Jun Luo's Internship Report

During the 2009 winter term, I had the opportunity to work as an intern in the project Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations (Montreal Life Stories). My internship began on mid-January and came come to an end on 30th April, 2009, and I was working with the Oral History and Performance (OHP) working group under the supervision of Edward Little, professor and chair in Theatre Department of Concordia University. A wide range of activities was undertaken by me during the internship with an average intensity of approximately 15 working hours per week.

1. Duties and Responsibilities

My primary responsibility as an intern in the OHP working group was to coordinate the diverse projects that were undertaken by university-base researchers, community artists and CURA staff. As shown in the organization chart, a communication team called Dit-elle? was created in late January, 2009, and I, along with three other interns, was assigned to the team with duties as follows:

a.) Coordinate the work conducted by different OHP project teams, understand their needs and offer assistance accordingly;
b.) Serve as a liaison between OHP and other working groups in the Montreal Life Stories project;
c.) Prepare and submit OHP working report to the Coordinating Committee in the monthly meeting;
d.) Publish a biweekly newsletter under the name of “Dit-elles?” with a view of keeping OHP members informed of all important activities, events, conferences and meetings related to the oral history and performance projects. The newsletter is also used as a tool to promote a clear image of the OHP working group within the entire Montreal Life Stories project.
e.) Develop contact with community artists, conduct interviews (if applicable), and report news stories about the involvement of the artists in Life Stories project.

The diverse research topics undertaken by the OHP working group were translated in a considerably broad range of activities and tasks and thus assigned multiple responsibilities to each member in the communication team. In retrospect, my activities in Dit-elles? could be split into the following four main categories:

a.) Interview: acting as videographer, I assisted in the OHP interviews with community-based artists such Janet Lumb.
b.) Chronology: chronology making is an important part in the postproduction process of life stories interviews. It serves as a way to facilitate the searching, analysis and research jobs in the future. Under the supervision of postproduction coordinator Sandra Gasana, I made chronology listing of the content of the OHP interviews with community artists such as Janet Lumb, Hourig Attarian‏ and Kamala Patpanathan.
c.) Newsletter: acting as editor and layout designer, I took part in the creation, the preparation and the eventual publication of the OHP newsletters. Besides being in charge of typesetting, software applications and other technical aspects, I wrote news reports about the OHP projects for the newsletter purpose and tried to integrate my own perceptions and reflections in the story writing process.
d.) Miscellaneous activities and events: I, together with my fellow workers in Dit-elle?, assisted in the Untold Histories Public Presentation, a community engaged cultural event presented by Teesri Duniya Theatre in association with Montreal Life Stories. I also videotaped and participated in the workshops on playback theatre and other events that were organized within the OHP cluster.

2. Internship as a Learning Process

The three-month internship with Montreal Life Stories exposed me to experiences which can tie back to the theories and knowledge that I learned in my undergraduate studies in Community and Public Affairs. The oral history methodology used in the project was, in fact, in consistence with the diverse local intervention initiatives that were discussed throughout the SCPA undergraduate program since they are both community-based and community-oriented. The project also offered me a chance to directly observe the impacts that mass violence and injustice can have on ordinary people and their implications on the young generations. The resistance efforts made by both the victims and the survivors in war, genocide and human rights abuse also made me realize the great potential of ordinary people to act as agents of social change, which was as well a key theme that resounded in nearly all the class lecturing and discussions that I have took part in at SCPA. Equally mentionable is the fact that I finally had the opportunity to combine what I have learned with what I need to do. Or to be more precise, my work in the communication team Dit-elle? was backed by the strategies and skills that I have learned in the core courses such as SCPA321, SCPA398 and so on.

The practice of internship in Montreal Life Stories enabled me to learn new knowledge and master new skills, too. When I was first introduced to the OHP working group, I had no clue what linkage art could have with oral history. The terms such as “Playback Theatre” and “Artists in Residency” also sounded esoteric to me. It was the intensive training workshops, the interviews, the hands-on chronology experience and all other practices that helped me know more, understand better and finally made me become part of the Montreal Life Stories project. All these experiences are invaluable to an intern like me, and I am sure that they can be an asset to me in my studies and profession career in the future.

3. Post-Internship Plan

Having completed the 120 hours prescribed by the contract between interns and the project, I am now at the point of exiting my internship and preparing for my graduation from School of Community and Public Affairs in June. That being said, my involvement in Montreal Life Stories won’t come to an end, however. I am planning to stay with the project as volunteer and continue my work in Dit-elle? communication team, which would surely bring me more exciting experiences and further my understanding about community, art, history and social change.

4. Reflections

Everyone has a life story to tell, but not everyone is ready to share the story, especially when it is all about painful memories. To collect life stories from people who were forced out of their homelands by war, genocide and human rights abuse is a rather challenging task. Yet, Montreal Life Stories is making it happen in the metropolitan with a high concentration of immigrants and refugees.

Through my internship with the project, I have met lots of people, learned a great deal of knowledge and skills and gained a stronger understanding of the cooperation between academic institutions and ethnocultural communities in terms of art, history, social justice and etc. It is unarguable that researchers in Montreal Life Stories are in an important process of creating, maintaining and renewing a collective memory for ordinary people who experienced mass violence and displacement. What we need to do is neither averting our eyes and pretending that nothing has happened nor trapping ourselves in memories about trauma and pain. How to avoid the bad part of history repeating itself, how to eliminate the root causes of war, genocide and human rights abuse and how to create a new and just world order should be the major concern behind all the collective memory building and updating initiatives. Towards this end, more rigorous efforts from researchers, activists, governments and their citizens should be necessary.