I had the pleasure of attending a public forum on pensions in Oshawa a few weeks ago. Organized by the retirees’ chapter of the Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) Local 222, over 200 bodies were in attendance. While the theme of the evening was universal public pensions, speakers had experienced a number of social ills: a single mother who lost her home… Read more »
This is a story about heritage buildings, those trying to save them, a city council, a university, and academics caught in the middle. It’s a story that raises questions about academics’ responsibilities in the community, academic freedom and activism, and the universities they work for.
by Jeremy Nathan Marks Historical writing has long suffered from the problem of auto-referentiality. Auto-referentiality, as I define it, simply means historians are writing only in reference to human subjects and human problems. I don’t mean to say that historiography is populated only by human beings but we do not currently possess an extensive literature where humans are not the… Read more »
Do the topics that we choose, as historians or aspiring historians, help accentuate the gap between the public and the academic?
This is a blog post looking at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, introducing readers to the resources available there.
Recent articles in Toronto newspapers on burst watermains suggest that we seek connections between infrastructure and the past when such infrastructures fail.
