Reconsidering the Canadian “Hinterland”: Visual Culture, the \nEnglish-Wabigoon River, and the Mercury Collection of Marion Lamm \n1945–1980
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
The three-model screen
all 1,000 screened works →All three models called this out of scope.
Thesis on visual culture and archives surrounding mercury poisoning of the English-Wabigoon River; cultural and environmental history, with an archival dimension that does not make research practice its object.
The thesis studies visual culture and environmental history surrounding a Canadian disaster.
Visual-culture thesis on a Canadian environmental disaster; arts/history of place, not research systems.
Abstract
This thesis examines select visual culture produced and gathered in response to one of Canada’s worst environmental disasters: the mercury poisoning of the English-Wabigoon River in Northwestern Ontario. This catastrophic event is the contextual and historical point of entry to explore two related visual records first, the dominant settler-colonial place image produced by industry and government stakeholders; second, a more complex image world discernable in a locally gathered archive created by citizen archivist Marion Lamm (1918–1997). These representations and narratives are examined at the intersection of Anishinaabe and settler-colonial histories and contexts that formed around the mercury case. I employ discourse analysis located in late capitalist visual culture and archival histories to examine ephemera, periodicals, photographic publications, and a film within broader cultural and environmental histories surrounding the English-Wabigoon River. The primary questions guiding this thesis are: Who and what defines a Canadian hinterland? From what positions are its stories told? Here I trace how the dominant, settler-colonial place image of industrial success and a tourist paradise is complicated and challenged by a record of locally gathered materials. Through transtemporal readings of a catastrophic event, I identify gaps between the local and translocal tellings. In doing so, I hypothesize that the visual record produced and disseminated by government and industry stakeholders presents a settler-colonial “hinterland” visuality that was incoherent with local realities.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
The record
- Venue
- Spectrum Research Repository (Concordia University)
- Topic
- Slime Mold and Myxomycetes Research
- Field
- Engineering
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- TourismNarrativeVisual cultureGovernment (linguistics)ArchivistHistorical recordMercury (programming language)NegativePoint (geometry)Environmental history
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes