Undergraduate Work Opportunities
The History Department is pleased to announce undergraduate Research Associate positions for this summer. These positions are part of a major multi-institutional and multi-sector project, that will work for seven years to research and tell the history of the forced sale of the property of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.
Undergraduate Research Associates in the summer of 2014 will have employment from May-August, and will earn as much as $7,500. Please see the detailed description attached for more information.
Landscapes of Injustice
A SSHRC Partnership Project
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ASSOCIATES
Landscapes of Injustice announces Research Associate positions for undergraduate students at the University of Victoria. These positions cover the first summer of the project (May 2014-August 2014). Successful applicants will participate as part of the team, defining the precise research agenda and embarking on the first stage of research. The value of this appointment is a maximum of $7,500 (see below).
Landscapes of Injustice is a 7-year multi-sector and interdisciplinary project to uncover and tell the history of the dispossession of Japanese Canadians to audiences across Canada and beyond. The first years of the project include research in a range of areas necessary to telling this history. Our work will result in a traveling museum exhibit, teaching materials for elementary and secondary school classes, educational websites, scholarly and popular publications, and public presentations across the country. Most Canadians know that people of Japanese ancestry, the large majority of them Canadian citizens, were uprooted from the British Columbia coast during the 1940s. Much less known is the policy, unique to Canada, to forcibly sell all of their property. The dispossession of Japanese Canadians caused lasting harm. It left Japanese Canadians without homes to which they could return after restrictions were finally lifted in 1949. It forced the eradication of Canada’s historic Japanese-Canadian neighbourhoods and settlements, thereby transforming individual lives and identities, and the broader landscapes of Canadian ethnic and urban life. It caused material hardship that stretches across multiple generations.
Like other shameful episodes of our national history, these events may seem to belong to a distant past, to a history left behind by multicultural Canada. In reality, however, the past is not so easily escaped. As Canada enters a century in which it will grow ever more diverse, a deep conversation about the enduring legacy of racism is of pressing importance. Landscapes of Injustice is committed to telling this history. Our team includes 14 institutions and 33 specialists from universities, community organizations, and museums across Canada. The project is funded by a major grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by participating intuitions.
- Land Title Research: this cluster works with records of Land Title to learn what precisely happened to the homes and businesses of Japanese Canadians when they were forcibly sold;
- Community Records: this cluster works with community directories, and other local records to reconstruct the communities disrupted by the uprooting and the liquidation of property.
- GIS: this cluster digitizes maps of Japanese Canadian communities to enable geovisual representation of materials collected in other clusters of research.