The goal of this pilot-project is to create a people’s archive of Calgary. This archive will carry stories of immigrants, refugees, First Nations people, racial and ethnic minorities, women, children, teenagers, differently abled, gender-minorities, and incarcerated — those who are strangers, newcomers, wanderers, and excluded attempting to settle into a hostile topography in order to make it their home. Some are introduced to the new world by their family, others enter it through their workplace, many discover the city during everyday practices such as shopping for provisions, most figure out a way to survive. Each individual enters this project of (re)making a city in different ways.
This week we will focus on immigrants and their food practices as a way to map Calgary. We will ask how cooking, selling, buying and transporting comestibles, eating alone, eating together, and remembering repasts help a newcomer chart her way in a strange new urban landscape and make it her own. Students and immigrant interlocutors will co-create knowledge about the city. Our method of collaborative fieldwork will borrow from collaborative ethnographers such as Joanne Rappaport who proposes a form of collaboration that transforms “the space of fieldwork from one of data collection to one of co-conceptualization.” Such a format is iterative and discursive. So, we will begin with community members telling us stories. These will be conducted in two 30 minutes long sessions, on Monday. We will compile and analyze their stories only to return to our interlocutors with modified stories in the form of posters, zines, dance recitals, architectural design propositions, docudramas, exhibits, or podcasts. The community members will review and respond to our stories. Our archive will not be singular, encyclopedic, and comprehensive. Instead, it will be fragmented, episodic, and perspectival — just as ordinary people experience a city. Each of our immigrant guides have used food as a way to remember, recreate, and reproduce their familiar world in unfamiliar places. They have retained and experimented with recipes and cooking, identified a network of stores, markets, and sites where they buy their ingredients, imported provisions from another country, and reimagined and remembered places related to food. They have served their food in different locations and to different people. Their pantries are stocked with objects that originate from places across the world. They learnt to read the city in creative ways in order to substitute, improvise, and adapt – after all, bricolage, circumvention, and creative reuse are tools by which the immigrants surreptitiously remake their worlds in new settings! [i] Sebastian Cobarrubias, “Countermapping,” Encyclopedia of Geography. Barney Warf (Ed.) (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2010): 595. Robert Rundstrom, “Counter-Mapping,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (eds.), (New York: Elsevier Science , 2009): 314-318. Nancy Peluso uses the term counter mapping to describe grassroots acts of creating maps that counter cartographic conventions produced by people and institutions that wield social power. Nancy Peluso, “Whose Woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Antipode 27 (October 1995): 383-406. |
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