In Week 11, our group made major progress on our project. We continued to conduct background research on our documentary subject, allocated weekly tasks, and completed our final interviews. During half of our class time, Maddy and I interviewed long-time Regent Park volunteer hockey coach and community advocate, Jim Stoner, who brought along a number of friends and fellow community members along for the ride. During the second half, Mishika and Summayahh arrived and we got to work on allocating tasks for the week and workshopping a timeline for the remainder of our documentary.
It was just past 4PM on Thursday, Maddy and I met up with Jim, his two friends Debra and Phil, and former student, Liam. Before the interview, we got into lengthy conversations about each of their experiences in Regent Park; then, however, we started to realize a lot of our conversations were very valuable to our project, and that we should start recording…
Jim, Debra, Phil, and Liam, provided many (many!) stories about their time at the rink. They talked about their favourite memories, the programs Jim ran over the years, how the changes in the neighbourhoods has shifted how the rink is used, and what the future of the rink looks like - especially in regard to Jim’s journey to attaining a roof for the Rink! If I tried to detail everything Jim and co. said, this blog post would be 50 pages long. To summarize, however, our very rich discussion focused on the meaning and strength of the community in Regent Park and what accessible public spaces and programs mean to a historically lower-income, immigrant neighbour like RP. It also homed in on what the Rink’s Canadian-ness means to a multicultural, immigrant neighbourhood like Regent Park, our major research focus.
After our interviews with Jim and friends, a woman bicycled up to the rink and asked if any of us worked there (in hopes of using the washroom). We then got to talking, and Jim introduced himself. It turns out, the woman was a long time east ender, who spent much of her life skating at Regent Park with her brothers - and Jim had coached them! She was stunned with how much the neighbourhood had changed, and started to tear up about how special this moment was. We then decided to interview her. It was a moment that was emblematic of the true importance of community; she began to name her close friends and family who grew up in Regent and the east-end, and Jim recognized everyone. She declared that she would organize her friends and family to come to the yearly hockey tournament Jim was organizing, and made sure to help on his commitment to attaining a roof for the rink. It was truly a special moment.
After a very long interview period, we met back up with our group members and allocated tasks. We downloaded all of our interview audio and made an editing schedule. For the remainder of class, we did pretty autonomous tasks - sorting through the audio and doing independent research.
All in all, our research question has stayed quite consistent, with our final question being: homing in on the fact that ice skating is a particularly “Canadian” concept, and the demographics of Regent Park residents are predominantly immigrants who may not have skated in their home countries/countries of origin, how does the notion of neighbourhood or community identity (de)construct in regards to “the Rink”? We are arguing that a new kind of identity forms, one that is uniquely tied to Canadian-ness, while simultaneously embracing the multi-cultural nature of Regent Park and Toronto as a whole and the low-income position of many in Regent Park. Talking to Jim, he did discuss how this has shifted with the revitalization. Many who attended his hockey programs had financial constraints to participating in the sport (one that is historically very expensive). Given this, we also want to underlay our documentary and paper with what it means to have accessible public services in predominantly immigrant neighbourhoods like Regent Park, what this means to community vitality, and how this can help maintain a sense of community amongst RP’s ever changing demographics. The goal of our documentary is to reveal what a long-time community hub means to a neighbourhood, especially one that is grounded in an intense national Canadian identity like an ice rink.
As of now, we do not have an official outline. However, this will be developed in the following days in tandem with the end of our preliminary sound and video editing process. I have attached some interviews and B-Roll we shot this week as our media pieces.
The team members of Frozen in Time are Mishika Khurana, Maddie Wintermute, Sumayyah Shahajan, and Charlotte Pink.