The Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE) is pleased to announce “The Imaginative Ethnography Symposium: Imagining Canada’s Futures with Romani Refugees & Migrants”
November 9-10, 2017, York University, Toronto, Ontario, curated by Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
The symposium will include two keynote addresses, a roundtable panel, and a workshop for graduate students.
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Ian F. Hancock is an internationally renowned scholar in the fields of Romani Studies, English history, grammar and dialectology, language and identity, African and Afro-Caribbean linguistics, and creolization and language contact. He has taught as a member of the minority faculty at The University of Texas since 1972, and is Director of RADOC (The Romani Archives and Documentation Center) at The University of Texas. He has published widely with over 400 articles, chapters and books authored or edited, including International English Usage (Routledge, 1986), Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers (Hertfordshire UP, 1998), Readings in Creole Studies (Story-Scientia, 1979), and We Are the Romani People (UHP, 1995). A collection of his essays edited by D. Karanth entitled Danger! Educated Gypsy was published in 2010 by The University of Hertfordshire Press. In addition to his academic work, he is a human rights activist, having represented the Roma at the United Nations as a member of the UN Economic and Social Council and of UNICEF. He is North American member of the Vienna-based International Romani Parliament and was a member of the Project on Ethnic Relations’ Advisory Board. He addresses the US Congress and the Council of Europe on human rights issues, and has represented the US State Department at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Warsaw, and spoken in Brussels, Geneva and New York before the EU and the UN. In 1998, President Bill Clinton appointed him as the sole Romani member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. He was recipient in Norway of the Rafto Foundation International Prize for Human Rights (1997) and of the Gamaliel Chair in Peace and Justice from The University of Wisconsin (1998). In 2015, he was appointed Honorary Vice-Chancellor to the International Roma University in New Delhi.
Lynn Hutchinson Lee is a multimedia artist/writer, daughter of a Canadian mother and Romanichal (English Romani) father, living and working in Toronto, Canada. A co-founder of Red Tree and chirikli collectives, she has exhibited in Canada, Latin America and Europe. Her mixed media installation, Shelter, Provisional (Awaiting Permanent Structure), is part of Red Tree’s Enraged, Inertia Ran Off intervention in a Hamilton, Ontario park (www.redtreecollective.ca/
Thursday, November 9
Workshop
The confluence of creation, identity and social engagement: an arts workshop
Lynn Hutchinson Lee, 3:00-5:00pm, ACE 209
In a printmaking and assemblage workshop, Lynn Hutchinson Lee will work with graduate students to explore identity and their perspectives on social engagement. After an initial group discussion, participants will develop images collaboratively or individually that reflect upon or respond to these issues, followed by the carving of linoleum blocks from the original drawings. The prints, once pulled, will be affixed to a paper garment made by the artist for the workshop, and previously subjected to a process of painting with konnyaku paste and drying, allowing the paper to be distressed, shaped and manipulated. In addition to the block prints, participants will collaborate in writing text or poetry, drawing, or otherwise marking the final garment.
Keynote
Romani reality and the ‘gypsy’ myth
Prof. Ian F. Hancock, 6:00-7:30pm, York Lanes 280N
It is still the case that the general public knows very little about the actual Romani people, while having a much more detailed notion of what “gypsies” are. Professor Hancock presents an overview of the Romani Studies course that he has taught at The University of Texas for the past 30 years, examining the reasons for the great disparity between the two identities. He will also discuss early and current explanations re: origins, and summaries of the two great Romani tragedies—the five-centuries-long period of slavery, and the Porrajmos, the Nazi genocide. He will also briefly address aspects of Romani religion and culture, the emergence of political movements, and the situation of Roma refugees and asylum seekers in the post-Communist period.
Friday, November 10
Roundtable
Imagining Canada’s futures through ethnography and the arts
10:00-11:30 am, York Lanes 280N
This roundtable will include keynote speakers Prof. Ian Hancock and Lynn Hutchinson Lee, as well as renowned Romani authors, artists, and activists, including Ronald Lee, Jennifer Danch, Ildi Gulyas, Nazik Deniz, and Monica Bodirsky. Participants in the roundtable will discuss the role of imagination and the arts in ethnographic and community-based activism. The roundtable chair will offer follow-up questions, and facilitate a dialogue between the presenters, and with the audience.
Keynote
Poshrat (half/blood): making art in a precarious identity
Lynn Hutchinson Lee, 6:00-7:30pm, York Lanes 280N
Drawing from her mixed Romani/non-Romani heritage, multimedia artist Lynn Hutchinson Lee deconstructs the skewed identities and cultural influences that mark her social engagement, activism, artistic practice and sense of belonging in shifting and converging communities. Beginning with Five Songs for Daddy, her spoken word poem from chirikli collective’s sound installation at the 2011 Venice Biennale’s Roma Pavilion, she explores a vicarious identity marked by the life of her Romanichal father. With a puppet as ‘witness’ from her ancestral past (made by her father when the family still travelled in England), she examines the practice of ‘reinventing’ oneself, and discusses identity in both cultural practice and broader social context. Finally, she asks what implications these issues have in imagining futures for Romani refugees in Canada.
All lectures are free and open to the public. For more information on the symposium, please email Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston at mkazubow@yorku.ca