Last week I was honoured to deliver a lecture to conclude my time as a visiting Craig Dobbin Legacy Scholar at University College Dublin (UCD).
During this forty minute presentation I shared with my colleagues an overview of my doctoral research from it’s beginnings in the campaign to rename Dundas Street, to how a series of walks across one of Toronto’s longest, most historic streets led me to develop the walking and research methodology that I call “scenographic chorography.”
I also shared how I used this mobile methodology, along with scholarly research at UCD’s Richview Library, to further explore connections between Belfield, Ireland, the historic estate that forms the core of UCD’s campus, and Belfield Plantation, Jamaica, a sugar and rum plantation that enslaved over four hundred individuals.
Attendees at the lecture also received a copy of my “Walking Belfield” artist book documenting my research at UCD.
Thank you so much to the UCD School of History, the Ireland Canada University Foundation , The UCD Centre for Canadian Studies, for being wonderful hosts, and especially Dr. Jeremiah Garsha, for not only being the former, but also an amazing colleague , and interlocutor for this event!
You can find a copy of the lecture abstract below.
From Dundas Street to Dublin: Performing Spatial Research Through Scenographic Chorography.
This talk is an introduction to scenographic chorography – an interdisciplinary creative, critical, and embodied walking practice I’ve developed as part of my doctoral research into practices of spatial performance, commemoration, and interpretation. Focussing on the urban landscape of Toronto, Canada, I explain how scenographic chorography has been shaped by my involvement in public history and memory activism campaigns such as the campaign to rename Dundas Street, and a desire to demonstrate to a wider public why who, what, and how relationships to the so-called past, can shape present realities, and work toward imagining justice-based futures. In the process I share examples of scenographic chorography as a form of doing, presenting, and animating research. and why I feel it may be a useful methodology for investigating and telling the stories of UCD’s Belfield campus.
