WINNIPEG, MB – The University of Winnipeg’s Cultural Studies Research Group (CSRG), led by Chancellor’s Research Chair Angela Failler, will host an invitational three-day workshop titled Caring for Difficult Knowledge: Prospects for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) from September 27-29, 2013 at UWinnipeg.
“This workshop emerges out of our desire to contribute to the potential for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR),” explained Failler. “We want the museum to serve as a meaningful site of cultural production, public engagement and pedagogical encounter in Winnipeg.”
The workshop aims to foster dialogue in support of the museum and the challenges it faces in representing human right issues. Highlights include keynote lectures by Dr. Rita Kaur Dhamoon (University of Victoria), Dr. Olena Hankivsky, (Simon Fraser University) and Dr. Erica Lehrer, (Concordia University).
Workshop participants include cultural studies scholars from across disciplines in the Faculty of Arts at UWinnipeg, graduate students in the Master of Arts in Cultural Studies, staff from the CMHR, local curators, visiting scholars and postdoctoral students.
Dr. Erica Lehrer is Associate Professor of History and Sociology/Anthropology, as well as Director of the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV) at Concordia University where she also holds a Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Memory, Ethnography, and Museology. Her research looks at cultural practices and products that attempt to apprehend, represent, or come to terms with mass violence and its aftermath — from the stories told in theoretical and creative texts to films, monuments, exhibitions and the ‘happenings’ of everyday life. In addition to several published journal articles and book chapters, she is the co-editor of Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave MacMillan 2011) and author of Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (University of Indiana Press, forthcoming).
Dr. Rita Kaur Dhamoon teaches Political Science at the University of Victoria. Her current research program is grounded in critical race feminism, and includes a book project on Sikhs in Canada and nation-building; research on intersectionality and solidarity politics between people of colour and Indigenous people; an intersectional analysis of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights with Dr. Olena Hankivsky (SFU); research, as a collaborator, in a SSHRC Research-Creation grant for ‘Project Barca: New Architectures of Memory & Identity’ which brings together intersectionality politics and performance studies; and a collaborative project that explores how students learn and how instructors teach ‘difficult’ topics on race and racism. Along with several published journal articles, book chapters, and co-edited collections, she is theauthor of a book called Identity/Difference Politics (UBC Press 2009).
Dr. Olena Hankivsky is Director of the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy at Simon Fraser University and is a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Gender and Health Research Chair and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Senior Scholar. She is editor of the recently published Health Inequities in Canada: Intersectional Frameworks and Practices (2011, UBC Press), and co-editor of Women’s Health in Canada: Critical Perspectives on Theory and Policy (2007, University of Toronto Press) and Gender, Politics and the State in Ukraine (2012, University of Toronto Press). She is also the author of Social Policy and the Ethic of Care (2004, University of British Columbia Press) and co-author of The Dome of Silence: Sexual Harassment and Abuse in Sport (2000, Fernwood & Zed Publications). With Dr. Rita Kaur Dhamoon (University of Victoria) she is conducting an intersectional analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
The Cultural Studies Research Group at the University of Winnipeg is an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the Social Sciences and Humanities, Faculty of Arts. The Group is led by Failler, Chancellor’s Research Chair and Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and is supported by the UWinnipeg’s Research Office, the Chancellor, the President, the Vice-President Academic and the Vice-President Research and International. The Cultural Studies Research Group also supports and is supported by the UWinnipeg’s Master of Arts programs in cultural studies.
