Join me on the first leg of Mapping MAMM and dive into one of the most fascinating and important research projects of the Humanities today.
Way back in April — which feels like an eternity of a summer ago — I had the honour of presenting a paper at the Brock English Students’ Association (ESA) Undergraduate Conference. I was nervous, to say the least.
Presenting wasn’t a problem and I was no stranger to publication at that point, but this was the first time in my life that I could actually contribute to the academic conversation that so many English professors go on about. After four years of university, I was finally going to put something academic into the world.
The reading went alright if you’re wondering, but that’s not the point of this story. After all the student presenters shared their work, another group of undergraduates launched into the final presentation of the day, the “Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald (MAMM) Research Project: RA presentation” by Dana Alrifai, Renee Colucci and Pilar Dietrich.
I knew the title — everyone had read the itinerary — and I recognized two of the student presenters from my English cohort, but I didn’t know who Ann-Marie MacDonald was, much less that there was a Humanities research project at Brock at all.
But then they started talking and I realized what a fool I’d been not taking any of Dr. Neta Gordon’s classes until my final year. There I was stressing about my first academic publication while undergraduate students described a research experience they’d been engaged with for years.
If you haven’t read the published conference proceedings, aptly titled “The Sett” — meaning “the home of a family of badgers” — I implore you to check it out, if not only to support the dedicated individuals who brought it to life, then to get the same detailed and passionate introduction to MAMM that I did. You can consider that presentation a prologue to this article, or a supplementary reading if you’d prefer.
The basic premise of the Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald (MAMM) Research Project is simple enough, with professors across various disciplines — Primary Investigator (PI) Dr. Neta Gordon from the Department of English, PI Dr. Aaron Mauro from the Department of Digital Humanities, Collaborator Dr. Ebru Ustundag from the Department of Geography and Tourism Studies, and Collaborator Tim Ribaric, Scholarly Publishing and Platforms Librarian — leading a group of undergraduate and graduate Brock students in the study of author and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald’s creative works, with a focus on “[exploring] literary geography via the development of interactive mappings of places, spaces and events.”
All of this information about the project can be found on their website.
But as I quickly learned by listening to Dana, Renee and Pilar, the MAMM project is so much more than just a research experience or a bullet point on a CV: it’s an innovative synthesis of disciplines, an opportunity to find real academic recognition as a student and the beginning of a crucial conversation about ethics, accreditation and community-building in the university at large.
I was inspired to reach out to Dr. Gordon, whose class opened my eyes to the complexities of literary geography months before I knew about MAMM. Neta was interested in the idea of my exploring MAMM as somewhat of an outsider, interviewing the collaborators and investigating the parts of the project I found most interesting: to come at the project not only as a researcher, but as a journalist.
And that’s exactly what I did.
MAMM has humble beginnings, born from a serendipitous alloy of various academic and pedagogical passions. Dr. Neta Gordon tells me how, when she was a graduate student, she wrote her dissertation on “Canadian women writing genealogy,” of which Ann-Marie’s first novel, Fall on Your Knees, was a core component.
Years later, Neta had an idea: “I just want[ed] to do something where I [could] pay students, because students need to be paid, and there’s less and less money for them, and it’s harder and harder for them.”
She was talking with future collaborator Dr. Aaron Mauro about “the kind of research projects they do [in the Department of Digital Humanities], which are much more collaborative, lab-oriented [and] involving students.”
Fortunately, this was around the same time Neta got in contact with Ann-Marie MacDonald.
“I’ve been working on her work for decades, and I returned to her because I’m a full professor, and it was a very full-circle moment,” says Neta. “I had the occasion to meet her: really sit down and talk with her. […] I just thought, I have this opportunity because there’s this person — this incredibly creative, wonderful artist — around who seems willing to talk to students.”
Neta “cooked up” a grant proposal for a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Insight Development Grant in 2023 and asked Ann-Marie if she would be a named collaborator so they might more easily obtain the funds. “In many ways, the conditions created the project rather than any sort of research that I wanted to do,” says Neta.
Over the past three years, MAMM has grown from a simple idea into a pedagogically advanced academic environment where everyone is valued and respected. For the past four months, I’ve had the pleasure of exploring this environment: speaking with students, professors and Ann-Marie MacDonald herself.
During this time, I’ve learned a great deal about feminist ethics of care, the complexities of what we refer to as “Canadian Literature,” the relationships between literary critics and creative writers — at times beautiful and other times tenuous — and much more.
So much more, in fact, that I couldn’t possibly subject you, dear reader, to all of it in one single article. That’s why over the next four weeks, I’ll be delving into specific topics about Canadian Literature and the Humanities at large, with the MAMM Research Project acting as a focal point: the shining star that simultaneously holds each conversation with equal importance in its gravitational field.
This will be the first chapter of five and I promise that you’ll want to stay tuned. Every single person I’ve spoken to oozes passion for this project, for this community where creativity is encouraged and anything feels possible.
Next week, I’ll be exploring the cross-disciplinarity of the MAMM project and the new tools that make it a one-of-a-kind research experiment at and beyond Brock University.
Until then, remember to stay curious. Ask questions when you meet new people; you never know what kind of doors will open for you just by starting up a conversation.
Disclaimer: As an RA employed by MAMM and Brock University, I was paid to write this series; however, my compensation was not accompanied by any assertions of bias or censorship, and the views expressed in these articles, aside from quoted material, are uniquely my own.