Angela Failler is an expert in the stories we don’t tell. For well over a decade the Canada Research Chair in culture and public memory and director of the centre for research in cultural studies (CRiCS) at the University of Winnipeg has focused her research on what the gaps in our collective memory tell us about our lives today.
This wasn’t the kind of research she had initially planned to do. Born in Saskatoon, Dr. Failler completed her undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Saskatchewan, then went on to a master’s degree in women and gender studies through Dalhousie University via the joint program from Mount Saint Vincent and St. Mary’s Universities.
Near the end of her PhD dissertation at York University, Dr. Failler met Sharon Rosenberg who was best known for her research on the memorialization of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal. Dr. Rosenberg’s mentorship helped Dr. Failler see how memorialization isn’t just about the past.
“Remembrance and commemorative projects are very much about the investments that people have in the present, and how we tell the story of the past and whose stories of the past matter,” Dr. Failler explains.
It was a screening of the documentary Desperately Seeking Helen by filmmaker Eisha Marjara that revealed to Dr. Failler one of the gaps she would spend years exploring – the bombing of Air India Flight 182 on July 23, 1985 off the coast of Ireland [the flight left Canada and was travelling to England]. This research will culminate in a sole-authored manuscript entitled Public Memory and the Cultural Afterlife of the 1985 Air India Bombings which is due out in 2025, around the same time as the 40th anniversary of the tragedy.
“When you have researchers and academics who look at your work, who think about it, who write about it, it’s validating.”
Though it is considered the largest mass murder of Canadian citizens in the history of the country, the Air India bombing has not attracted the same level of public remembrance as tragedies such as the 2001 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York City or the École Polytechnique massacre. According to a 2023 poll by the Angus Reid Institute, nine in 10 Canadians have little or no knowledge of the attack that led to the death of 329 people, around 280 of whom were Canadian citizens.
Dr. Failler argues that the reason a tragedy of this magnitude is often missing both from museums and school curricula is that the circumstances around the attack represent “difficult knowledge,” that is, stories that don’t fit neatly into contemporary ideas around our national identity. “It really is not coherent with an image of Canada as a non-violent place, or Canada as a multicultural haven and so forth,” she says.
This national forgetfulness, Dr. Failler points out, isolates the families of the victims as well as those from South Asian communities more broadly. “It wasn’t only the loss of their loved ones and individual family members that was excruciating,” she explains. “It was also the political and social context of national indifference that rubbed salt in the wounds.”
Rather than study direct memories, Dr. Failler has chosen to focus her research on the artists who were already grappling with this complicated process of remembering in their creative work. One artist she has worked closely with is Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar who recently joined Dr. Failler and Angus Reid president Shachi Kurl for a panel at Simon Fraser University entitled In the Archive of Memory. This interdisciplinary event was just the latest in a long line of conversations between Dr. Failler and Ms. Saklikar, who lost her aunt and uncle in the bombing.
“One of the things we as academics really have to work hard at is not undertaking projects just for theories’ sake or for the sake of our own curiosities.”
The two met at a ceremony at the Air India Memorial in Vancouver’s Stanley Park more than a decade ago. Ms. Saklikar, whose background is in law, was just beginning her creative journey into poetry and had been introduced to Dr. Failler’s writing by a mentor.
“It was such a revelation to see an academic speak of Air India in this very clear, careful, nuanced, precise way, in ways that I had approximated, but didn’t have the language for,” Ms. Saklikar recalls. “I remember it being quite a short amount of time between reading and feeling this sense of epiphany, and then meeting her.”
Ms. Saklikar, who has since published several books of poetry, including 2013’s Children of Air India: Un/authorized Exhibits and Interjections, acknowledges that there is a long history of researchers in sociology and anthropology othering and exploiting their subjects. However, she sees her professional relationship with Dr. Failler as reciprocal and collaborative rather than extractive.
“When you have researchers and academics who look at your work, who think about it, who write about it, it’s validating,” Ms. Saklikar says. “It creates community. It creates a sounding board. You have someone to talk to who can frame your work in a way that you never thought.”
“Remembrance and commemorative projects are very much about the investments that people have in the present, and how we tell the story of the past and whose stories of the past matter.”
This kind of reciprocity, Dr. Failler believes, is why it’s key for researchers to build connections to communities outside academia. “One of the things we as academics really have to work hard at is not undertaking projects just for theories’ sake or for the sake of our own curiosities,” she says. “For me, ethical engagement does necessitate building those relationships.”
As co-lead of the interdisciplinary collaborative research project Museum Queeries, Dr. Failler has also applied this critical framework to support those seeking to diversify the stories being told about queer communities. Without this kind of attention, she argues, even those memory institutions with explicitly human rights-focused missions such as the Canadian Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg can fall into the trap of avoiding difficult knowledge.
“It’s fascinating to look at museums, libraries, archives, and art galleries to see what isn’t there,” she says. “Then also to see the incredible work that is being done by individuals and communities and increasingly archivists, libraries, museums and galleries to do better around representation. Sometimes that means calling into question whether the project of the museum, given its colonial formation, is even a project that we’re still interested in doing.”
Dr. Failler is now seeing the effects of this kind of research in her own life thanks to an exhibit at Vancouver’s Chinese Canadian Museum called The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act that helps families connect with records that were recently unsealed by the federal government. Her next project, she hopes, will be an attempt to creatively grapple with her family’s connection to these stories.
“It’s kind of overwhelming and also exciting, sad and healing, all at the same time,” she says. “It’s a belated recognition that actually my life has informed my research in ways I hadn’t fully realized.”