A Place for Community Archiving: A Panel Discussion

As a part of Museum of Toronto’s Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto exhibition, this unique panel will explore the growing importance of community archivism in our city.

We are gathering field experts from initiatives wokring on the Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), the Portuguese Canadian History Project, and Chinese Canadian Archives to describe the efforts, ethics, and challenges in preserving local histories, while simultaneously working in institutional archival settings.

This cross-cultural, cross-institutional conversation will explore questions such as:

• Who has the resources and rights to collect these histories?
• Are there ethical as well as moral issues with collecting people's oral narratives?
• What might we understand between archival expertise and lived expertise?

Meet the Panelists

June Chow

June Chow 周慕慈 (she/her) is a formally trained archivist practicing across Chinese Canadian communities and specializing in Chinatowns. In Toronto, she is a special collections archivist with the Chinese Canadian Archives at University of Toronto Libraries. In Vancouver, she is community archivist of The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, working through a reparative lens with Chinese immigration records held within families and at our national archives. Her mother and aunt’s sharing of oral histories related to their grandfather’s life in Canada as a “Chinese bachelor” led to the recovery of his long-lost grave in Saskatoon. June and her family are Cantonese-speaking, uninvited guests and settlers of Turtle Island.

Gilberto Fernandes

Gilberto Fernandes is a visiting scholar and instructor in the Department of History at York University. He is the author of This Pilgrim Nation: The Making of the Portuguese Diaspora in North America (2020) and several other academic publications on the history of the Portuguese diaspora, and of Ontario's construction industry and its building trade unions. Gilberto is also an award-winning public historian with several credits, including community archives, documentaries, exhibitions, websites, podcasts, walking tours, and theatre, which he developed in collaboration with university archives, museums, embassies, trade unions, social service agencies, and other organizations. Most notably, he is the lead director of the Portuguese Canadian History Project, which he co-founded in 2008.

Dr. Cheryl Thompson

Formally recognized by the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists (2021), Dr. Cheryl Thompson is a renowned author and expert in the field of Black Canadian studies. She has held numerous leading research positions, including as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Black Expressive Culture and Creativity, an Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University, the director of Black Creative Lab, and more.