Contesting Closure

The large industrial footprint of the General Motors Canada manufacturing facility in Oshawa suggests the scale of its importance and influence in the surrounding community.

Re-The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a laundry list of consequences on everyday life; a list far too long to synthesize into one tidy blog post. Instead, I want to shine a light on the impact that the pandemic has had on archival research. For much of the last two years, physical archives have been closed to researchers. For example, the University of Toronto’s archival collections have been shuttered for in-person use, while their online collections and services have remained accessible

Popular understandings of history often rest on the perceived achievements of “great men.” These retellings tend to structure their narratives around particularly prominent individuals or decisive political and cultural moments. Certainly, this approach can help to reveal the basic elements of an important historical episode – names, dates, and places, for example – but it tends to obscure the individual and collective efforts of people in their day-to-day life. Indeed, “Great man” methodology