It is an icy December morning and a group of early-career researchers from the Faculty of Information and the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto set out for an extraordinary three-day gathering. I am lucky enough to be one of them. This project has brought us from a broad array of geographies, academic and personal backgrounds to unfold, together, conversations on research and curatorial practices, creative workshops, collaborative knowledge-building, exhibitions, live performance, and sharing life-warming food.

This is an event that looks, and, more importantly, feels, unlike the traditional academic protocols with which I have been familiar in Montreal and the UK, let aside the shrinking budgets and efforts devoted to diversity and inclusion in the global academic mecca of the US. Here, I feel safe from the grant-driven suffocation: the stress, insomnia, and quiet abandonment that haunt junior scholars day after day. Far, too, from the forced autonomy demanded in the name of meritocracy, when expanding techno-corporate pressures erode higher education, and particularly the arts and humanities, in the ever-lengthening shadow of AI.

Where I find myself is not the beginning, but the exuberant materialisation and first residency of TADDA: an evocative acronym that names both a project and a research collective dedicated to Translocal Action Dialogues on Digital Archives . For three days now, we have been living and working together, sheltered by a strange and generous comfort made of shared knowledge, curiosity, and camaraderie.

Our temporary studio holds us, literally and intellectually. Curated specifically for this gathering, the TADDA studio gives form, rhythm, and sustenance to an idea first imagined and initiated by CLCF collaborator Professor T. L. Cowan.

TADDA is rooted in the Cabaret Commons project and the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC), both SSHRC-funded online research environments co-directed by Professors Cowan and Jas Rault. These projects have previously brought together researchers and practitioners Dr. Stephen Lawson and Dr. Carina Guzmán, alongside the invaluable contributions of PhD students Emily Faubert and Paula Vidal Valdespino. New to the team are Dr Chido Muchemwa, author and postdoctoral fellow at UTSC, Tam Rayan and Moska Rokay, both PhD students working on embodied archives, heritage and displacement. As a new postdoctoral researcher at UTSC myself, I also joined this new constellation quite recently, becoming part of the core team shaping TADDA 2025, working closely with Cowan and Lawson as a program co-curator. I fell for the Cabaret Commons’s digital archives along the way, and inspired by Vidal Valdespino’s striking self-portrait Ixtapalapa, I chose it as the visual identity of our first gathering. A faceless silhouette made of an unexpected array of textures and torn pieces, a fractured identity navigating trauma and belonging while still holding onto the fresh, feminine, tropical sensuality of papayas. What is not to love about this contestation to a Warholian serial imagery, where predictability and repetition clash with surreal juxtapositions of a collage? And what can better represent us in this lab of thought where we, coming from everywhere, are experimenting with methods to create a unique melting-pot of translocal experiences and practices?