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

November 26, 2020—Mapping the City: Public Histories and the Shifting Landscape of Vancouver

Speaker: Caitlin Gordon-Walker, Honorary research associate and sessional instructor, Department of Anthropology, UBC.

This presentation will discuss a new and ongoing research project inquiring into past and current changes in the representation of Vancouver’s pasts within the city’s landscape. While this project considers the work of museums and other official heritage sites, such as public art and efforts to (re)name public spaces, it also examines the dialogue between these and the wider places and lives in which they play a part. Presenting some initial findings from the first phase of the project, Hindsight is 20/20, it will highlight some of the tensions between official heritage discourses, often linked to themes of redress and reconciliation within a nationalist framework, and the diverse experience of living in the city, in which various actors (re)claim and/or dispute the past and articulate differing understandings of what the city’s histories mean for the present.