Shannon Lecture Series Fall 2024/Winter 2025
Session 1: October 21, 7pm - Virtual

Title: Ingenium’s Black and African Canadian Scientific and Technological Innovations Fellowship

Ingenium oversees three national museums which include the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, and the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Ingenium is responsible for Canada’s national scientific and technological collection which includes over two million archival items and more than 150,000 artifacts. The Black and African Canadian Scientific and Technological Innovations Fellowship is an opportunity for current graduate students from Canadian universities to research the historical and/or contemporary connections between Black and African Canadians and science and innovation. The inaugural fellows are Mila Mendez (they/them), a doctoral student at York University and Samia Dumais (she/her) a doctoral student at Concordia University.

Mila Mendez will speak on their experience and research as a fellow in the Black and African Canadian Scientific and Technological Innovations fellowship at Ingenium Centre, exploring Black agriculture in 19th century Southwestern Ontario. Through the application of such Black Studies and Black feminist offerings as “critical fabulation,” “wake work” and “freedom dreams,” this research suggests four curatorial reflections for engaging with artifacts and archives in the Ingenium Centre collections in order to tell stories of early independent Black farming. These include: on land clearance and printing, on innovative labour vs. innovative tools, on care in presentation, and on uplifting freedom dreams over failed initiatives.

Samia Dumais’s talk engages with the CN Images of Canada Collection, archived at Ingenium, which is one of the most comprehensive collections of photos of Black railway workers. Black porters can be seen completing various tasks related to their work, like assisting customers, taking care of passenger’s children, polishing shoes, and preparing the beds. However, these staged pictures are not representative of the work conditions or societal experiences of Black porters in the early 20th century. Through an assessment of the Canadian National Railways Magazine and Spanner, the two periodicals respectively published by the Canadian National Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway, this presentation seeks to note the dichotomies between the pictorial representations of Black railway workers and more largely, Black communities within the periodicals. This presentation will demonstrate that it is possible to create a counter-narrative highlighting the multiple realizations of Black workers and communities on the railway with the use of oral histories, documentaries, and autobiographies.

Biography:

Mila Mendez (they/them) is a parent, cultural worker and educator committed to transformative relationships, spaces and ideas. They find joy and grounding in the capaciousness of Black feminisms to show us what care can do. As a doctoral candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University, Mila’s current research is curious about Black queer and trans feminist cultural production in relation to and beyond the forces of colonialism, racial capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy. Mila has been working to cultivate a careful and caring practice of the labour that is envisioning and administrating at the intersection of art, politics, and education. They currently do this work in Tkaronto.

Samia Dumais is a doctoral student in history at Concordia University. Her research focuses on African-Canadian history in the second half of the twentieth century, and on the contemporary experiences of Afro-descendant and immigrant communities within Quebec and Canadian educational structures. A member of the editorial board of HistoireEngagée.ca magazine, Samia Dumais has worked on a variety of research projects in Ontario and Quebec. She is currently the archivist for the community organization Harambec.