The Political Power of Storytelling

Join us for presentations from Wendy Allen and Eva Crocker looing at intergenerational exchange through digital storytelling in Monteral and nostalgia and the queer utopic in Newfoundland. Moderated by Eric Craven, this session invites audience members to reflect on active aging, culture revivals, and nationalism through the lens of oral history. 

You can read the full presentation abstracts below.

How can you participate? Join us in person by or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions or if we can make this event more accessible for you: Contact us at info.4@concordia.ca

Wendy Allen 

For this presentation, Wendy will screen selections from her oral history and digital storytelling projects created during the past 10 years in various community group settings that have focused on older adults and intergenerational exchange: “Promenade Parlante” (Atwater Library), Ville Extraordinaire (Atwater Library), and Future(s) Fish (Suspicious Fish). This includes an audio walk in Cabot Square, excerpts from oral history interviews with older adults in Mile End carried out on Zoom during the pandemic which were edited and enhanced with photographs and an “Ode” to public transit created in collaboration with Caroline Filler at Suspicious Fish.

The presentation will include Wendy's thoughts on digital storytelling as “active aging”. Wendy will comment on what has worked well in engaging older adults in meaningful creative projects using digital media. This includes the importance of having supportive skilled facilitators, and the results and benefits for the participants in this project. 

Eva Crocker 

In June of 2026, Eva successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “The End of a World: An interdisciplinary exploration of living with extractivism in Newfoundland and Labrador” in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Department at Concordia University with focus areas in Art History, Communications, and Creative Writing. Chapter Two of her thesis, “Out Around the Bay: Nostalgia and the Queer Utopic in a Former Fishing Community” is an essay based on oral history interviews conducted with her aunt, Wanda Crocker in Broad Cove, an outport in Conception Bay North. The previous chapter, “Fish and Alternative Temporalities" looks at the way the closure of the fishery continued to reverberate through Newfoundland culture for years after the Northern cod moratorium. 

Eva's aunt bought her house in Broad Cove three years before the Federal government announced the cod moratorium. This chapter therefore focuses on the nostalgia that surrounded the fishery as it was disappearing. Her aunt is a Newfoundland folk musician, and this chapter offers an opportunity to discuss the “Newfoundland renaissance” or the “cultural revival,” an art movement that flourished in Newfoundland in the 1970s and 1980s. The cultural revival was focused on celebrating and preserving the outport Newfoundland culture that was disappearing at that time, as a result of resettlement programs and the industrialization of the fishery.

Eva's aunt is a lesbian and, in the years following her move to Broad Cove, many of her queer friends joined her on the North Shore. In our interviews we discussed how her passion for traditional Newfoundland culture fits with her queer identity. Eva will draw on Svetlana Boym’s ideas about the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia as ways to navigate a relationship to nationalism, and turn to José Esteban Muñoz’s definition of the queer utopic as a perpetual future that we can only hope to catch glimmers of in the present.

Wendy Allen 

In 2008, after retiring, Wendy Allen took a course in oral history and digital storytelling at COHDS given by Anna Sheftel and Michael Klassen. Her first project used an oral history approach to present portraits of the people at the heart of the international development projects she had worked with in Indonesia. She also made short videos documenting the stories of visiting scholars from Uganda at COHDS.

Since 2016 she has been participating in Digital Literacy projects led by Eric Craven (also a COHDS affiliate) at Atwater Library. Projects have ranged from using her photos to create a video about her time in China in the late 70s, to the COHDS projects, the “Promenade Parlante”, a place-based research-creation project in Shaughnessy Village and “La Ville Extraordinaire: Learning from older Montrealer’s urban knowledge.” A montage of videos she created for La Ville Extraordinaire from the interviews conducted in Mile End was presented at the Centre des Mémoires Montréalaises (MEM) and at Concordia’s 4th Space.

Since 2024, she has participated in two projects led by Eric Craven and funded by New Horizons for Seniors. “Ode to Public Transit”, is a short video about the Montreal Metro created with Caroline Filler with the support of Guillaume Jabbour, a COHDS affiliate and Grace Dart scholar, who composed and performed the music for the video. It was screened at Suspicious Fish, a Verdun community organization and posted on the MEM website. In 2025/2026 the seniors group was based at Concordia’s engAGE, where Eric is now the Coordinator. Francis Léveillé, who also received a Grace Dart scholarship, proposed creating digital games for this project. The games included one about “downsizing” based on the group’s personal stories.

Eva Crocker

Eva Crocker is a freelance editor and author who grew up in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). She is the author of two novels, Back in the Land of the Living and All I Ask, which won the 2020 BMO Winterset Award and was long listed for the Giller Prize. All I Ask was also translated into French by Laurent Assuant and published under the title Tout ce que je demande by L’Interligne in 2022. 

Her short story collection Barreling Forward was shortlisted for Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQS2 Writers and the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. It won the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Author’s Award. Her new short story collection Bargain Bargain Bargain, will be published by McCelland and Stewart in 2027. She is the creator and facilitator of “Fundamentals of Short Fiction,” a creative writing workshop open to people of all experience levels that prioritizes experimentation and receiving feedback on works in progress. 

She recently defended her PhD dissertation in the Interdisciplinary Humanities department at Concordia University, where she was studying visual art as resistance to resource extraction in Newfoundland. 

Eric Craven