Three CIRM members receive SSHRC and FRQSC grants!
Erin Hurley (Co-director of the research-action axis “Digital culture, art, literature, and performance”):
Alongside Nicole Nolette (University of Waterloo), Marie-Christine Lesage (UQAM), and Shauna Janssen (Concordia University), Erin Hurley has received a SSHRC grant for a four-day conference initially planned to be held in Montreal from May 25th to 28th, at the Université du Québec à Montréal and Concordia University. The conference has now moved online, as it can no longer be held in person, and will run in a largely asynchronous, virtual format from July 29th to 9 August 9th .
This is city-crossing initiative embodies the intercultural gesture of the event, which will bring together a group of theatre and performance scholars, students, artist-scholars and practitioners working in French and/or in English in Canada and elsewhere. Its objectives are to increase knowledge about compositional practices and creative processes of contemporary Québécois and Canadian theatre; investigate the borders (partitions) that divide and connect different disciplines, arts, and cultures in contemporary Québécois and Canadian theatre and its study; favour exchanges and networking between emerging and established researchers, artists, and artists-scholars; encourage a new or renewed interest in contemporary Québécois and Canadian theatre and in research in Theatre and Performance Studies; invest in the professional training of students and emerging scholars; and support French-English bilingualism and theatre interculturalism.
Marie Leconte (Resident scholar):
Marie Leconte just obtained a FRQSC grant of $45,000 per year, for a duration of two years.
Her project entitled « Le rôle de la Quebec Writers' Federation dans l'institutionnalisation de la littérature anglo-québécoise (1980 à nos jours) » [“The Role of the Quebec Writers’ Federation in the Institutionalization of Anglo-Québécois Literature (1980 to today)”] focuses on the evolution of Anglo-Québécois literature in Montreal and the political and linguistic tensions that have influenced it. The study will use the complete archives of the Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF), an organization created in the mid-1990s following the merger of two other organizations run by English-speaking literary stakeholders in Montreal. For more information, please visit Marie Leconte’s presentation page.
The project is undertaken at McGill University in the Département des littératures de langue française, de traduction et de création, under the supervision of Professor Gilian Lane-Mercier and CIRM.
Natalie Doonan (Postdoctoral member of the research-action axis "Digital culture, art, literature, and performance"):
Alongside Lorna Heaton (Principal Investigator – Department of communication, University of Montreal) and Alexis Diamond (Collaborator – Composite Theatre Co.), Natalie Doonan has received a SSHRC research grant for their research project entitled “Constructing participatory performance: the ecologies and architectures of audience engagement”.
The goal of this project is to explore audience engagement and interaction in immersive theatre and performance events. They suggest that contemporary theatre and performance arts offer a laboratory for engaging audiences with technologies and each other in a quick and iterative way, and posit that the intensification of experience this type of situation offers may generate insights of broader social relevance. This project thus proposes the spectatorial encounter as a valuable site for theorising the intersection of aesthetics, politics, epistemologies, and technologies.
This research will contribute to social science understandings of how emergent, collective action is produced. By exploring the potential of theatre and participatory events for generating public dialogue and engagement around environmental issues, this research will open up alternative paths for configuring and reimagining participation in more reflexive, anticipatory, and responsible ways.
