LAMACS

The Promised Land Project (PLP) is a multidisciplinary research project that focuses on the study the role and evolution of the early black settlements in the Chatham-Kent area, whose role has been uncelebrated and contributions neglected.

The description of such communities as the “final stop on the underground railroad” points to a historical ideology suggesting that this extraordinary heritage is simply an ending rather than the birthplace of something significant and unique. It is not widely known that when Canada became a country in 1867, the sixth-largest population group was people of African descent. The Canadian national history still terms these citizens as “fugitive slaves” disregarding their efforts towards the fight to end slavery in the United States, on the implementation of civil rights in modern Canada, and on the social, cultural and economic development of this region.The overall objectives of this project are:

1. to protect primary historical materials
2. to make these materials publicly accessible
3. to support new academic research and teaching
4. to promote community development in this historic region of Canada
5. to use the new knowledge generated by the project to frame current discussions of ethnoracial identity, social justice, migration and Canadian multiculturalism

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The Conversation Series is a project that focuses on creating a dialogue with filmmakers, researchers, and teachers who examine the world through a cultural perspective. More specifically, the project brings to the surface voices and perspectives that are normally held to the margins of national and cultural grand narratives.

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The purpose of this project is to create a comparative study aiming at understanding how racial and cultural identities are articulated in the independent cinemas of Canada, South Africa, and Australia. Given our global contemporary context of new identity practices that are fertile with crisis, we are exploring what can be learned from a study of these specific representations.

The three main objectives of this research are:

1. to establish a corpus of thirty films from independent cinemas of the multiracial and multicultural countries of Canada, South Africa, and Australia
2. to gain an understanding of the significant factors representing identity practices of center and peripheral groups within the three target countries. This will be achieved by analyzing the epistemological markers of the films as well as interviewing ten of the filmmakers
3. to compare historical and ideological foundations represented in these films through their articulations of identity and racial identity practices.

This project is financed by SSHRC from 2007 until 2010.

Memory is a slippery concept. When one considers how culture, history, and society overlap and intertwine, memory becomes a complex of the relations between these elements. If we consider the affects of global, transnational, and trans-disciplinary landscapes, add in the various forms of production, distribution, exhibition and consumption, the movement of memory becomes incredibly dynamic and at times, overwhelming.

We can see how this occurs within the redefinition and re-articulation of macro/micro cultural identities and citizenship within, across, and beyond the traditional, canonist conceptions of continent, nation, geopolitical space, and sociocultural identity (ethnicity, race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, etc.).

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