About Us

The AMLAC&S (the lab) is an audiovisual media laboratory engaged in studying multicultural societies, as well as cultures as a whole. This space is dedicated to the research, documentation, and creation of audiovisual productions that specifically target the cultural practices of communities or marginalized identity groups such as blacks and aboriginal people. 

The purpose of the lab is to produce research material that exposes contributions made by cultural, ethnic and racial minorities through their specific cultural practices. Through the lab, we conceptualize questions of citizenship within multicultural societies in Canada. 

The lab was founded in 2005 by Boulou Ebanda de B’béri with financial help from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund. The space itself, which was endowed by the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Arts houses a variety of filming, sound recording, and web development equipment to facilitate the mandate of the lab. 

Objectives

The principal objectives of AMLAC&S are:

1. To establish an audiovisual database targeting specific practices of identity made by racialized and ethinicized identity groups;
2. To produce audiovisual documents that are artistic and educational, which adequately represent both the complexity of cultural practices and of social and
   cultural theory;
3. To cultivate a “voice to see” (to represent) those cultural practices that articulate questions pertaining to the experiences of cultural, racial and ethnic minorities in multicultural societies;
4. To develop reference documents on cultural practices that would not otherwise be produced or represented other than through the “dispositives” of a research center having its own infrastructure of production and dissemination, and whose research objects target, in a specific manner, the representations of racial, ethnic and cultural minorities and their experiences; and
5. To build connections between academia and certain practices of identity produced in the margins of normative frames of reference.