Home is the Journey is a critical exploration of current issues and longstanding themes influencing and confronting Portuguese immigrant communities around the globe. Gilberto Fernandes and Miguel Moniz host the thinkers, creators, storytellers, and other folks who discern and discover the histories and cultures that shape this diverse and widespread diaspora. With a focus on North America, we also travel to other places that Portuguese speakers have settled, departed, inspired, and impelled. Our podcasts include interviews with authors, researchers, journalists, artists, musicians, actors, athletes, and other narrators, talking about their areas of expertise and experience. Shorter sidecasts center on cultural practices and local institutions in immigrant communities and beyond.
This series is co-produced by the Portuguese Canadian History Project (Gilberto Fernandes) and the Migrant Communities Project (Miguel Moniz).
The Laborem Ex Machina podcast series explores the fascinating technological, business, labour, military, cultural, gender, racial, children and youth, and environmental history of modern construction machines and their operating engineers in Canada in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This 8-episode series has a digital companion with photos, artwork, videos, interactive maps, infographics, historical records, and other illustrations meant to be browsed through while listening.
This project was sponsored by the International Union of Operating Engineers’ Local 793 in partnership with the Global Labour Research Centre and the Department of History at York University.
Business & Government
Episodes 1-3
The first part of the series discusses the technological development of modern construction machines, their transnational designers and manufacturers, and the role played by Canadian governments in promoting and regulating their use.
Labour & Military
Episodes 4-6
The second part of the series focuses on the workers who operated heavy construction machines, their labour organization and union rivalries, their participation in the First and Second World Wars, and how technological developments impacted them.
Culture & Gender
Episodes 7-8
The third part of the series focuses on representations of construction machines in popular culture, how their assigned meanings reflected modern anxieties and aspirations, changing views about nature and cities, and working- and middle-class masculinity.
Gilberto Fernandes 