MIDAS Maritime Inter-Disciplinary Arts Seminar research presentation-FR and SJ

Event Details:

The second of this year's MIDAS (Maritime InterDisciplinary Arts Seminar) series will feature Dr. Eric Weissman showing a film drawing attention to the issue of Homelessness in Canada (with discussion to follow). The seminar will be video-linked between UNBF (Marshall d'Avray 126a) and UNBSJ (Hans W. Klohn Commons, 107). 

Ethical Traces: A lesson in Reflexive Time, A short film study of Housing and Identity by Eric Weissman, Ph.D.
 
All interested faculty and students are welcome to attend.
 
ABSTRACT
 
Ethical Traces – A Lesson in Reflexive Time (2018 [2005]).
Eric Weissman Ph.D. 
UNBSJ Social Science
Run Time Approx. 37 minutes
Media: SD/HD Video

Ethical Traces is an experimental short film that examines the impact of stable housing and social supports on the profound identity shifts experienced by people with extensive prior experiences of addictions, mental health issues and literal homelessness.  This film is constructed from excerpts of the original film, Subtext-real stories (2005), which explored life in Toronto’s infamous “Tent City,” a large and crudely built homeless community between 2000-2002. The film then followed some key ex-residents as they navigated difficult transitions into conventional regular market housing.  Ten years later,  in Ethical Traces, Brian Dodge, one of the collaborators on the original project looks back at the various videographed iterations of himself over those years of moving through housing spaces, and discusses the intense sense of irreconcilable disconnection he experiences looking back at himself as a troubled, unhoused person. The filmmaker, a recovered addict and sociologist, wanted to reconcile how collaborators in the original work had changed the stories they told about their earlier situations and life histories, generally abandoning earlier narratives for those more consistent with emerging self-governing and conventional narratives.  The film also offers insight to the relationship between visual cues and memory, and the questionable nature of stable objective realities when doing long term field work in vulnerable populations.

Building: Hans W. Klohn Commons UNBSJ; Marshall d'Avray Hall UNBF

Room Number: Hans W. Klohn Commons 107 UNBSJ; Marshall d'Avray Hall 126A UNBF