Members of the Archive/Counter-Archive network spans across Canada and multiple disciplines. Learn more about our research below!
Publics Talks and Keynotes
- Public Talk: Crystal Mowry (Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery). April 14, 2021, Online
- Artist Talk: Shawn Johnston. March 30, 2021, Online
- A/CA Symposium 2020, Keynote: Deanna Bowen, Berlin Berlin. December 10, 2020. Online
- Panel: "Counter-Archives as Living Archives." With Janine Marchessault, Debbie Ebanks Schlums, Ryan Conrad, and Rebecca Gordon. Film Studies Association of Canada. May 13, 2022. Online.
- Panel: "Archive/Counter-Archive ( A/CA) – Activating Marginalised Archives in Canada" with Antoine Damiens, Janine Marchessault, Nadine Valcin, and Michael Zryd. Eye International Conference, June 4, 2023. Amsterdam.
- Roundtable: "Official opening and plenary roundtable: Archives, Access, and Disability" with Michael Marlatt. IAMHIST 2023 Conference, June 20, 2023. Montreal.
- Roundtable: "Archive/Counter-Archive Screening and plenary roundtable: Television Archives Revisited" with Andrew Burke, Jennifer Dysart, Mary Elizabeth Luka, Janine Marchessault, Patrick McCurdy, and Jennifer VanderBurgh. IAMHIST 2023 Conference, June 21, 2023. Montreal.
- Panel: Toronto Living with AIDS Book Launch with Ryan Conrad, Kaspar Jivan Saxena, Darien Taylor, and Ian Iqbal Rashid. The Tranzac as a part of the 2024 Toronto Queer Film Festival, March 16, Toronto. (*Note: you will need to make a free TQFF account to access the recording).
The Working Papers Series
Archive/Counter-Archive's Working Papers Series (WPS) is a collegial forum where graduate students are given an opportunity to present their thesis or dissertation research in-development to colleagues and faculty. The Working Papers Series is hosted by York University and takes place in Toronto (or online, during the Pandemic) . The Series is an excellent forum to receive input/feedback about research in progress.The 2024-2025 Working Papers Series is organized and curated by A/CA Student Researchers Elina Lex and Emily Barton.
Watch the recordings
- Working Papers Series with Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier: "‘I Say The Only Plot I Can Write Is A Life’: Lucy Lippard’s Feminist Fiction," Tuesday, February 20, 2024
- Working Papers Series with Lola Rémy: "Women’s Affective Labour in Experimental Film Archives: At the Margins of the North American Avant-Garde,"Tuesday, December 5, 2023
Working Papers Series with Debbie Ebanks Schlums: Performance Documentation and the Embodied Jamaican Diasporic Archive, Tuesday, November 7, 2023 - Working Papers Series with Noor Bhangu: Homoerotics of Haram Life, Tuesday, February 28, 2023
- Working Papers Series with Johanna Laub: Archives In/As Ruins: Moving Image Art And The Anarchaeology Of Archival Debris, Tuesday, November 29, 2022
- Working Papers Series with Theo Xenophontos: Film as Mediator: Cultivating a Cypriot Canadian Community Audiovisual Media Archive. Tuesday, October 25, 2022. Online
- Working papers Series with Marcus Jack: Peripherality and its Consequences: The Counternarratives of Artists' Filmmaking in Scotland (and elsewhere). Tuesday, March 8, Online.
- Working Papers Series with Kate J. Russell: John Waters’s Effluvic Cinema: Cult, Community, Laughter. Tuesday November 23, 2021 Online.
- Working Papers Series with Axelle Demus: Out of the Closets, and Into Your Homes!: Televising, Informing, and Connecting Queer Communities on Ontario’s Cable Access Channels (1972-2000). Tuesday October 26, 2021, Online
- Working Papers Series with Sylvia Nowak: This Is Toronto: Finding Antifascism in the Neoliberal Archives, 1979-1998. Tuesday March 23, 2021, Online
- Working Papers Series with Ana Rita Morais: Remediating the [AR]chival Impulse. Tuesday January 26, 2021, Online
Previous (unrecorded) WPS talks.
- Working Papers Series: Postdoc Roundtable with Andrew Bailey, Anjo-marí Gouws, and Julia Polyck-O’Neill. Thursday, March 30, 2023
- Working Papers Series with Michael Marlatt: "Disability, Chronic Illness, Neurodiversity and the Moving Image Preservation Program", Tuesday March 15, 2022. Online
- Working papers Series with Linda Grussani: Recognition and Access: Indigenous Curatorial Practice, Tuesday February 15, 2022. Online
- Working Papers Series with Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte: Digital Distribution as Counter-Archival Practice?. Tuesday October 27, 2020, Online
- Working Papers Series with Jenn E. Norton: Imaging the Past.Tuesday February 4, 2020, Toronto
- Working Papers Series with Lisa Sloniowski: Theorizing the Library. Tuesday November 26, 2019 Toronto
- Working Papers Series with Jonathan Petrychyn: An Archive of Fevers. Tuesday October 29, 2019. Toronto
Talking Archives
Talking Archives is our new interview series, which features conversations with artists, archivists, and researchers who are part of the A/CA network. Season 1 focused on Canadian archives. It was coordinated by Janine Marchessault. Seaon 2 is produced by A/CA researchers Monika Kin Gagnon and Elina Lex. It features conversations with filmmakers, archivists, and researchers who presented at the 2024 Global Audiovisual Archiving Conference in Toronto in July 2024.
Season 1
- Talking Archives - Episode 1: Artist Nadine Valcin
- Talking Archives - Episode 2: Filmmaker Philip Hoffman
- Talking Archives - Episode 3: Postdoctoral Researcher Ryan Conrad
- Talking Archives - Episode 4: Video Artist and Filmmaker John Greyson
- Talking Archives - Episode 5: Students Activating the Archive
- Talking Archives - Episode 6: Artist-in-residence Pamila Matharu
- Talking Archives - Episode 7: Archivist and ArQuives Director Raegan Swanson
- Talking Archives - Episode 8: Archivist Melissa J. Nelson
- Talking Archives - Episode 9: Julia Minne
Season 2
Archival Atelier
Artists, archivists, and researchers engage with analog and legacy digital materials, many of which are at-risk. Explore different ways of assessing these media at Archival Atelier, A/CA’s new series of workshops devoted to varied media types and their preservation.
- Dave Pascoe ”Opening the Box: Assessing a Random Sample of AV Materials." March 4, 2022.
- Kelly Egan and Mark Toscano ""Material in the Margins: Experimental Film, the Archive and Ephemerality"." March 25, 2022.
- Kim Tomczak "Tackling VHS Tapes: An Overview of Digitization Workflow." March 22, 2022.
- Pippin Barr. "Up Close and Personal: Documenting Design with the Method for Design Materialization" May 4, 2023.
- Hélène Brousseau and Sarah Lake. "Web Archiving with Webrecorder." May 18th, 2023.
- Callum Beckford, Anna Douglas, Jeremy Heil, Jennifer Kennedy, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, and Susan Lord. ""Net Art Restoration With Cheryl L'hirondelle's vancouversonglines.ca/nikamon ohci askiy," June 16, 2023.
- Allison Elliot. "Memory Labs as Participatory Archival Spaces: A Feminist Perspective," November 14, 2023.
- Nada El-Omari and Jean-Pierre Marchant. ""Digitising and Remediating Personal Archives." January 16, 2024
Summer Institute
We are pleased to share the recordings of the public talks that took place during Archive/Counter-Archive's 2021 Summer Institute, "Locating Media Archives," (May 18-June 17, 2021).
The three public talks below were part of Dr. Stacy Allison Cassin's intensive, "The Practice of Indigenous Metadata and Knowledge Organization."
- Indigenous Knowledge and Relationships, with Camille Callison.
- Indigenous Data Protocols, with Kayla Lar-son
- Mapping for Awareness of Indigenous Stories in Cultural Heritage Collections, with Dr. Stephanie Pyne
The next two panels were convened by Dr. Ryan Conrad and took place during his intensive entitled "AIDS Activist Media Research within Canada."
- HIV on TV: A Panel on Early HIV/AIDS Activist Television in Canada, with Richard Fung, Karen Knights, and Ian Iqbal Rashid
- A Dialogue on Women's HIV/AIDS Video Activism Then & Now, with Darien Taylor and Alison Duke
Previous (unrecorded) Summer Institutes:
Video interviews on A/CA
In this section, you will find video interviews of A/CA members.
- "Creating a World without limits through television and film." Dr. Jennifer VanderBurgh discusses her research on Margaret Perry at the Nova Scotia Public Archives. Saint Mary's University.
- "Work of pioneering N.S. filmmaker Margaret Perry goes under the lens" CBC's Richard Woodbury and A/CA's Dr. Jennnifer VanderBurgh discuss the Margaret Perry case study