scott does scotland: travel adventures

  I’ve now been in Edinburgh itself for a few days, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time walking (thanks to the step counter on my phone, I know exactly how much I’ve walked!) and trying to figure out the city. My residence is nice enough; it’s apparently an old boarding school, so kind of cold inside with lots of echoey hallways, but definitely has more character than I was expecting. It reminds me of the residence I lived in during my second year: shared kitchen/bathrooms within a separated flat of…read more

Thanks to my wonderful family, I’ve survived my first full day in Scotland! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t homesick or that I felt fully acclimatized to my new environment, but it’s been nice to stay with family and get over the jet lag in a familiar house. I arrived yesterday after a long (long!) day of travel; an eight and a half hour flight to Heathrow followed by a four hour layover, then an hour and a half to Edinburgh, getting lost in the airport and trying to…read more

This summer has really gone by in a flash, wow. Although I don’t really consider myself a ‘blogger’ (although what makes one a ‘blogger’ anyway?), I’ve decided that the only way to make the most of my amazing opportunity is to blog it. For those who are not filled in on my amazing opportunity: I am doing a semester abroad (September to December) at the University of Edinburgh through the Go Global program. I’ll be taking classes, but not working – so tons of free time to explore! The basics…read more

Repost from a comment on our class blog: I think I finally, kind of, maybe, understand what Derrida was getting at – the desire to know more, to continue to read and learn and explore the lives of people who may be just as ordinary as I am. Takeaways from this class: retain original order, sometimes the ordinary can be extraordinary, Tinder can pop up when you least expect it to, and there is something special – and difficult to put into words – about exploring someone else’s diaries and…read more

It’s kind of shocking that this is our last official blog of the semester! It seems appropriate that we’re discussing archives so modern they hardly seem like archives under the classical definition. Joanne Garde-Hansen’s chapter “MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook” addressed Facebook’s ‘archive-ness’ using Derrida as a middleman of sorts; her ideas can also be applied to other forms of social media. I’ll focus mainly on Facebook, which has become something of a staple to our generation, as well as two newer forms: Snapchat and PostSecret. Garde-Hansen says…read more

First and foremost, as a born-and-bred Canadian, I grew up learning about the exploitation, forced assimilation, and essential whitewashing of First Nations people in school, so our continued focus on photographs often featuring residential schools is relevant and interesting, but incredibly sobering. I will try my best to be sensitive to these issues and the traumatic memories that are still near to the hearts of many individuals. (Secondly, I am very sleep-deprived, so I apologize in advance if any of this does not read smoothly or if any sentences don’t…read more

This week I delved into Box 19 of the Vancouver Status of Women collection – this is a hefty box of newspaper clippings from the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were a few things inside that seemed particularly interesting/relevant to me; these newspaper articles relate to Shaunna Moore & Susan Pell’s “Autonomous archives” as well as the introductions by Lisa Darms and Kate Eichhorn on their “Radical Archives” movement. In general, I think Darms sums up the intrigue of archives focusing specifically on women. She says that “the covert function of an…read more

I would use this blog space to write about Derrida, but I’m still not sure I understand what he was talking about. I am the first to admit that philosophical readings scare me (still! Even after Arts One!), so lucky for me the reading this week was much more accessible. I won’t give anything else away for fear of ruining the amazing presentation Nicole and I will give on Tuesday … stay tuned 🙂 Back to last week, when I was in the archives looking through Box 54 of the Toni…read more

Last week I journeyed into the archives independently for the first time. I’ll admit, I was a little lost, unsure of what to do, and distraught without my backpack full of notebooks and pens. Having said that, I had a look into the Joy Kogawa fonds this week (box 18, to be exact). There were a couple of things that I found interesting; I touched on them in class yesterday but wanted to throw some quotes out there. The letter from Lily Munro (the Minister for Multiculturalism and Citizenship) invited Kogawa “and…read more

It’s nice to be able to use this blog for a third course in just three years – I actually really enjoy blogging, even though I fear that the only one reading my blog is my mom (hi, Mom!). Ah well. This is my introductory post for the course, so I am going to address a couple of questions asked of us by our professor. Firstly, she asks us to introduce ourselves; this is something I usually have an unnecessarily hard time with, mostly because I don’t know what things about…read more