Research

Part of my ongoing research is an article titled “Access versus Assimilation in the Multilingual Collections of Canadian Public Libraries.” This article dissects the history of multilingual collections in Canada’s public libraries, particularly those that hold non-official language/allophone (not French or English) language collections (e.g. German, Italian, Ukrainian).

The central claim of the article is that, while multilingualism fits well with the Canadian self-proclaimed goal of pluralistic multiculturalism, their origins lie in early twentieth-century attempts to promote assimilation and “Canadianization.” While developing multilingual collections is extremely laudable, librarians need to be careful that their collection development strategies do not unintentionally further the culturally-chauvinistic designs of their institutional predecessors.

I believe this issue represents the duality of accessibility, where policies which may seem intuitively beneficial to marginalized patrons (i.e. linguage diversity) may also reflect the interests of powerful institutions, and which may actually be to their detriment if not enacted critically.

During my program at the University of Ottawa, I undertook research which studied the appraisal and acquisition process of historical materials at Canada’s national museums. This research, performed from 2023-2024, involved holding semi-structured interviews of archivists at these museums’ archives (War, History, and the Ingenium museums), and analyzing both how their roles and respective levels of autonomy differed both compared to each other and over time.

A significant part of this research project was researching the historical context of memory institutions in Canada, particularly archives and manuscript collections in libraries. This primarily involved a literature review which detailed the development of the Canadian macro-appraisal method, a functionalist system to appraise whether something is archival by reducing the archivist’s discretion. This project involved interfacing and coordinating with professionals in uniquely prominent institutions, and gave me new insights into how they function behind-the-scenes, and what challenges they manage.

Diverging from the other two areas of research, the published portion of my research consists of an article titled “Cleansing Fire: The Impact of Disease Response on the Colonial Relationship during the Hong Kong Plague of 1894”, published in the University of Toronto’s peer-reviewed journal The Future of History. Written during the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, this article focuses on the way that prejudices about Chinese things and people as “alien” to the body of the colony promoted a plague-response effort which undermined the well-being of the Chinese Hongkonger population, and threatened the existing rapport with colonial administrators.

While this article is essentially Victorian history research, its lessons remain relevant. As the COVID-19 Pandemic showed, times of difficulty and social unrest can bring forward long-standing prejudices, and divide communities – with extreme consequences. An understanding of how implicit and explicit biases persist over time is important for evaluating diversity in collections, as well as creating policies and programmes which build trust with marginalized communities.