Workshop 2

Collage Making: Re-envisioning Civic discourse in Urban Space with Camilla Gibb, Reena Tandon and Ken Moffatt

Morning Workshop | 10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Collage is an art form that allows for creative expression and meaning making that is born of a person’s experience. Collage does not require a prior artistic practice of the participants. In this workshop we equip participants with tools and strategies for analogue or handmade collage making.

Participants  engage through making collage in an approach to thinking about experience, place, subjectivity, identity and social change. Through this process we are picking up the unfinished work of history and speaking to contemporary civic discourse around the personal, the social, economic, and environmental issues. Workshop leaders  provide a brief overview of the histories of collage, past collage projects at TMU as well as support the creative process of collage making.

The workshop involves participants in all aspects of the collage-making process, including sourcing found material in the urban environment surrounding the university. When we returned to the campus space we arranged and assembled the materials, engaged in sense-making, and reflection together. With permission from the participant, each person’s collage was displayed for the symposium as a whole. 

After the symposium, the collage was displayed in the community at Bar Bacan.

Camilla Gibb is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels: Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life, Sweetness in the Belly, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, and most recently, The Relatives, as well as a memoir, This Is Happy.

Camilla has been the recipient of the Trillium Book Award (external link) , the City of Toronto Book Award (external link)  and the CBC Canadian Literary Award (external link)  and has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (external link)  and the RBC Taylor Prize (external link) .

Her articles, essays and short stories have been published widely, and she recently wrote and produced two radio documentaries for CBC Radio: “Evidence of a Father” (external link)  and “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

Reena Tandon currently leads the Community Engaged Learning and Teaching (CELT) program (opens in new window)  in the Faculty of Arts, at TMU. In this role, she designs, co-creates and facilitates academically embedded community engaged initiatives and courses across disciplines. She draws on her extensive experience in research, teaching and consulting around the globe. She has presented and published on innovative pedagogical approaches as well as her research on migrant women, precarious labour, resistance and organizing. She is a co-author of Immigration and Women (NYU Press) (external link, opens in new window)  and maintains deep connections to immigrant women and community groups including chairing the Executive Board of the South Asian Women’s Centre in Toronto and been a board member of the Sherbourne Health Centre (external link, opens in new window) . This project builds on her on-going collaborations with educators, students and practitioners across Canada to center the significance of engaged learning, teaching and research, and transformative pedagogical approaches for democratic and civic engagement within higher education.

Professor Ken Moffatt is the editor of Troubled Masculinities; Reimaging Urban Men published (external link, opens in new window)  by University of Toronto Press in 2012. Troubled Masculinities explores the gender construction of marginalized men through text and art.

He is also the author of University of Toronto Press imprint, A Poetics of Social Work  (external link, opens in new window) that explores the roots of social work epistemology during the development of the profession in 1920s-1930s with particular emphasis on the limiting influence of technological and scientific thought.

Moffatt is the principal investigator for the current SSHRC-funded project, Unsettling the Classroom: Social Work Education in the Context of New Managerialism.