Abstract: Monuments recount particular historical and human rights narratives in our parks and on our street corners. And yet, as “we pass them every day,” they can fade into the background of our day to day lives. Contextualized by a growing public conversation around the appropriateness and representativeness of monuments, including the toppling of a prominent monument of Queen Victoria in front of the Manitoba Legislature on Canada Day 2021, I will discuss an assignment using monuments in the city of Winnipeg to spark discussion around which stories are told/untold, and how monuments reflect power and dominant narratives. With two colleagues, I used the assignment in 13 sections of a second year human rights course at the University of Winnipeg over a period of two years, with a survey administered before and after the assignment. We found that the assignment shifted student perspectives on their local built environment, increasing curiosity and interrogation of statues, landmarks and street names they had taken as given. By deconstructing narratives within the classroom through the examination of local monuments (and their destruction), students experienced how knowledge and narratives can be altered and restructured by real everyday people like themselves.

Speaker's Bio: Dr Kristi Kenyon is an Associate Professor and Program Director in the University of Winnipeg's Human Rights Program. She has a strong interest in participatory, experiential and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning in human rights including exploring ways to bring human rights concepts that can seem distant or theoretical "home" to students in her classroom. Dr. Kenyon has been an Executive Member of the Human Rights Section of the International Studies Association since 2020, served two terms on the City of Winnipeg's Human Rights Committee, and is currently the sole Canadian representative on the Human Rights Cities Alliance (North America) steering committee. She served as the 2024-2025 Teaching and Learning Section head for the Canadian Political Science Association and, as co-Editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, is editing a forthcoming special collection on Activist Pedagogies in Human Rights Education.

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