Biography

Marissa Foley is a second year MA student studying public history and digital humanities at Carleton University. Her research explores digital storytelling’s potential and limitations as a tool for public history. Through her oral history project Reclaiming Jamesville, Marissa is collecting place memories of Hamilton, Ontario’s Jamesville community and curating them into a series of short audio walks guiding listeners along James Street North, through the heart of the Jamesville neighborhood. Reclaiming Jamesville is produced against the backdrop of a city undergoing the entwined processes of deindustrialization and gentrification, and as such it is a project that resonates with places and communities undergoing their own structural transformations. In telling a story of place that makes the neighbourhood’s industrial past more visible, audible, and knowable, her work offers a counter-commemoration to that which currently exists in Jamesville.