This poster presentation examines “On Paper: Toward a Queer of Colour Archival Practice," an ongoing community-engaged research project which explores how art-making, storytelling, and archiving function as practices of care and identity formation for 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Toronto’s eastern, diverse suburb of Scarborough.

Originally developed through a collaboration between the University of Toronto and a local arts non-profit program, the project seeks to build a digital archive documenting the creative and affective histories of queerness in Scarborough - a space too often omitted from dominant, downtown-centric queer narratives and histories. Through creative practices such as postcards-making, collage, and painting workshops facilitated by local QTBIPOC artists and researchers, the project investigates how acts of creation may foster individual and collective well-being.

Inspired by and building on works such as Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of archives of feeling, Saidiya Hartman’s storytelling/critical fabulations, and José Esteban Muñoz’s vision of queer futurity, the project reimagines archives not only as repositories of information but as technologies of survival which hold trauma, care, and possibility. Participants’ art and testimonies show how queer of colour youth cultivate resilience and belonging even in conditions marked by spatial, racial, and socioeconomic marginalization.

Anchored in the frameworks of health humanities and participatory/qualitative research, we argue that creative archival practices constitute a critical mode of health intervention. By foregrounding lived experience and affective knowledge, Queer Scarborough “On Paper” expands what counts as evidence in health and humanities research, offering an ethics of care rooted in co-creation and representation.

Ultimately, this presentation situates Scarborough’s queer communities within broader discourses of identity, wellness, and place-making. It demonstrates that artistic and archival practices - especially those led by youth - may reorient understandings of health away from purely clinical models toward relational, interdependent, and imaginative practices of flourishing.