From Migrant Heritage to Community Practice: The Greek Canadian
Archives and the Emerging Global “Classroom.”
By: Sakis Gekas, Associate Professor and the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair in
Modern Greek History at York University.
Toronto is one of the world’s most diverse cities. It is in this city that a small team
of Greek and Greek Canadian researchers have taken on the task of making the
history of Greeks in Canada as mainstream as possible. Making history mainstream
does not mean sanitizing or beautifying it but practicing history with a critical view
of the past that is attuned to the questions and the challenges of the present. The
group of researchers in Toronto clusters around the activities of the Hellenic
Heritage Foundation (HHF) Chair in Modern Greek History at York University, a
vantage point that I will take up in this essay to reflect on the significance of Greek
Canadian texts, historical events, and cultural situations for expanding the
understanding of Greek and Canadian history through the generation of public
resources.
In this context one can identify three main approaches to strengthen the
transnational and comparative curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate
level, while at the same time engaging through different ways with broader
audiences that appreciate the educational aspect of the knowledge that is being
produced. The classroom, the digital, and the experiential modes are therefore the
three approaches that are self-reinforcing and complementary. As our classrooms
and audiences change and as we must navigate between the physical and the digital
worlds, it is the right time to think about what we offer to whom and to what end as
researchers––in our case––of Greeks in Canada.
Since 2021 the project to expand the physical archive...
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