Program:

Thursday, May 11, 2023
Scott Library Collaboratory at York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON.

4:30-6pm Donor Appreciation Event

Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas, Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair of Modern Greek History, York University
Vasilis (Bill) Molos, Director and Research Lead, HHF Greek Canadian Archives at York University
Michael Moir, University Archivist and Head, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, York University
Theo Xenophontos, PhD Candidate, Cinema & Media Studies, York University
Angelo Laskaris, PhD Candidate, History, York University

6-6:30pm Conference Welcome

JJ McMurtry, Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University
Panayotis Antonatos, Consul General of Greece in Toronto
Sandra Gionas, Hellenic Heritage Foundation
Betty Skoutakis, President of the Greek Community of Toronto

6:30-8pm Keynote Panel: Toward a Global Greek Migration History

The History and Future of a Subfield: Greek Canadian Studies in 2023
Chris Grafos and Vasilis (Bill) Molos, York University

Toward a Global History of Greek Diasporizations: Reflections and Pathways from Australia
Andonis Piperoglou, University of Melbourne

Diasporas as Action: Intersecting Projects in Global Greek Diaspora Studies
Yiorgos Anagnostou, The Ohio State University

Friday, May 12, 2023
280 York Lanes at York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON.

9-10:30am Heritage Learning, Preservation, and Exploration: Language, Memory, and the Arts

Greek Language in Canada: Online Resources for Community Teachers and Learners
Themistoklis Aravossitas, York University and the University of Toronto

Forgotten History, Collective Memory and Toronto’s 1918 Anti-Greek Riots
Elizabeth Compa, Independent Researcher, Toronto

Chasing Greekness: Living and Writing in the Threshold
Tina Poulimenou-Tzatzanis, Toronto District School Board

Post-Socratic Dialogues: Rethinking Conversational Hierarchies as Greek Canadians in the Arts and Academia
Marianne Apostolides, Author, Toronto

10:30-11am COFFEE BREAK

11am-12:30pm Whose Community History?

Film as Mediator: Excavating the Audiovisual Artifacts of the Cypriot Canadian Diaspora
Theo Xenophontos, York University

Kingston Greek History Project: A Community Project Dedicated to Collecting and Preserving the “Stories” of Kingston’s Greek Community
Paula Antonakos-Boswell and George Katinas, Independent Researchers, Kingston

Childhood Narratives of Greek Canadians from the 1940s: Trauma and Resilience
Angelo Laskaris, York University

Tracing Minor Incidents: Fascist Graffiti and the Archival Politics of Diasporic Heritage
Georgia Koumantaros, York University

12:30-2pm LUNCH

2-3:30pm Transnational Turns, Transnational Methodologies

Writing the History of Greeks in Canada: Archives, Themes, and Approaches
Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas, York University

Beyond Push-Pull Factors: Reexamining Post-War Greek Migration to Canada Through Oral History Archives
Alexander Balasis, York University

Unaccompanied Child Migrants in Greece: Finding Unheard Voices on Social Media
Othon Alexandrakis, York University

3 Kilometers away from the Skouries Forest: Gold Mining, Borders and Political Possibility in Halkidiki, in Northern Greece
Effrosyni Rantou, York University

5:30-6:30pm HHF Historical Walk of the 1918 Anti-Greek Riots
The HHF history committee will guide us on a "Greektown on the Danforth" walking tour, which will explore Greektown "from its foundations in faith and family to the evolution of today’s businesses and restaurants."
* Meet at Pape Subway Station, 743 Pape Avenue, Toronto, at 5:25 pm.

Abstracts

The History and Future of a Subfield: Greek Canadian Studies in 2023
Chris Grafos and Vasilis (Bill) Molos, York University

On May 3-4, 2018, the HHF Chair in Modern Greek History and the Greek Canadian History Project hosted the inaugural Greek Canadian Studies Conference. Academics, authors, and artists participated, sharing diverse perspectives on Greek Canada. The conference announced the arrival of a burgeoning, interdisciplinary field of study. This presentation aims to describe the historiographical developments that brought us to that moment, outline the state of Greek Canadian studies today, and propose future directions for the subfield.

The presentation will offer an overview of Greek Canadian historiography into the early part of the 21st century before delving into the methodological underpinnings of Chris Grafos’ work. It will review the groundbreaking dissertations completed between 2015 and 2016, and discuss the new questions they provoked, and the new projects they inspired. The presentation will conclude by proposing (i) a new vocabulary for reconceptualizing the Greek Canadian diaspora, and (ii) how Greek Canadian studies can contribute to Global Greek Diaspora (and Migration) Studies.

Toward a Global History of Greek Diasporizations: Reflections and Pathways from Australia
Andonis Piperoglou, University of Melbourne

Studies of Greek migration to Australia have often been from within a settler national frame of analysis. That is, the story of Greek migration to Australia has been framed as central to nation building developments that showcase the Greek migrant experience as a story of “struggle and success” - a story that situates Greek migrants who arrived in an Anglo-British world that was largely hostile to their presence, as a populace that arduously laboured to climb the step ladder of social mobility to become successfully assimilated Australians. In this sense, the historical experience of Greek assimilation has contributed to rosy historical narratives that celebrate the making multicultural Australia. 

My contribution to this keynote panel contests this national framing of Greek migration to Australia – a framing, it should be noted, that has obvious overlaps with Greek Canadian historical inquiry. Via an examination of what I am increasingly thinking of as a “Mediterranean Pacific” phenomenon, I am interested in realigning stories of Greek diasporization so that they engage with past and lingering legacies of colonialism. Through a comparative case study of South Pacific indentured labour and Greek voluntary labour on Queensland’s cane fields, I draw upon a scattered photographic archive to both broaden the history of Greeks in the Anglosphere and diversify histories of colonialism. In doing so, I am keen to disentangle the prevailing dichotomy between settler/coloniser and colonised. I am concerned with unravelling how an assortment of groups from the Mediterranean region positioned themselves as loyal to settler colonial ideas, while also exploring the cultural specificities at play in how Greek migrants have laid claim to Indigenous lands that they have come to call home.

What if we were to reframe the historical experience of Greek migrants’ struggle and success? What if the corresponding stories of Greek migrations to Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States of America were understood as interconnected stories of diasporization and colonialism? What if Greek mobilities (in there varies forms – peoples, texts, ideas, visual culture, architecture, and attitudes) were seen as part of wider trans-imperial, transnational or transoceanic processes of movement and exchange? What would a global history of Greek migration in the modern era look like if it engaged with Indigenous scholarly critiques of settler colonial culture?

Such questions foreground my exploration into the global dynamics of Greek diasporisation. They are questions which prod me to move away from exhausted stories of Greek migration and assimilation. By engaging with these questions, I hope to open fresh analytical pathways that consider how modern Greek mobilities entered onto deeply stories landscapes that have their own transhistorical and pre-colonial senses of origins and belonging.


Diasporas as Action: Intersecting Projects in Global Greek Diaspora Studies
Yiorgos Anagnostou, The Ohio State University

In this presentation I reflect on the twofold project of (a) reflecting on the internal diversity of a diaspora and (b) exploring ways to write about the various Greek diasporas in relation to each other. I do so by directing attention to the internal diversity of a diaspora as a matter of cultural politics and conceptualizing a diaspora as a field of action toward making something new.

My point of departure is Greek America and its internal diversity (class, regional, gender, urban-rural, ideological) to show that the question of this diversity is also associated with a cultural politics of difference. This politics appears to be intrinsic in any modern diaspora. As a position of double affiliation, a diaspora asserts difference in relation to its home nation-state (Greek Canadians in Canada for example), a position which may potentially register as a threat to national cohesion, generating discourses regulating the range of difference.

The question of diaspora then connects with the notion of governmentality, which, in turn, links with the cultural politics of difference: what range of differences is privileged, and which is silenced is a political question at any given historical moment, calling for examination.

The central theoretical point is to move analysis beyond the identarian approach to diaspora––diaspora, that is, as an entity defined by ethnic qualities (entrepreneurial, courageous, successful, organic extension of the historical homeland)––and instead, view a diaspora as a constellation of political and cultural actions (a constellation of projects) toward making something new. In this formulation, diaspora does not refer to a shared identity within a group but involves group actions, each action deriving from a commonness of purpose. In other words, the move is from diaspora as sameness to diaspora as context-specific agency for cultural becoming.

Conceptualized in this manner, a diaspora is about future-oriented projects. It involves, for example, (a) synergies between secular heritage organizations and Modern Greek programs to historicize and understand diasporic experiences; (b) educational initiatives for the next generation incorporating critical reflection on pedagogies and heritage politics; (c) mobilizations to foster Greek civic alliances/solidarities with historically disenfranchised groups; and (d) empowerment of historically marginalized groups and movements within a diaspora (the working class; feminisms; LGBTQ subjectivities; maverick intellectuals) among others. This very conference represents such diasporic action.

I propose that the notion of a diaspora as a constellation of actions within politicized difference offers a productive framework, among others––which I will outline––for cross-fertilizations among researchers working on particular diasporas (Greek Canadian, Greek Australian, Greek American, etc.) in what we could begin to imagine as a global Greek diaspora studies network.


Greek Language in Canada: Online Resources for Community Teachers and Learners
Themistoklis Aravossitas, York University and the University of Toronto

Many Canadians are speakers of Community (Heritage) Languages which are significant both to the respective cultural communities and to preserving the nation’s multicultural mosaic. Τhe non-official status of these languages in Canada, along with the complexity of teaching them to a quite diverse group of learners, constitutes an educational challenge. In the context of the Greek language, which serves a community of over 250,000 speakers (Census Canada 2021),  there is a plethora of programs available to learners. However, many of these programs operate in continuing/complementary  education settings and involve volunteer or part-time educators and administrators. 

These individuals need in-service support such as learning materials, teaching aides and instructional guidelines. Access to Greek language programs and to learning resources is also essential to community members -parents and students of various age groups- who wish to begin or enhance their Greek language learning. Furthermore, the quality and viability of community language programs depends largely on interconnections between different institutions, schools, administrators, educators, and learners who need a network to collaborate and share resources. 

To address the above-mentioned challenges, the Hellenic Heritage Foundation (HHF), a Toronto-based community organization which aims at supporting the Greek language and culture in Canada, has initiated a series of projects, such as funding of Modern Greek Studies Programs in Canadian Universities, developing professional development courses for Greek teachers, suppling textbooks to community schools, etc. This article discusses the development of Greeklanguage.ca (GLC), an educational portal  that includes (a) a comprehensive list of Greek language programs and community organizations across Canada, (b) educational resources for Greek teachers and learners, and (c) updates on community events and news. The GLC portal project, which is developed as part of a community-based research study on the vitality and intergenerational transmission of Greek language in Canada, paves the way for a new approach to community education in Canada, and is theoretically based on the Networked Learning Theory and the Access-Innovation-Motivation Framework for Heritage Language teaching and learning.

The portal users, who could be students enrolled in Greek language programs, independent learners, parents or teachers, can search through an interactive map which filters Greek language schools and organizations across Canada, according to various criteria such as location and type of available programs, days and hours of operation, etc. Hundreds of educational recourses, that meet the teaching and learning parameters of Greek heritage language education, are also presented and categorized; they include textbooks, audiovisual materials, lesson plans and assessment tools on various Greek language and culture units.


Forgotten History, Collective Memory and Toronto’s 1918 Anti-Greek Riots
Elizabeth Compa, Independent Researcher, Toronto

This article examines collective memory around the anti-Greek riots of August 1918. An extraordinary instance within the city’s history of targeted violence against an ethnic group, the riots went largely undiscussed and even forgotten, including by Greek Torontonians, for the better part of a century. But beginning in the mid-2000s and through their centennial anniversary, scholars and others have brought this piece of city history back into the light. The article recounts the riots and their aftermath, including the experience of World War I in the city; describes collective memory and how it is forged; highlights the efforts in the last twenty years to develop greater awareness and understanding of the riots; and discusses what this historical episode illustrates about Toronto’s identity and its relationship with collective memory. It includes reflections from members of Toronto’s Greek community on why the riots were forgotten for so long and what it means to collectively recover this memory. The article will be published with Heritage Toronto.


Chasing Greekness: Living and Writing in the Threshold
Tina Poulimenou-Tzatzanis, Toronto District School Board

This presentation will demonstrate how, as a writer of historical fiction, both research and personal experience are integral to creating a world that is rich in details of place as well as relatable characters and an engaging plot. Key texts that helped shape this world of 50s and 60s Greece, include Kostis Kornetis’ Children of the Dictatorship, Mikis Theodorakis’ autobiography, Journal of Resistance, and Kitti Arseni’s autobiography, Bouboulina 18, to name a few. Chris Grafos’ dissertation, “Canada’s Greek Moment: Transnational Politics, Activists and Spies during the long 60s” and photographs from the Greek Canadian Archives were vital in building the anti-junta settings of Toronto 1967 and even inspired some of the characters. As important as research is to writing historical fiction, however,  the personal experience of the writer, as a diasporic Greek of mixed heritage, plays an equally important role in how scenes are created, how characters think, feel, and move through their world. This presentation will show that the writer’s lifelong pursuit of Greekness drives the need to create and that the ‘threshold’ between the writer’s dual identity is the vantage point from which writing happens.


Post-Socratic Dialogues: Rethinking Conversational Hierarchies as Greek Canadians in the Arts and Academia
Marianne Apostolides, Author, Toronto

Socrates always knows more than his interlocutor: He controls the topic of inquiry, the method of thinking, and the value of his interlocutor’s response. If we consider Socrates to be a symbol of the intellectual tradition that set the standards for ethics and aesthetics in the West—a tradition that presumed itself to be superior to all others—we can well imagine that Socrates would now be left at the door to the drinking party, no longer invited or missed. I’d argue that my metaphoric scenario can only be altered if we rethink how dialogue is done, and realize what we, as Greek Canadians, can contribute.

This presentation will explore the necessity of reimagining what it means to be in dialogue. The presentation’s form and content are both derived from my experience as a Greek-Canadian author—someone who has observed the literary landscape change dramatically in the past 25 years, since the publication of my first book. Initially, I sensed that change as a professional displacement from the literary ‘gold standard,’ as if European ideas were toppled from their lofty podium; now, I sense it as a return to the soil—to heritage and blood. From this place, a new dialogue can occur, one that speaks across traditions, assumptions, and systems of knowledge to create new forms of meaning.

My analysis of literary culture will be interspersed with excerpts from my latest book. This combination of critical thought and creative work will illustrate the potential for modes of discourse that are expansive beyond the Greek-Canadian academic tradition. As listeners will learn, my writing does not foreground the Greek-Canadian experience per se. Instead, I write as a woman whose ways of thinking and being (and therefore of writing) are shaped by my Greek roots, and by the blood shed during my father’s wartime childhood in Greece. I’ll conclude by arguing that our increasingly diverse intellectual and artistic landscape is a boon for people who care about Greek-Canadian heritage—if we can embrace a new type of dialogue.


Film as Mediator: Excavating the Audiovisual Artifacts of the Cypriot Canadian Diaspora
Theo Xenophontos, York University

This presentation will chronicle the development of my dissertation project, which is focused on creating a community-based archive devoted to the Cypriot Canadian diaspora. At the centre of this archive is video testimonials with members of the community that connect the intertwined threads of familial, socio-cultural, and political history. Supplementing these interviews are a variety of donated media materials, including home movies, videotapes, and photographs that further attest to the primacy of audiovisual artifacts when it comes to narrating and preserving the history of an underrepresented community from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ citizens. While this presentation will be buttressed by the theoretical writings of Cypriot scholars such as Myria Georgiou, George Kouvaros, and Yiannis Papadakis, the audiovisual and photographic items created for and given to this archive will be foregrounded as a means of displaying the outputs of this research. In the process, I hope to highlight how film can function as a mediator of memory and history.


Kingston Greek History Project: A Community Project Dedicated to Collecting and Preserving the “Stories” of Kingston’s Greek Community
Paula Antonakos-Boswell and George Katinas, Independent Researchers, Kingston

Greek immigrants made Kingston Ontario their home since the beginning of the twentieth century, however, there were very few official records of their lives and stories. The holdings of the local public libraries and Queens University Archives didn’t contain Greek immigration stories. At the same time the older members of the current Greek community of Kingston were anxious to tell their stories and preserve their legacy. Also, the rest of the Greek community was interested in learning more about the history of their parents and grandparents. These realities brought forward the idea of creating a Kingston Greek History Project (KGHP). We felt that the practice of Oral History interviews would be a good way to capture the stories of the Greek community of Kingston.

We were fortunate and grateful to receive funding for our project from the City of Kingston Heritage Fund (CKHF). The Kingston Greek Community was awarded two CKHF Project Grants, one for the 2016-2017 grant period and a second for the 2017-2018 grant period.  

The funding from the first grant covered expenses for Oral History Interview training, purchasing hardware (microphones, laptop, scanner, CDs etc.), hiring a translator and transcriber. During this first phase of the project, we recorded 30 interviews which we summarized, transcribed, and translated (from English to Greek or from Greek to English). We also scanned photographs and documents given to us by the people we interviewed. 

During the second phase (2017-18) we hired a researcher, who is a member of the Greek community, to process and organize the material we have gathered up to now. Our researcher, Angeline Boswell, also wrote additional content on the history of Kingston’s Greek Community to be hosted at Queen’s University Archives Stones Kingston platform. The Stones Kingston platform is a collection of walking tours presenting the history of various Kingston communities.  Ms. Boswell also created a web site featuring the history of the Greek community together with the recorded interviews and photographs. Finally, all the Oral History interviews and collected material is available on Internet Archives (archive.org). We remain committed to collecting additional interviews, collaborating with other groups, sharing resources, and acquiring new skills and ideas.

Childhood Narratives of Greek Canadians from the 1940s: Trauma and Resilience
Angelo Laskaris, York University

The paper elucidates the narratives of traumatic childhood and adolescence memories that demonstrate various degrees of resiliency from 1940s Greece. This decade was the deadliest and bloodiest in the history of the modern Greek state. The research draws primarily on oral history methodologies and is based on life stories of people born in Greece during the late 1920s and 1930s, who currently reside in Canada. The aim of the project is to document their experiences as children of war, occupation, and famine. It argues that the trauma inflicted by such events caused the children of the 1940s to have a ‘lost childhood,’ resulting in them to mature far too early and live with the physical and mental trauma(s) for the rest of their lives. Subsequently, the research enquires whether such traumas created degrees of resiliency that impacted any decisions to immigrate to Canada.

The paper revisits the oral history literature, which with few exceptions tends to focus on people who were adults during the 1940s. The project aims to be interdisciplinary and revisionist as it uses interviews as the primary source to document the childhood and adolescence period of respondents’ lives. Interviews conducted for the research presented request from respondents to ‘go back’ to their childhood period, not as a background to their life story, but as the main focus of the interview. The paper analyzes childhood narratives of people who belong to ethnic minority groups (such as Slavophone Greeks) and highlight the social and economic conditions of their childhood, and the politicization of youth organizations. Despite restrictions surrounding the ongoing pandemic, audio and video interviews are currently being conducted with more than thirty participants enrolled in the study. The paper is also based on secondary sources on the 1940s, oral history and the Memories of Occupation in Greece project, and on the work of scholars who have studied extensively childhood trauma caused by war.

Tracing Minor Incidents: Fascist Graffiti and the Archival Politics of Diasporic Heritage
Georgia Koumantaros, York University

The Danforth, Toronto’s Greektown is a neighbourhood hailed by local media as a left-leaning multicultural haven. It is beloved for its Greek restaurants and hospitality, home to a large part of Toronto’s Greek diaspora, and contains cultural objects like Greek flags and statues of Alexander the Great. In 2018, violent xenophobic graffiti paralleling that of the Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή), a far-Right neo-Nazi political organization in Greece, appeared in its alleys—content which has retained space until today. In this paper, I ethnographically explore the relationship between the physical street, the Greektown, and the graffiti in the alleys and detail the affects created by their co-existence and proximity—literally sharing walls and conceptually in their ‘Greekness’. I follow the shock, shame, panic, and disorientation caused by their proximity and investigate other events which evoked a similar response in me. I introduce a third site, the Greek Canadian History Project Archive, which contains material from the forgotten local history of the Greek Left’s resistance to the military junta. Greektown on the Danforth, the Golden Dawn Graffiti, and the anti-junta activism all happened on the same streets (and alleys). Bringing what seems like causally and chronologically unrelated objects within the frame of this inquiry helps me to contour the gaps and silences of what can constitute “Greektown on the Danforth.” Conceptualizing the graffiti, the neighborhood, the archive, and the Greekness through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) major and minor, allows me to complicate the way diasporic self-understandings of common heritage and belonging are enacted spatially and affectively. Critical attention is directed at the way diasporic self-understandings of transnational identity are unsettled by material and affective traces of inconclusive and highly divisive political events from the more recent past. What if these traces (e.g. Golden Dawn graffiti) aren’t merely treated as incidental and therefore irrelevant to larger contexts and historiographical projects dedicated to communal representations of national belonging and diasporic identity? How else to comprehend this graffiti other than as, at worst, the marginalia of a fringe far-right vandal or, at best, the unrepresentative perversion of what Greece and Greeks “stand for”. Rather than overlook these traces, how might attention to their marginal presence on the Danforth activate an awkward but critical reflection over the very terms of Greekness as a diasporic identity connected to, and through, the cultural history of the Danforth?

Writing the History of Greeks in Canada: Archives, Themes, and Approaches
Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas, York University

The 2nd conference in Greek Canadian Studies presents an opportunity to map the way forward in the writing of history of Greeks in Canada, and assess the challenges and problems in such a task: how does Greek history-writing in Canada differs from elsewhere in the Americas, especially for the period post-1950s, and from other Greek histories in the world? Secondly, to what extent does historical research and investigation on Greeks in Canada allow for methodological approaches that can enrich the study of Greek and other diasporic ethnocultural groups in the 20th century? Thirdly, a study of Greeks in Canada in the twentieth century calls for the re-thinking of the Greek state’s history in relation to its diasporas, and the history of Greeks more broadly in the period post-1880s and especially post-1922. Such a task requires serious engagement with recent conclusions and advances in the historiography of Greece and Greeks in the last thirty years.

A transnational approach will be more productive if informed by advances in our understanding of the political, economic, social, and cultural history of Greece, and enrich the history of the Greek migrant experience and the post-migration stories of Greeks in Canada. At the same time, the migrant and Greek Canadian experience was shaped profoundly by Canadian history, politics, and cultural changes, that were typically ignored in studies of Greeks in Canada. The paper suggests ways to advance historical writing through public history, oral and digital history and transnational history. The HHF Greek Canadian Archives can facilitate research on the following projects among others: a history of the Greek Canadian press in Toronto and the public image of Greeks in Toronto and Canada through the Greek-language newspapers; A history of the anti-dictatorship struggle in Toronto and in the Greek diaspora; and more broadly generating historical awareness of Greek migration to Canada, similar to the history of Greeks in the United States and Australia, and complement existing and offer innovative approaches for research to scholars interested in the histories of ethnic communities.

Beyond Push-Pull Factors: Reexamining Post-War Greek Migration to Canada Through Oral History Archives
Alexander Balasis, York University

For a long time, scholars have viewed migration as a direct outcome of economic hardships. This perspective also prevailed in the literature on Greek migration after the Second World War. However, while push-pull factors are crucial in understanding the phenomenon, they do not paint the complete picture as they overlook the agency of migrants. The creation of an oral history archive, such as the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Greek Canadian Archive at York University, can provide historians with modern tools to revisit and problematize the migrant experience.

I organize this presentation in two parts. The first part will focus on the reasons that led to the emergence of the post-war Greek migration wave, as presented in the literature, while also briefly describing why immigrants chose Canada. Alexander Kitroeff’s work, which has thoroughly studied the Greek diaspora, and Peter Chimpos’ research, one of the first to investigate Greek immigration to Canada, will provide the basis for this part. The second half of this work will utilize a small sample of interviews that answer the same question, though this time from the immigrants’ perspective. For this part, all interviews were retrieved from the “Immigrec” oral history project, which helps us reexamine the underlying reasons behind the Greek migration to Canada. I argue that categorizing reasons into distinct categories may be an oversimplification of a much more complex phenomenon. Instead, a more nuanced approach is needed to capture the multifaceted nature of migration. Thus, the interviews examined emphasize that migrants exercised an agency we tend to overlook while they elevate the importance of already established networks abroad. Furthermore, this presentation pinpoints limitations in the interviewing process and proposes recommendations to ensure cohesion between the interviews conducted for the new oral history project, the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Greek Canadian Archive.

Unaccompanied Child Migrants in Greece: Finding Unheard Voices on Social Media
Othon Alexandrakis, York University

3 Kilometers away from the Skouries Forest: Gold Mining, Borders and Political Possibility in Halkidiki, in Northern Greece
Effrosyni Rantou, York University

In the wake of crisis-driven market reforms in Greece and increasing local concerns over environmental conditions, gold mines in the Halkidiki peninsula in Northern Greece became political borders. Through these borders, systems of power redistribute socio-political tensions at the local, national, and international levels. Taking mines as ‘thresholds’ of knowledge, memory, and power, I ask: What sort of sociopolitical and spatial terrains are provoked by the presence of the mine? How the division caused by the extraction between the mining supporters and the anti-mining groups changes perceptions of the body, the space and the subterranean? How do anti-mining groups operate within and against these terrains to create political possibility and what sort of practices and actions are stimulated to do that?

After spending a year in villages of the Eastern Halkidiki peninsula, it became clear that the gold mine located in the heart of the Skouries forest had a more complex impact than just the environmental destruction and the reaction of the local communities. Social “pollution” between mining supporters and anti-mining groups, paralleled environmental pollution. As a consequence, social geographies have been altered and the mobility of bodies across space and place has been rearranged. The gold mine appears to be the ultimate border of the forest, highly militarized by the use of fences and the intense presence of private security and police patrolling and restricting access to it.

This paper has a three-fold purpose: first, the paper critically demonstrates how the process of “bordering” extends to and penetrates everyday life practices, bodies, relationships and strata of history and knowledge. Second, it dwells on how the liminality of borders is used to question and challenge centralized and corporate power and therefore create political possibility. Third, the paper discusses how the experience of the border allows the anti-mining groups to draw connections with other environmental and political struggles across the world. Moreover, this embodiment of the border allows the anti-mining groups to design maps of alliances and challenge in their terms the imposed social and spatial exclusions and divisions.

This paper is the product of year-long fieldwork, participant observation and formal and informal interviews with anti-mining groups. During the time spent at the villages in Halkidiki, I had the chance to attend local councils, anti-mining struggle committees, local elections, trials, social actions and protests. I was particularly attracted to materialities and spatialities the anti-mining struggle generated and the way those contribute to the formation of political subjects.

With no prior anthropological work on mining in Greece and with the majority of scholarly attention on borders focusing on migration and geopolitical issues the mines invite a different reading of the borders. Thinking about borders through mines and the anti-mining struggles not only challenges the idea that the sovereign debt crisis is a homogenized national experience but it also presents us with a view of Greece as a fragmented assembly of local, national and transnational dynamics and frictions.