The Commercialization of Digital Information: Implications for the Public Role of Museums

In recent decades, Canadian, British and American museums have faced a number of significant challenges to their traditional role. One of the major challenges has been the reduction of government funding and the incipient pressure to find new sources of revenue. A second has been the introduction of digital technologies that provide new opportunities for museums to communicate with their public, but that require significant investments of both time and money. This thesis explores the impact of both on the public role of museums. Drawing on the work of Jurgen Habermas and, in particular, his belief in the importance of cultural institutions and democratic communication in maintaining a healthy public sphere, this thesis argues that universality remains an important objective for museums. The commitment to serving a universal public, although imperfectly realized, was gradually recognized as an important principle in nineteenth-century Britain. Under the financial pressures of recent decades, however, notions of equality and access have been overshadowed as Anglo American museums have increasingly looked to a paying public to generate revenue. This trend can also be seen in museums’ approach to digital information, where early expectations of financial returns through the licensing of museum content, coupled with the high costs of creating and maintaining digital resources, have resulted in a tendency to view information as a commodity rather than as a public good. By means of two case studies, this thesis argues that digital information does not represent an important new source of revenue for museums. The first case study examines the commercialization of information at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, long a proponent of new technologies, while the second looks more broadly at the experience of stock agencies, museums and consortia in licensing digital content. Together, they throw into doubt the belief that the Internet and other forms of technology will unleash pent-up public demand for museum images and result in significant new revenues flowing into institutional coffers. Given the centrality of the dissemination of information to institutional missions, this thesis argues on behalf of open and equitable access. Museums would be better served by a more critical view of technology that balances benefits with costs, experimentation with evaluation, and short-term goals with strategic, long term institution-wide planning. Renewed government support for education would allow museums to re-establish a balance between market and mission both in the physical and virtual environments

Another kind of team : an ethnographic look at contemporary Inuit dog race in Nunavik

Le projet vise à dresser un portrait ethnographique de la course Ivakkak, un évènement sportif communautaire, organisé annuellement à Nunavik depuis 2001. Cette course célèbre la tradition de traîneau à chien inuit (« Ivakkak - the return of the Inuit dog », tel est le titre officiel de l’événement), mais consiste également en une fête sociale très populaire chez les locaux. L’objectif principal est de connaître l’état actuel des relations humains-qimmiit (chiens inuits) au Nunavik à travers une observation compréhensive de l’édition 2020 de la course Ivakkak. Plus précisément, le projet porte sur trois volets principaux: premièrement, l’organisation et le déroulement d’Ivakkak, ses significations sociale, culturelle, voire politique, pour les participants et pour les spectateurs; deuxièmement, les techniques de traîneau et de dressage ainsi; finalement, les relations humain-chien dans un contexte de compétition sportive spécifique. Le projet tente de saisir l’importance d’Ivakkak et des qimutsiit, « dog team », dans la modernité inuite, du point de vue des Nunavimmiut. Les résultats de ce projet révèlent que, malgré le fait qu’il soit largement sous-représenté dans les médias du Sud, Ivakkak constitue un univers d’une grande richesse, créé et soutenu par les Inuits et leurs partenaires canins, dans une configuration qu’on ne peut difficilement assimiler aux autres compétitions de traîneau à chiens ailleurs dans le monde.This project in ethnology examines the contemporary Inuit dog sledding practices (Inuktitut: qimutsik) and their place in modern Inuit society in Nunavik, Québec, Canada. In particular, this project attempts to document and analyze the Ivakkak race, an annual Inuit dogsled race in Nunavik, from the Inuit cultural perspective. The project presents an ethnographic portrait of the event, as complete as it could be, given the circumstantial limitations imposed by the 2020 Covid pandemic. The findings presented in this document cover key features of Ivakkak, including its administrative and sportive dimensions, its pan-regional communal aspects, its performative and athletic traits, and most importantly, its multi-species cultural-social integration specific to the contemporary Inuit life in Nunavik. The findings show that, although largely underrepresented in the mainstream media (sport and cultural outlets), Ivakkak encapsulates a unique universe, built and sustained by dog-human partners in ways unrivaled by any modern dogsledding competition in the Northern hemisphere

Time, technology and troublemakers: 'fast activism' and the alter-globalization movement in Canada

"This study documents and critically evaluates the history of the alter-globalization movement in Canada. It makes a contribution to existing scholarship by providing the most comprehensive historical account available of the movement's major mobilizations during the past fifteen years. The study also deploys an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to examine the largely overlooked temporal dimensions of contemporary activism in the age of instant communication. While recent years have seen a proliferation of scholarship lauding the advantages of ""new media activism,"" of which the alter-globalization movement in an example par excellence, most of this literature neglects what are arguably more pressing questions regarding the ways in which contemporary social actors conceptualize and organize time, and the implications of these hegemonic temporal norms for patterns of collective action. To redress this gap, this study evaluates the social, cultural and political implications for activism of the process of time-space compression, driven by the basic dynamics of capitalism and facilitated by digital communication technologies. Using evidence collected from semi-structured interviews, it therefore not only offers the first systematic and in-depth account of the history (and pre-history) of the Canadian alter-globalization movement, it also demonstrates that the social acceleration of time facilitated by new media technologies encourages a tendency toward ""fast activism"" by diminishing three activist time-related practices in particular: building sustained movement infrastructure, learning from the past, that is, collective memory, and thinking reflexively about the future, that is, long-term strategic planning. The study's conclusion offers some tentative suggestions for improving the political capacities and potentials of today's anti-status quo troublemakers.

Figuring the Plural

This report is an examination of ethnocultural, or ethnically/culturally specific, arts organizations in Canada and the United States.As our societies rapidly diversify and we seek to negotiate our increasingly complex national identities, these organizations possess enormous potential to assist in this process for they serve as cultural advocates, cultural interpreters, facilitators of cross-cultural understanding and communication keepers of ethnic tradition, and/or sites where prejudice is exposed and challenged

Coded Territories

This collection of essays provides a historical and contemporary context for Indigenous new media arts practice in Canada. The writers are established artists, scholars, and curators who cover thematic concepts and underlying approaches to new media from a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Through discourse and narrative analysis, the writers discuss a number of topics ranging from how Indigenous worldviews inform unique approaches to new media arts practice to their own work and specific contemporary works. Contributors include: Archer Pechawis, Jackson 2Bears, Jason Edward Lewis, Steven Foster, Candice Hopkins, and Cheryl L'Hirondelle

A Shared Authority? Museums Connect, Public Diplomacy, And Transnational Public History

Museums Connect stands at the intersection of public history and public diplomacy. The program, which has both public history and public diplomacy agendas, is sponsored by the United States Department of State and administered by the American Alliance of Museums. This dissertation examines the competing impulses of transnational public history and public diplomacy made manifest in Museums Connect and its ramifications for public history theory and practice. The project demonstrates both the seeming similarities between public history’s ideas of shared authority, dialogic museum practice, and community engagement and public diplomacy’s “people-to-people” diplomacy, as well as the limits of these similarities. This dissertation also considers the ramifications of these dynamics on museum and public history practice and theory. It is shown that the assumptions of public diplomacy found in Museums Connect inform the program’s structure and operation, while also precluding a truly shared authority between the American museums and their international partners. The appointment of the American museums as “lead” museums and the Department of State’s choice to focus on young people as the target audience for the program foregrounds didactic relationships between the museums and their “communities” for the projects. Through three case studies of Museums Connect projects between the United States and Afghanistan, Morocco, and South Africa, this dissertation challenges the seminal theoretical literature of public history, articulated in Michael Frisch’s A Shared Authority, that interpretive and meaning-making authority in public history is inherently shared. Each case study reveals different factors that either promote or preclude more balanced power dynamics between the museums and their communities within the broader power dynamics established by the grant. Staff reflection-in-action, project activity and partner museum choice, and the non-American public history and museological contexts are all revealed to uniquely influence the dynamics between the museums and their communities. Throughout, the agency of the non-American participants, highlighted through the responses and reactions to the unequal dynamics of the projects, complicates notions of the singular democratic public sphere that underpin the paradigm of the museum as forum

Good Mourning Canada? Canadian Military Commemoration and Its Lost Subjects

Using the Highway of Heroes as my point of departure, in “Good Mourning Canada? Canadian Military Commemoration and its Lost Subjects” I interrogate the role of Canadian military commemoration in the production of hierarchies of grievability and the construction of nationalist narratives. I argue that military commemoration plays a critical role in the performative constitution of the privileged—and the “lost”—subjects of Canadian nationalism. My investigation looks first at how Canadian military memorial projects operate as a means of interpellating Canada’s citizen populations into a particular kind of settler-nationalism, and second, at how performance might serve as a methodology towards the production of counter-memorials that resist the forgetful narratives of Canadian nationalism. My methodological approach weaves historical, theoretical, and performance analyses with first-person reflections on three counter-memorial meditations I performed as a method of embodied inquiry and critical engagement. While the reflective remains of Impact Afghanistan War are scattered throughout this dissertation, and Unravel: A meditation on the warp and weft of militarism and Flag of Tears are discussed explicitly in the final chapters, all three counter-memorial meditations inform—and are informed by—the entire project. Throughout this dissertation I deliberately posit both Canadian military commemoration, and performance, as broadly construed. I investigate repertorial performances of commemoration—like the Highway of Heroes, Remembrance Day ceremonies, and Impact—in addition to the archival performances of institutions and objects—like the Canadian War Museum, military fatigues, and Unravel’s threaded remains. I also intentionally wander outside the constructed borders of Canadian military commemoration to consider how these memorials disappear the violence of settler-colonialism. I bring popular culture performances of nationalist and counter-nationalist narratives—like the Winter Olympics and Jeff Barnaby’s film, Rhymes for Young Ghouls—into conversation with performances overtly linked to the contested terrains of Canadian social memory, like the World War I and II documentary, The Valour and the Horror, and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In bringing this range of performances together under the umbrella of Canadian military commemoration I make visible the larger scenario of Canadian settler nationalism and its sticky “inter(in)animations” with militarism and colonialism.