Anxiety and Rebellion of Local Culture Archives

2003-091-017-p011. In front of grandmother’s house. 1930s. Anne Elias collection

On November 14, 2020, a roundtable entitled “Anxiety and Rebellion of Local Culture Archives” was held in frames of the 2020 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Virtual Convention. The roundtable was designed to discuss the advantages and challenges of using materials, collected by someone else for different purposes, in our own research. More specifically, the roundtable participants discussed their experiences of working together on two major projects: indexing of the “Local Culture and Diversity on the Prairies” series of interviews and developing of an exhibition “Chasing Gophers Barefoot: Prairie Children of the 1930s.” Both projects were conducted by researchers of the Kule Folklore Centre in 2019 and 2020.

Maryna Chernyavska opened the roundtable introducing the “Local Culture” project, which, as Maryna stated, consists of more than eight hundred hours of interviews, approximately 800 photographs and 20 videos. Jelena Pogosjan presented information about the “Chasing Gophers Barefoot” exhibit and shared her reflections on the experience of creating an exhibition about childhood using memories of adult people. Iryna Skubii, who explored the topic of toys and games, presented a talk “‘No toys at all’: Reading unseen and searching for outnumbered objects.” Matthias Kaltenbrunner’s talk entitled “Tracing the Unintended: Beyond the Prairies in the 1930s” was about how we can notice, recognize and interpret the gaps in archives. Finally, Maria Mayerchyk was talking about the responsibility and challenges of presenting the Indigenous and Métis children experiences in the exhibit. The roundtable ended with a discussion of the ideas that arose during the meeting.

More about the Local Culture and Diversity on the Prairies Project. 

Search, browse and listen to the interviews here.