When Dr. Kristina Llewellyn's 11-year-old nephew interviewed Tony Smith a former resident of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children for a school project, the intergenerational, intercultural conversation about Smith's lived experiences of racism was something Llewellyn wanted other students to understand.
Dr. Kristina Llewellyn, Professor, History, The Games Institute
As an oral history educator, Llewellyn's questions about how other students could witness and hear Smith's story and those of other former residents in a place-based way led her to the Games Institute at Waterloo. As a self-professed non-gamer, she was reluctant about finding her place in the space but admits that the Institute is more than what we think of as gaming.
"It's an environment in which interdisciplinary scholars come together with community partners to build a future based on the ethical and meaningful use of interactive and immersive technologies," she says. "It is an environment in which technology does not drive the research, but rather the need to address a community concern drives the research and how we engage with technology."
Dr. Oliver Schneider, Professor, Management Science and Engineering, The Games Institute
Finding belonging at the Institute led Llewellyn to collaborate with other passionate interdisciplinary researchers including Dr. Oliver Schneider from the Faculty of Engineering and Michael Barnett-Cowan from the Faculty of Health. Together, they launched the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project, an educational virtual reality (VR) curriculum rooted in restorative justice.
She shares that the project is driven by the fact that relatively few people know about the story of the Home, even though former residents have raised their collective voices for decades.
"The DOHR project supports former residents of the Home with what they call their Journey to Light," she says. "It brings the silenced histories of institutional harm out of the shadows and into public light, in a way that can collectively transform racist and unjust relations."
Dr. Michael Barnett-Cowan, Professor, Kinesiology and Health Sciences, The Games Institute
Based on the oral histories of Smith, Gerry Morrison and Tracy Dorrington-Skinner, the VR storytelling learning resource has become an effective method for students to bear witness to this historical harm and to understand the resilience and activism of former residents over time.
"This 15-minute VR experience has been carefully designed to position the listener as someone who is witnessing the events of the storyteller to relate to them, but not to be immersed in the visual work of the virtual world," Schneider shares. "We're trying to disrupt the sense of presence at key moments. We're trying to help people to remind themselves that they are sitting and listening to this experience."
The experience is crafted to allow listeners to engage with the tragic history, think about their own positionality, and carry the learnings forward into social justice action to address racism in their communities.
Schneider, who specializes in computer haptics, the technology that enables the sense of touch, shares that this element will be part of the VR experience when it is shared for an exhibit at the Black Cultural Centre in Nova Scotia in the coming months.
"We're also focused on how restorative processes can inform the development of the technology ... and as we develop this technology, we're learning methods and processes that others can use to develop their technology in a justice focused way as well," he says.
