See me at the From Marginalization to Visibility conference

From Marginalization to Visibility: 2SLGBTQ+ Archives and Public Memory is a queer and trans history and archives hybrid conference taking place in Halifax, Nova Scotia from 15-17 May 2026, with presentations in both English and French.

The conference brings together 2SLGBTQ+ community members, researchers, nonprofit organizations, heritage professionals, academics, historians, publishers, and emerging scholars who share an interest in documenting, preserving, and celebrating diverse and intersectional 2SLGBTQ+ histories in Canada.

I will be presenting a paper titled “Fragmentary Remains: Archival Ambiguity and Making History” on Saturday, 15 May.

This paper examines the role of ephemera, including photographs, zines, correspondence, marginalia, community newsletters, and other fragmentary records, as critical evidence in the recovery of queer and trans histories. It explores how historians and community researchers attempt to recover past lives, relations, and networks when identities cannot be confirmed or named concretely.

Using analytical categories such as queer sociality and trans possibility, the paper demonstrates how fragmentary materials reveal relational histories, including shared spaces, affective ties, and informal networks, while resisting definitive claims about individual figures.

Finally, the paper attends to the contexts in which queer and trans histories are presented, noting that academic and community engagements make different demands on certainty, naming, and narrative form. Ethical historical practice, I argue, lies in remaining accountable to how recovery work circulates, what it enables, and what risks it carries for the communities whose lives it seeks to make visible.

For the full schedule of events and hybrid registration info, see arquives.ca/fmv2026/.