Convenor: Sarah Robbins
Location: Zoom Room A
Online Session
Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories is seeking participants for a new CATR Working Group. Gatherings—a SSHRC-funded research Partnership focusing on the care and keeping of archival and oral histories of performance in Canada, has been in existence since 2018. It is a pan-Canadian and cross-institutional partnership of universities and non-academic organizations with the goal of creating a national community of scholars, artists, archivists and students who can meet on equal footing to discuss the preservation of performance traditions in the country, in all its complexity.
The Working Group follows one of our initiatives, the ‘Roadshow Series’ of online gatherings, during which individuals—along the lines of the ‘Antiques Roadshow’—make a brief presentation of an object or document that raises questions, or a question that has arisen from individual research projects, about the research goals, the relationship with the archival repository, or the processes of interviewing. We will pay attention to issues of access, of collection and reproduction, of the influence of technology, and the relationships we all forge (and need to forge) among and between archivists and with artists. This will be an open and expansive discussion, providing time and space to talk about the process of historical research.
The Working Group will meet in an online forum during CATR’s meeting in early June. Prior to this, Gatherings will be hosting monthly on-line ‘Roadshow’ Presentations beginning in March. These will be publicly announced, inviting open application, in the lead up to the online segment of the CATR conference. The existing members of our Working Group include the individuals who are listed on our website as involved in the full project.