The Archive of the Future: Oral History and Community Archiving

Join us for a conversation regarding lives of learning, experiences with oral history, and community archiving. Increasingly, we seek to break down institutional barriers and include participants in the archival process. What are the best practices that can help to achieve this? How can we make community archiving a more inclusive process?

Po Ki Chan is a PhD student in INDI at Concordia University. She holds an MSc in Multimedia and Entertainment technology from the Design School of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where she started her journey in exploring possibilities in a virtual representation of the heritage of cultural significance. Her research focuses on heritage conservation by leveraging oral history to provide an effective understanding and cultural presence for the global audience.

Sonia Dhaliwal is an information professional who has worked as an archivist and librarian in academic institutions. She has a keen interest in developing archives and research collections reflective of diasporas through community led digital scholarship and research-creation based initiatives. She graduated from McGill’s School of Information Studies and has an MA in History from Concordia.

Eliot Perrin is the archives coordinator for the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. He is also a History PhD candidate at Concordia. His research focuses on the impacts of urban renewal and deindustrialization on a historically Francophone neighbourhood in Sudbury, Ontario.

Carla Rodeghero is a History Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she teaches history of Contemporary Brazil, and oral history methodology. Between 2012 and 2014, Carla was editor of the Brazilian Oral History Association Journal (História Oral) and in the following biennium, she chaired the national organization. Since 2018, she coordinates the UFRGS’s Oral History Repository, a website and a collaborative team that aims to gather, organize and publish interviews carried out by students, professors and other researchers from the History Department of the university. Carla is currently involved with two projects: 1) she is comparing some oral history institutional experiences in Brazil, Canada and Italy; 2) she is a co-coordinator of the inter-institutional project Documenting the Covid 19 Experiences in Rio Grande do Sul, that is been carried out for 14 institutions in her state.