Making Difficult Pasts Present Through art and Photography

Monday, 04 May 2015, 7:00-8:00 PM

Cinematheque Theatre, 100 Arthur Street
Reception to follow in the gallery.

PLATFORM is pleased to welcome Dr. Angela Failler, the Chancellor’s Research Chair, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Women’s & Gender Studies at The University of Winnipeg. In this lecture, Failler reflects upon her use of art and photography in a major study focused on public memory of the 1985 Air India bombings. Considering the methodological stakes, approaches and dilemmas of this research, she posits lessons to be learned from working with aesthetic representations as remembrance practices. More specifically, she argues that aesthetic representations have the potential to complicate narrower historiographic accounts of the past and generate “critical hope” in relation to difficult or traumatic histories whose legacies remain present.

Dr. Angela Failler is Chancellor’s Research Chair, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She also leads the Cultural Studies Research Group, teaches and supervises for the MA Program in Cultural Studies, and is a Research Affiliate with the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies.

Image courtesy of Angela Failler.