summer Institute, the event 'The Effects of Being Heard' presented a conversation that employs performative methods to re-construct key moments of a healing journey from abuse. The conversation focusses how a social worker, a restorative justice facilitator or a performance creator can deploy listening and oral history interviewing techniques to support such a healing journey. However, naming and acknowledging what happened to a victim is crucial to the restorative justice process and therefore we will be referring to some of the violence experienced by Julie Ann.

Warning: This talk is about how a woman, a victim of incest by her father, went from being silenced to become an emerging public activist whose voice in support of victims of sexual violence resounds across different communities. We advise you to practice self-care as you listen to this talk and invite you to notice where the information that you are hearing sits in your body.

Julie Ann Carpini is a speaker and communicator whose desire to speak for sexual violence victims and survivors grew from her healing journey from relating deep traumatic wounds. As an activist, in partnership with Université de Montréal, she is one of five committee members at "Experte en Vécu" for the research project entitled "Cellule Trajectoires", which addresses major issues with domestic violence. Julie Ann is currently in a specialized training at Centre de Services de Justice Réparatrice in Montréal to accompany victims and offenders in a restorative justice process. She is also collaborating with Dr. Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro in a research-creation project that intersects performance and restorative justice in the Acts of Listening Lab at Concordia University.

Luis C. Sotelo Castro is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, Montreal (Quebec, Canada). He is also the second co-director of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. In 2018 he founded at Concordia the Acts of Listening Lab, a hub for research-creation on the transformative power of listening to painful narratives, with particular reference to testimonies by exiles from sites of conflict. His latest publications explore listening in the context of post-conflict performances of memory.

La mondialisation est-elle un phénomène nouveau ? On peut soutenir que les réseaux commerciaux terrestres prémodernes que l’on appelle aujourd’hui « la Route de la Soie » ont jeté les bases de la mondialisation que nous connaissons actuellement. Rejoignez Richard Foltz, l’auteur de Les religions de la Route de la soie : les chemins d’une mondialisation prémoderne récemment publié à Concordia University Press, le traducteur Benoit Léger et le modérateur Rachad Antonius alors qu’ils discuteront de la manière dont la transmission des idées et des pratiques — notamment celles des grandes religions — a accompagné le mouvement des marchandises à travers l’Eurasie à l’époque prémoderne, et comment ces processus historiques pourraient mieux nous permettre de comprendre le rôle du commerce mondial dans la transformation des normes culturelles aujourd’hui.

"The line between what information is meant to do and its use in persuasion is an interesting place for our scientists and journalists."

In a complex landscape of social media and legacy news platforms, quality scientific journalism struggles to get heard. This problem has been exacerbated in the past year. How can we ensure that scientific discoveries and breakthroughs are not ‘’over-pushed’’ for the sake of sensationalism - or hype - especially when the findings are just preliminary?

Join Public Scholar Sylvie Ouellette (B.A. Journalism, 95 and PhD candidate, Chemistry/Biochemistry) and David Secko (PhD, Chair and Professor, Journalism) as they embark on a discussion on how researchers can best serve the media, and vice-versa. Amélie Daoust-Boisvert moderates the conversation.

"We need to have conversations that stem from indigenous knowledge systems in a way that doesn’t always have to go back to explaining the basics"

In this episode, Anne-Marie Turcotte, a Concordia Ph.D candidate and a Public Scholar, who has been working with Nunavimmiut youth moderates a discussion with researchers Natasha Blanchet-Cohen and Elizabeth Fast. They reflect on their current work and the challenges facing those deeply involved in collaborative research with Indigenous youth.

"The feminist efforts that resonate most strongly are those that seek to take action now, on behalf of the future..".

The Summer Institute is a collaboration between Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and the Scottish Oral History Centre at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

Hosted at 4thSpace this summer, the Institute is organized by former lead co-director of COHDS, Dr. Cynthia Hammond.

As a lead up to these events, Cynthia sat down with two of the participants, to find out more about their research and the connections between their practices

Dr. Bimadoshka Pucan, assistant professor in History and at the School of Public Affairs at Concordia and Nancy R. Tapias Torrado currently a post doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Political Science and Law at UQAM.

"How to listen to the library? Something that is still reading, but a kind of reading that is engaging all the senses".

Katherine McLeod researches archives, sound, and poetry and is an affiliated researcher with the SSHRC-funded partnership of SpokenWeb.

Most recently, as a researcher-in-residence at Concordia Library, Katherine is working on “Listening to the Library,” a sensory based investigation into the audio-visual collections of Concordia’s Library.

John Latour is the Teaching & Research Librarian in Fine Arts at Concordia University and is a visual artist with an interest in artists’ books and questions of open access.

For this episode, we invited Katherine to bring a selection of objects and sound recordings into 4thSpace, hoping to make audible the sounds held within the Concordia Library collections and, simultaneously to engage in conversation with John about ‘reading’ or, rather, hearing the library as somatic.

"I love having access to augmented reality to tell those stories that have been deliberately debased and erased..".

In this episode, Shauna Jenssen, the Concordia Research Chair in Performative Urbanism sits down with researchers Amanda Guttiérez, Andrei Mamaliga, and Alex Tigchelaar to investigate the relationship between augmented reality, scenography, data surveillance, and the spatial histories of urban change.

The Performative Urbanism Lab for Spatial, Social, and Scenographic Experimentation (or PULSE) are investigating, via an FQRSC funded research-creation project, augmented reality and its application to art and, more specifically as a scenographic apparatus for creating place-based stories of the city.

"My activism just works differently - but all forms of activism are necessary for any type of social change"

This episode is the fourth in our series with the Black Perspectives Office. In this episode, the founding coordinator of the BPO sits down with anti-racist psychotherapist David Archer, to find out more about his practice..

David Archer is a anti-racist psychotherapist from Montreal. He has a private practice and provides consulting services for organizations and other therapists. In addition to being trained as a clinical social worker he also a registered couple and family therapist. His thought is informed by mindfulness, intersectional feminism and critical race theory.

Annick Maugile Flavien is a Black community advocate, a Black scholar, the founding coordinator of the Black Perspectives Office (BPO), and a Co-chair on the President's Task Force on Anti-Black Racism at Concordia University. She is a three-time graduate of Concordia and has been working on campus for the last ten years where she had the opportunity to participate in and support grassroots EDI and anti-racist initiatives across campus. She now offers anti-discriminatory consultations, workshops and trainings, and is developing trainings specifically for anti-Black racism at Concordia University. In her creative and academic research, Annick roots herself in communications, ageing studies, migration and geography in order to explore the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and identity for Black communities in Canada with the goal of addressing Black community isolation in Canada and fostering connections across Black Canadian communities.

"We want to create these tools of design automation to help customization for everyone"

Dr. Tsz-Ho Kwok is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering at the Gina Cody School as well as a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Manufacturing. For this episode, Prem Sooriyakumar, Knowledge Broker from the Office of Research, sits down with Dr. Kwok to discuss his research, his interest in origami, and the diverse research directions he is exploring with his students.

"My experiences have made it feel Like I haven’t had a choice; it’s important to always centre the margins..."

In third episode of our series with Concordia's Black Perspectives Office, the BPO’s coordinator, Annick Maugile Flavien sits down with with Marlihan Lopez, Program and Outreach coordinator at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute.

Listen in for an in-depth discussion around the themes that led Marlihan to her work, her experiences as a Black feminist, the mobilizing work she does around supporting survivors of sexual violence in Montreal North and the impact she hopes to continue to shape at Concordia and beyond.

Annick Maugile Flavien

Annick Maugile Flavien is a Black community advocate, a Black scholar, the founding coordinator of the Black Perspectives Office (BPO), and a Co-chair on the President's Task Force on Anti-Black Racism at Concordia University. She is a three-time graduate of Concordia and has been working on campus for the last ten years where she had the opportunity to participate in and support grassroots EDI and anti-racist initiatives across campus. She now offers anti-discriminatory consultations, workshops and trainings, and is developing trainings specifically for anti-Black racism at Concordia University. In her creative and academic research, Annick roots herself in communications, ageing studies, migration and geography in order to explore the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and identity for Black communities in Canada with the goal of addressing Black community isolation in Canada and fostering connections across Black Canadian communities.

Marlihan Lopez

Marlihan Lopez is a Black feminist activist and community organizer tackling issues surrounding anti-Black racism, gendered based violence, police violence and its intersections. She is currently co-Vice-President for la Fédération des femmes du Québec and Program and Outreach Coordinator at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. Her writing has appeared in CBC, Le Devoir, Ricochet, Huffington Post among others.