Mapping the City: Public Histories and the Shifting Landscape of Vancouver

(This is a invitation-only workshop)

These workshops are intended to bring together scholars from the UBC community interested in thinking through the changing landscape of Vancouver’s public histories and to generate ideas for research partnerships both within and beyond the university. The first workshop will be an opportunity to begin to establish the parameters and direction of a larger project, while a second workshop will allow us to continue to develop the project’s objectives and outcomes.

Drawing on these workshops we will develop an application for a major SSHRC Research Grant.

The project intends to examine the intersections between public histories, art, culture, and social space in Vancouver. Contextualizing this investigation in relation to contemporary discourses of the Canadian nation-state, it will ask how Vancouver as a city is changing the ways in which it understands and represents its past. It will also ask how the city’s approach to heritage-making opens up – or not – dialogical spaces in which various actors can reclaim and/or dispute the past and articulate differing understandings of what the city’s history means for the present. The project aims to bring together scholars working from diverse theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, as well as different sites of practice – academia, museums, the City, First Nations, artists, community organizations, and more. An initial phase of the project will be to assess past and current public representations of the city’s history, including in traditional places such as the Museum of Vancouver and long-recognized heritage sites, as well as more recent initiatives acknowledging Indigenous place names and intangible heritage and commemorating less well-known histories through interpretive signage, public art, digital media, and exhibitions such as cəsnaʔəm, the city before the city and Challenge and Denial: Komagata Maru, 100 Years Later.