Research Projects

Current research projects:

• Developing a network of community archives in Montréal:
  
  My Postdoctoral Fellowship in Community Archives and Accessibility at McGill University is part of FOCAS: Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support, a Mellon Foundation-supported collective of faculty members and academics representing nine academic institutions across Canada and the United States. Key to FOCAS is the implementation of a large-scale North American effort to support paid internships at community archives in order to empower community archives across diverse locations.
  
  As part of my postdoc, I am developing relationships with and completing key archival projects that increase the visibility, preservation, and accessibility of the histories of marginalized communities within Montréal, with the goal of developing a local network of community archives sites and place Master of Information Studies students within community archives across the city for paid internship work.
  

• “Archiving Intersecting Communities: Accessibility and Disability in Community Archives in the U.S and Canada” – Co-Investigator
  
  Under the supervision of and in collaboration with Dr. Gracen Brilmyer at McGill’s School of Information Studies, I am assessing cross-institutional questions around disability and accessibility across different community archives. This research is based on interviews/focus groups with archivists and patrons at different internship sites in the larger FOCAS program in order to reveal some of the needs, approaches, and barriers to archives accessibility and materials on disability within community archives. The research centres around the following questions: How are different community archives collecting and describing materials on disability that intersect with other marginalized identities? How are community archives making their materials physically and/or digitally accessible? What are the current interests, foci, strategies, and barriers community archives face when doing this kind of work?
  
  
• “From Local Screens to National Networks: Trajectories of Queer Cable Television in Canada” – Book project
  
  My PhD dissertation “Queering the Cable Airwaves: The Evolution of LGBTQ2+ Community Television in Ontario, Canada (1977-2001)” explores the history of queer cable access television in Ontario, Canada, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Using oral history and in-depth archival research, I analyze how LGBTQ2+ cable access television programming in the province was primarily driven by what I term “queer access mobilization,” a process through which queer individuals and groups mobilize to increase access to media and information, as well as access to social, cultural, and/or political networks.
  
  I am currently working on a monograph based on the dissertation (under contract with McGill Queen’s University Press). From Local Screens to National Networks spans not just Ontario, but offers a comparative overview of LGBTQ2+ community programming in Canada to analyze how and why cable access was mobilized by various groups and organizations, from cable access’s inception in the early 1970s to its eventual decline in the 2000s.
  
  For more on this project, click here.
  
  
• Archive/Counter-Archive educational guides
  
  I have been involved in the SSHRC-funded project Archive/Counter-Archive in various capacities for the past six years. As a Research Associate, I developed a series of educational guides for Archive/Counter-Archive’s Case Studies to bring important yet understudied archival audiovisual works, including video art and experimental film, to the classroom for educators at the Secondary and Post-Secondary levels. Through this work, I have worked closely with Canadian Artist-run Centres such as the CFMDC (Toronto), VTape (Toronto), GIV (Montreal), and VIVO (Vancouver) as well as memory institutions like the Nova Scotia archives.