October 12th, 2017 | May giving invited talk, hosted by Women's & Gender Studies at St. Thom

Co-chair May Chazan has been invited by the Department of Women's Studies & Gender Studies at St. Thomas University to give a talk, which will be titled "Storying Activisms: Intimate Geographies of Making, Un-making, and Home-making in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Ontario)." As May says:

"This talk will focus on some of my newest research -- storying resistance, resurgence, and resilience in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Ontario). In this ongoing project, I am examining activisms and activist connections in place through intergenerational, digital storytelling workshops, focusing on the mid-sized urban context of Nogojiwanong, the traditional territory of the Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg. I am explicitly aiming to document the lesser-told and frequently-forgotten stories of activisms, engaging especially activists of different ages who identify as racialized, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+. I am also seeking to contribute to queer, decolonial, and feminist approaches to intergenerational storytelling as knowledge production methodology. In this talk, I will offer preliminary reflections on the process, methodology, and emerging themes from the first round of research workshops, carried out in 2016. Based on a close reading of three storytellers’ interviews, I will then explore how their stories reflect activisms as processes of both “un-making” (dismantling, resisting, exposing) oppressions and “making” (through creative work, land-based practices, and ceremony) different, fairer, more sustainable futures. Finally, I will discuss these storytellers’ recurrent and interconnected invocations of “home” or “home-making” as central to their activisms in Nogojiwanong, where they all reside, investigating the ways in which “home” is both highly-emotive and highly-contested in this context of ongoing settler colonialism."