Public History
Dragon Center Mall, 23 Glen Watford Drive, Scarborough, 1980s, Toronto Public Library Collection.
Intro screen to the Dundas + Carlaw: Made in Toronto tour, Heritage Toronto.
FOODWAYS OF THE GLOBAL CITY
This on-going work investigates how culinary hubs emerge and function. Culinary hubs are places where dense affective, sensory, social, cultural, and economic networks overlap and combine to create place-specific diasporic sensescapes.
This work has taken several shapes over the years. First it was a digital map of the growth of Chinese malls in the diasporic suburban neighbourhood of Scarborough, Toronto, Canada. Then it became a co-authored academic article in Food, Culture, and Society that examines the role of late twentieth-century transnational migrants to Canada in transforming Scarborough into a culinary hub with global and Asian resonances.
Lately, it is part of the collaborative Dragon Centre Stories project, which records and commemorates the history of the Greater Toronto Area’s first indoor Chinese mall. This project was featured in several media pieces.
Toronto’s Global neighbourhoods
Global movement of goods, people, and capital are constitutive of local histories. Bégin’s consultative and collaborative public history practice places Toronto’s neighbourhoods within global perspective.
At Heritage Toronto, Bégin led the team that worked on Dundas + Carlaw: Made in Toronto, a digital tour designed, researched, and written with a large public of tourists and locals in mind. This tour can be taken online or in the neighbourhood where 10 historical plaques join the physical space with the digital experience. The interpretation places the industrial history of Toronto’s east end within international trade networks, the history of capitalism, and global war.
This project won the 2019 Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award in the Community Leadership Category.
Picking the meat from the chicken bones is one of the big jobs in preparing the pilau, 1941 Peanut Festival, Florida, photograph by Stetson Kennedy. Federal Writers' Project photographs for the America Eats project, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
What America Ate
Bégin was part of the team behind What America Ate, an innovative website and online archive of culinary sources from the Great Depression funded the National Endowment for the Humanities. Materials include the papers of the WPA America Eats program, a collection of rare community cookbooks, and hundreds of food marketing and advertising materials from the 1930s. Led by Helen Zoe Veit at Michigan State University, the website lets users browse historical recipes, search materials by state and region, get a deeper understanding of historical context, explore featured sources related to a range of topics.