What makes oral history different and why are these stories important to our historical record? Come find out why your story is important to the history of our community.

Speakers:

In 2005, Shawn Micallef was the Project Coordinator for Bendale: About Place, a project of the Scarborough Historical Museum in partnership with a number of community organizations including the Scarborough Historical Society and the Multicultural Society of Ontario. The project explored the history of the Bendale community through the voices and reminiscences of its residents, supplemented with family snapshots, letters, writing and artwork, recent and archival photographs.  Shawn is a weekly columnist for the Toronto Star, an instructor at University of Toronto, a Senior Fellow at Massey College and co-founder of [murmur] and co-founder and senior editor of the magazine Spacing.. He is also author of a Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness, Full Frontal TO: Exploring Toronto’s Vernacular Architecture and The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure and Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto that includes a chapter on Bendale.

In 2001-2 Jennifer Bonnell was working with the Multicultural Society of Ontario in partnership with the Scarborough Museum on the project, Agincourt: a Community History.  The project explored the dramatic change in the community from the 1930s through oral histories and produced a traveling exhibit and a book of walking tours.  A historian of public memory and environmental change in nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada at York University, Jennifer is also the author of Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and the editor, with Marcel Fortin, of Historical GIS Research in Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2014).