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Host: Valerie Pringle 

Guest: Robert Leckey

 

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Valerie Pringle introduces the host of the Brave Spaces podcast, Professor Robert Leckey, the Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law. Robert Leckey, a 2003 Scholar, was Co-Chair of the Alumni Executive Committee of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation from August 2019 to April 2022.

They discuss the duty and the need for information sharing, and how the media can constrain communication, but also teach us to communicate more clearly. They touch on the evolution in the feedback, communication gaps, and the notion of a brave space.

 

Transcript

Robert Leckey
Welcome to the Communications and Sharing Knowledge Series of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Brave Spaces podcast.

Valerie Pringle
Hello everybody. We're going to do an introduction now to a new podcast series, which is going to be hosted by Professor Robert Leckey, who is the Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and family law. 

Robert served as a law clerk for Justice Michel Bastarache of the Supreme Court of Canada. He chaired the McGill Equity Subcommittee on Queer People, was President of Egale Canada, chairing its Legal Issues Committee. Prior to his appointment as Dean, he was the director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law. He's won many awards for his wonderful teaching. Therefore, communication skills.
We're very proud that he is a 2003 Pierre Elliott Trudeau scholar, a great success. Robert, as I mentioned, will be hosting the podcast series we're about to start, which is why we're speaking to him now, to get his thoughts on communication and the information sharing. 

Hello, Robert!

Robert
Hi, Valerie.

Valerie
Can you start off, maybe, just so people have some kind of orientation as they listen to you going forward, telling us a little bit about your work and particularly this communication and knowledge-sharing piece, how that's been central to your work? 

Robert
I have a very clear memory. When I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto, there was a bulletin board in the hallway, and this is how old I am. When professors there had an op-ed in the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star, it would be clipped out. Literally, the newsprint would be clipped and pinned to this board, and I would walk by it, and I would see them. And I would see: these people are contributing to public education and public debate. And I would say, I want to be one of the scholars who does that one day. 

So, I had, from the very beginning, the idea that you don't just publish things in books and scholarly journals, you also try to talk to people. You know, my aunt who reads the Globe and Mail at breakfast, or my parents met their neighbors… that you try to reach out to other people. And so, I've been trying to do that from the very beginning of my career. And the Trudeau Foundation had a piece in that, because when I was a scholar, my mentor was Jeffrey Simpson, who had been at the Globe and Mail for donkey's years, and Jeffrey cast his eye very kindly over the first op-ed I pitched to the Globe. And, it's such a painful process learning to speak simply. You spend all these years learning expertise, and then you got to learn to dumb it down. Oh, that sounds negative. You’ve got to learn to make it simple and clear.

But that's become a journey throughout my time as a Law prof. How do you speak to the public as well as the students? Now, as a Dean, you’ve got to speak to alumni, you’ve got to speak to other outside stakeholders. So, the communication kind of runs through the whole career I've had to date.

Valerie
And the impetus for that was the sharing of the ideas, the selling of concepts, or a profile, a presence, you know, what’s the goal? 

Robert
There’re different ways of coming at it. I mean, part of it in this Canadian context, where the institutions we work in are publicly funded, it does seem to me that there's a kind of responsibility. So, I don't spend my days negatively judging the colleagues who don't do it, but I, for myself, think of it as a kind of duty. That I have the great privilege of having working conditions that do allow me to take an hour now and then to try to dash off something or talk to a few journalists.

I think we're a public resource. I think the ideas I work on, particularly the ways in which families aren't always recognized by law or aren't recognized well by law, that stuff matters to people. And I want to talk to them about it, and I want to, sometimes, try to move things forward. So, it's a sense that the ideas matter, a sense that there's a duty. 

Sure, it's also kind of fun when you put something out there and you hear reactions from people. It is gratifying, and, unquestionably, there's immediate reaction to an op-ed or a TV spot that having something published in a journal has no equivalent. I mean, you put something out there, and it could be months or years before people tell you they saw your journal article. So, it's all those things, I think.

Valerie
It's interesting to view it as a duty, because, and I think, obviously, this is one of the things that the Trudeau Foundation talks about to scholars – to be a public intellectual, and to be a leader, an intellectual leader.

How do you feel you have impact or how can you tell you have impact from putting your ideas out there?

Robert
Again, I'm so old that I used to get feedback in different forms. So, there would be, at times in the past, if I did a radio interview, there might be a voice message left on my office phone that I'd see the next day. Now the social media makes it much more immediate, right? So, you see stuff on Twitter, a little bit less on Facebook, you have a sense that people are engaging.  So, that's always interesting. My spouse at times asks if it's just a sort of ego stroke of having people react. There is clearly something there, but you also have a sense: people are reading and thinking. And seeing the way they answer or comment, or seeing if people are going to quote, retweet, and pull out a sentence, it's always interesting to see what they pull. And if they pull a sentence I think is really important, I think, OK, I've really managed to communicate on that one.

Valerie
Well, you've touched on the evolution and change, obviously, we've seen in ways that we communicate, which have impacted the way you do your work and get your messages out.  What do you think are the impacts of all the evolution and change, with social media, essentially, dominating?

Robert 
Some of it is quite positive. So, I think, having done a fair amount of media myself, I try to write as a scholar more simply. So, I think, my own, even the stuff I send to the scholarly journals might be a little more accessible as a result of those years of trying to polish or simplify the op-ed, or find a way to speak to the journalist. So, some of that is positive. 

Then there's the question of whether the sort of constraints of simplification are extreme? Like, is it impossible to have nuances in the media, in social media? And I know there are some pressures there, and it's hard to really deliver complicated ideas or to have the necessary caveats. So, you get quoted out of context, but there is some risk of that kind. I kind of acknowledged this is where we're going. So, I've had exercises in the last couple of years now, when I'm teaching, where the students had to tweet, at least once in the semester, just informally in the class website, but they had to make a critical comment about one day's readings, and they had to tweet it.
And that's because I know a lot of our people are going to go out into contexts where they will be the spokespeople for organizations. So, they will be trying to communicate in this new format. So, finding a way to do it, I think, that's got to be as much of our work as teaching, how to write legal memos and so on.

Valerie
Yeah, and what an exercise too, because, as you say, where's the nuance, where's the complexity in a few words, in a few letters?

Robert
I had a media training session when I was a fairly junior prof, and it was helpful, because a couple of colleagues were there. And a couple of times there were people who had had bad experiences with the media, such that they would hesitate to talk to journalists again. They felt they had been quoted out of context, and so on. And the media relations person coaching us said, one way to do is to say in very few words, it's not black and white, or you can say, this is a complex area, or we're waiting to know for sure. Like, there actually are ways you can try to do it. And it's very hard for journalists to sort of cut and fragment the quote when you say, it's not black and white. Like, there are some strategies better than others for trying to deal with that.

Valerie
What you are also, I guess, facing all the time, especially with instant feedback over Twitter and response, and people retweeting, and stuff, is the ugliness that often people get into, when people disagree and have a difference of opinion.

Robert
Yeah. And you got to decide, how much are you deterred by the idea of how people might react? So, if you can already anticipate, when you say something that you believe in, what the negative reaction will be, does that stop you saying it, or do you say, look, I got to put out the message I'm going to put out, even if I can anticipate how some people are going to react. And, I guess, you got to decide how thick your skin is, and how much you care about what it is you want to put out there.  But the possibility, if you're even a quasi-known figure with a few followers, the possibility that there will be that kind of backlash or critique is always present.

Valerie
Well, and this speaks to the importance of being able to foster and participate, navigate conversations between different communities, differences of opinion. Also, you know, academic versus non-academic.

Robert
Oh, it's really tricky, right? Reaching across and even finding the words to work. So, in some of the LGBTQ activism, what are the words that you can use to communicate a radical idea to a 65-year-old judge, for example? And I remember discussions like, would they know what queer means? How do you stay true to principles while trying to translate your ideas for others? There can be communication gaps across generations, communication gaps across different social groups. It's a lot to arbitrate, and you got to try to keep listening and try to keep talking to people, and try, I guess, in certain contexts explaining that no stakeholder group is going to have everything they want, but can we be working together somehow?

Valerie
Well, you know, it is fraught at times, because it seems, sometimes people are being told, you can't say that, you can't even express those ideas. They're so not acceptable now or not politically correct, or whatever, that the conversation is just shut down.

Robert
Yeah, there's a sense that some things can't be spoken or… I think it's exaggerated often. And I think, some of the people complaining that they are being canceled and have no way to speak seem to have a lot of megaphones in front of them. So, I'm less worried than some that the cancel culture is out of control. But there are differences around the words that are used. There are also differences around how quickly things are going to change.

And so, when censors, at least in the university context… there were groups who, you know, maybe for two centuries have been shut out. And as things start to move, they don't just want it to change tomorrow, they want it to change yesterday. And so, when you say to them, you know, changing these things will take a little time, sometimes they listen and they feel, you're basically stonewalling, saying like, we're refusing to change. But honestly, some things in an institutional setting do take time to change, and you got to be working with a lot of people. So, there can be a lot of challenges in these discussions.

Valerie
Well, I guess, you saw that a lot, probably, with your work with Egale and the Subcommittee on Queer People and stuff. And again, some of it is language, some of it is ideas.

Robert
Yeah, they go together. But if you can really accept that people you respect and can learn from have different views than you do, and we'll use different words. And then you say, what can I, how can I learn from that? It can help instead of just jumping to judgment.

Valerie
So, this podcast, these podcast series is about brave spaces, which is a concept that the Trudeau scholars are working on, and themselves. What does the notion of a brave space mean to you?

Robert
I mean, the brave space, to me, evokes a conversation, a form, a setting, where I have to be open to being surprised by what I hear, being uncomfortable hearing some things while outside the comfort zone, the idea being that being exposed to new ideas is important, but not easy. And so, clearly, the brave space is contrasting with the idea of the safe space. But it's important… I guess, the balance is keeping in mind that in ways, some people don't recognize, the conversations we come to, we don't all enter on equal footing. So, there are people who will come in having a sense of being deeply marginalized. And so, it may be easy for the people who feel at home in the space to say, let's make it a brave space. But nonetheless, on the whole, if you think of how traditionally rules that silence people, how they play out for, say, vulnerable minorities. Like, we tend to come on the downside of those things. So, personally, I tend to be in favor of less regulation of speech, rather than more.  Thinking, and from my own personal perspective, you know, if you start to have some rules around censorship, it's going to be the shipment to the gay bookstore that's going to be stopped at the border first. And so, the awareness that that's how police power and how censorship tends to work – it tends to shut the people who are already vulnerable. That leads me, certainly, to favor less regulation, more openness to a whole lot of people saying a whole lot of things. But it may not be very comfortable for some of the people in those conversations.

Valerie
You know, when people talk about communications, they think, writing or talking, not listening. When you think of communications, are you thinking, communicating your ideas, your point of view, with a point of winning people over?

Robert
But even to try to win people over, you’ve got to be listening to them, to know where they're coming from, how they're coming at that. I work in the Faculty where there's always a couple of legal traditions in play, and if you're trying to explain an area of law to someone, it's helpful to know what they know already. So, what are they expecting to hear, how is what you're sharing today different from what they know already?

That seems to me already, even trying to persuade people, you got to be thinking about them and listening to them. I may also be influenced – I taped a podcast with Beverly McLaughlin, the former chief justice of Canada. And she was certainly talking about the importance of listening, and it made me think as well.

But whether it's teaching, whether it's leading, whether it's all these things, you certainly got to be doing a lot of listening as well. So, yeah, that is communication. And even if you're writing, sharing the draft to people and listening to them, what did they see in it? How did it communicate to them? I don't think you can just do it alone in your office.

Valerie
So, what are you hoping will be the takeaway from this podcast for the people who are listening? Do you, sort of, have a vision for these conversations?  What you want people to learn, what you want to learn?

Robert
I mean, already, I anticipate certain things are going to be common. Like, you ask, how has communication changed in the past couple of decades? Nobody's going to ignore social media, right? But I do hope that hearing how a range of people who have been actively engaged in communications, how they think about it and speak about it, maybe it'll help the listeners to be a little more self-conscious and intentional about the choices they make and the way they communicate, and the choices they make about what they read, what they listen to, what they do with it.

So, I hope that we’ll have a short series of vignettes that help people clarify how they're doing their own communications in their lives.

Valerie
But without it, you're really lost. I mean, if you're just… if you're not communicating your ideas and getting feedback, then you might as well just be in a bubble, not much of a point.

Robert
It’s always a collective endeavor.

Valerie
Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you and I hope it goes brilliantly well, and I'll be listening.

Robert
It's a pleasure for me too. Thanks so much.

Valerie
Thanks, Robert.

 

Host: Pascale Fournier 

Guest: Sophie Thériault

 

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Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation President and CEO Pascale Fournier talks with Sophie Thériault, Co-Chair of the Foundation's Alumni Network Committee*, to introduce the Brave Spaces podcast series on Communication and Knowledge-sharing, one of the key concepts of the leadership program. They guide the discussions in the upcoming podcast series by stating that the research and academia community must evolve towards greater openness in order to foster the democratization of knowledge and the sharing of its outcomes.

*Note: Sophie Thériault is now President of the Alumni Executive Committee (at the time of the recording, she was co-president with Robert Leckey).

 

 

Host: Robert Leckey

Guest: Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin

 

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Robert Leckey interviews the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, a former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and the first woman to hold the position of Chief Justice of Canada, an arbitrator, an author, and a mentor for the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. She shares how she learned to become a better speaker, her thoughts on the communication revolution, on the dangers of siloization, and on how we can express our values and principles. 

 

 

Transcript

Robert Leckey

Welcome to the Communications and Sharing Knowledge series of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Brave Spaces podcast. 

The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin is a former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and served as Chief Justice from 2000 to 2017. She was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 1988. And it was January 7th, 2000 that she became the first woman to hold the position of Chief Justice of Canada. As Chief Justice, she chaired the Canadian Judicial Council, the Advisory Council of the Order of Canada, and the Board of Governors of the National Judicial Institute. In total, she participated in some 2,100 decisions of the Supreme Court and authored 442 opinions. She has written and spoken on a wide range of subjects in many areas of law, including constitutional law, criminal law, commercial and corporate law, and dispute resolution, both in the courts and through arbitration and mediation. Now she works as an arbitrator and mediator in Canada. And internationally, she sits as a Justice of the Hong Kong Final Court of Appeal and the Singapore International Commercial Court. She is also a panel member of the Hong Kong International Arbitration Center. 

In addition, she is actively engaged in writing fiction and non-fiction. Her first novel, Full Disclosure, was published in May 2018. And her memoir, Truth Be Told, was released in September 2019. She is co-author of the first and second editions of The Canadian Law of Architecture and Engineering. 

Beverly McLaughlin serves on a number of charitable boards and is Honorary Patron of various charitable and cultural institutions. She is an Honorary Bencher of The Honorable Society of Gray’s Inn, The Honorable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, the Honorable Society of the Inner Temple and the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple. She is an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, the American College of Construction Lawyers, and the International Academy of Construction Lawyers. She is the Visitor of Queen’s College at Cambridge University and Visitor of Massey College at the University of Toronto. She serves as Honorary Colonel to the office of the Judge Advocate-General. And most directly for our purposes, she is a 2020 mentor for the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and member of the Covid-19 Impact Committee. So, welcome, and how communications and knowledge sharing have been central to your work?

The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin
Well, thank you very much. It's lovely to be with you. Yes, communications and knowledge sharing is central to so many people's work in different ways. I spent most of my career, most of my life being a lawyer, and then teacher, and then a judge. And each of those roles had communication at the forefront. You can't be a good lawyer unless you can communicate with clients and with the court. You can't be a good teacher unless you can communicate with your students and they with you. And you certainly can't be a good judge, unless you can communicate. Now, communicating as a judge is a little bit different, because he communicates through your judgements, through your written reasons, mainly. But in addition, I also, certainly before I was Chief Justice, but certainly when I became Chief Justice in particular, made it a point to try to communicate with the public about how the institution of the court was working, and how justice was being done in Canada.

Robert
And was that an adjustment after you’ve worked for a number of years, doing judicial communication, primarily, when you started speaking more broadly to the public, did that require any adjustment on your part?

Beverley
Yeah, it was a steep learning curve. I wasn't very good at it at first. I felt that I didn't give speeches very well. I had a lot of technical problems, I would speak too quickly. And you know, what I wasn't doing, basically, was something very fundamental in those early years when I was struggling to become a better speaker. What I wasn't doing is actually realizing that this is a conversation with those people who are sitting out there in the audience, and you are treating them as though they are not there. You're just so focused on delivering your own thoughts that you're not thinking about the communication part, which is having a conversation with those people in the audience. So, I would go too fast, I would just sort of rattle through and try and get it over. I wouldn't use the right emphasis and I always tried to prepare notes, because I was nervous and then I'd get lost in my notes.

So, as I got more confidence, I would just speak to people and I would say, we’re here to talk to each other. I want to listen to you. I would give a shorter address often, and then just take questions and comments. I found that worked much, much better.

Robert
It reminds me, in my early years of teaching, I had more of a sense, as you mentioned, you know, fully prepared notes that I was delivering, and then I started to realize that this was not an audience watching a film, they were there, and we could speak together. And if they were shaking their heads, I needed to stop and figure out why, and all those kinds of things.

Beverley
Exactly. And it's wonderful, just picking up on what you said, to have a live audience, because you can watch their faces, and you can usually tell if somebody's puzzled or perhaps wanting to ask a question but not daring to, and then you can zero in on them, which is something I miss working on Zoom. A lot of the speaking I do now is on different platforms through video, and you see some heads sometimes, but you often don't see the people in the audience at all. And because of the nature of technology, it's much more difficult to read faces and body language, and expressions. So, I do hope that we can get back to talking to each other in a real space, not a virtual space.

Robert
On Zoom they never laugh either, they're all muted. And even if you say something really funny, there's just this silence, huh?

Beverley
Oh yeah. And it can be a dreadful situation. You know, the first class I did on Zoom, I was asked by a professor of law to come and do a 20-minute talk and then we'd have a discussion. And that was in the early days. And I saw a few people, but other people must have had their videos turned off, and I got through my 20 minute-spiel and there was just this silence. And then the professor rescued or tried to rescue the situation by asking a few questions, but I came away from it feeling very disappointed. I love classroom teaching and I love being able to say to somebody, well, you look like you're puzzled. Tell me what you're thinking. And bring them into the conversation. And I couldn't do that on the virtual screen.

Robert
We've gone quite quickly to Zoom and the pandemic communications. But if you look a little more broadly over the past years, what sort of changes and evolutions in communication and knowledge sharing would you observe across multiple sectors?

Beverley
Well, it's just been huge, because somebody as old as I am, and I'm pretty old, grew up in a totally different communication world. We communicated by meetings, by paper, by telephone, by fax. Does anybody now know what a fax is?

Robert
I remember a fax, yeah.

Beverley
And then, suddenly, when I was already late career, this new thing came along and everybody around me was sending emails and they were tweeting, and they were on Facebook, and I thought, what is happening here? And I realized that it's a communication revolution, as big as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. People are communicating electronically. And as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. So, what's happening is qualitatively different than other forms of communication. There's a spontaneity about it. There's a closeness about it. There can be, on certain platforms, like Facebook, an element of showmanship. When you get into YouTube and Twitter and how many likes you have, it's raising all sorts of aspects to a prominence. They were always there, I suppose, but to a prominence that we never thought. 

And then a final thing, it's not the final, but the list of what the changes are, and how we communicate are so vast. But one important one is this ability to polarize because you can select your… there's so much available and people select the conversation groups they want to have conversations with. And there's only so many hours in the day. And so, they always go to the same groups and they're hearing the same views, and they aren't listening to other views. And so, this is the biggest threat, I think, we face – people are drawn into their own little silos of other like-minded people with the same ideas. This can have a ratcheting up effect, where ideas that are kind of crazy actually take on reality. QAnon, that kind of thing. And it can have a very confining effect, because unlike the old days where, you know, you open the paper and there it is spread out before you, and your eye glances over a lot of different stories and information, and opinion pieces from people who don't think like you, for example. And you look at them. You may not look at them long, but you look at them. And you're aware of a world where there are lots of opposing ideas, and no one clear handle on what is the absolute truth. And so, that kind of relativism pervaded my communication world, but in the Internet, there's a certainty that comes along, there's a siloization, there's a shutting out of voices that are unlike and ideas that are unlike yours, which is very bad for democracy, and very bad, actually, for growth and development.

Robert
So, all this noise and all these people with ways to speak. And at times, in the Trudeau Foundation and elsewhere, there's discussions about creating a brave space of dialogue. And I wondered what you think of that idea.

Beverley
Yeah. I don't know what it is to be brave. What I think, what I try to do is say, what are my principles? What are my values? And how can I express them and stand up for them? And if that involves being brave, well, that's fine. If it doesn't, that's fine too, but there's no virtue in just being rashly brave.

The virtue is in understanding your values and principles, and acting and speaking in accordance with them. And that does take courage sometimes, because particularly in a world where people are driven to the same conclusions, the same ideas, to speak up against that can be extremely difficult. And you will incur all the wrath of the people online who don’t think like you, et cetera, et cetera. And the nuances you're trying to convey will be lost. This takes courage. Courage is, for me, and I'm getting philosophical here, a supplementary virtue. It's necessary, so that you can take a principled stance and do what's right. 

Robert
What are some of those principles, if it's not, first and foremost, courage that would be driving how you think about the way you communicate? What are some of those principles you would think of?

Beverley
Well, I think each person has to sort that out for themselves, and it depends on the circumstances. You see, whenever you're facing a problem, a decision… let's take the vaccine issue – should vaccines be mandatory? Well, there's a lot of principles involved: there's the freedom of your own body, to do what you want with your own body, on the one hand. On the other hand, there's the public health aspect. So, you have values of individual economy, you have values of social responsibility, and then you have some difficult decisions to make in real life situations as to what you're going to do and where you're going to come down, and where your lines are going to be drawn. So, it's not like, oh, this is my principle, and I'll follow it to the end, and it's all very easy. No, and this is, of course, what my work as a judge was, every judge's work is – you're in this difficult area, where you have principles that seem to be pointing in different directions, and they're all important.

So, the wonderful thing about us in Canada is that we have a culture of compromise, and I think that's the most important thing we have in Canada. It's right there in our Charter. We say, everybody has rights. We're going to give you all these rights. You read about them: free expression, liberty, right to control your body... It doesn't say it quite in those terms, but it talks about liberty. And here are your rights, people, but Section 1 says, they are subject to limits imposed by law. The limits that the government can justify as reasonable and justified in a fair and a free and democratic society. So, it's this balancing, which is the great principle, if you like. We have all these different values, and in a particular situation, like, will I make somebody against her will get a vaccine, you're doing a balancing act. And you have to decide that for yourself, whether you would actually grab somebody and drag her, kicking and screaming, into a building and poke her. I mean, there is such a thing as controlling your own body, but what else would you do? Maybe there's action short of that. Like, encouraging vaccination, like giving incentives, like trying to impress people with social responsibility and how we need to help our co-citizens get through this. So, that's the kind of way I come at this. And sometimes, when you draw your line, you've worked it all through, that line may not be in a line that other people like, some other people like. Often, it'll be a controversial line. And that's where the courage comes in. You've got to say, well, I've thought about this. I've worked it through. And this is where I come out on it.

Robert
Totally for a moment going off the questions we talked about before, but you were perceived as Chief Justice as being very good at fostering consensus. At least from the outside, there was a perception that that's something you were good at. And it seems to me, that involved people with quite deeply held views that at times came into conflict.
How do you personally help people to find consensus or to listen to one another when they disagree?

Beverley
Well, you just keep talking and meeting, and listening, you know. There's just listening. There's passive listening and active listening. Passive listening – I'm just sitting at the table and I'm thinking about what I'm going to do when I leave the office, whether I need to go to the bank today and yeah, I'm passive listening. Some of it is going in, but I'm not really in it. Active listening is really important. And that is where you're taking on the idea. And sometimes you are disagreeing with it, but you're taking it on, and you're discussing. And I think the active listening is really, really important. 

So, Bertha Wilson, who was the first woman on the Supreme Court of Canada. She was still there when I joined. She gave me one piece of advice. She said, the people of Canada are entitled not to nine individual views on a question, there being nine judges, but they are entitled to nine views after each of those individuals has listened to and considered the other views. That's really interesting. So that's the process. And she put it so well. And I think, that is the essence of being a good judge. You don't just come on the Court to say, well, I don't like abortion. Therefore, I'm always going to vote anti-abortion, for example. No, no. You listen to people, and you couple that with the idea that your job is not just to put in your own opinion, but to apply the law, the law is your master and mistress. You have to be quite humble. Your own opinion isn't the law, and other citizens aren't required to accept your personal opinions. They are required to accept what you say about the law, because that's your position as a judge.

Robert
Justice Wilson's point about listening to the others means you really can't just phone it in. You have to be there listening actively at the table, open to the possibility your views will change as you listen, right?

Beverley
Yeah. That's why I think on a Court, the more conversations you can have about cases, the better. There's also such a thing, and it's often confused, which is collegiality, which is just being friends and getting along. And that helps. But people often look at the United States Supreme Court and they say, you know, these people Scalia and Ginsburg, they were so different, they had such different views, and yet they were friends. Of course, they are, but that didn't help them come to closer views, because they each started from such different viewpoints, and it wasn't possible often for them to meet, although sometimes they did. But you start off with a basic, I hope, collegiality in a situation where people actually are happy with each other or have worked out some sort of relationship, where they can talk to each other in confidence, because there has to be a trust at the basis of all of this communication, if you want to get to a real answer or consensus as close as you can get. 

Robert
So now in the current moment, a lot of those discussions that might once have been around a table with coffee in front of us, have switched to Zoom or other electronic means. How does that affect the group decision making and talking to one another?

Beverley
Yeah, I don't know. I think in different ways. I do quite a bit online decision making. As you mentioned, to do some arbitration and that kind of thing. And it's possible, particularly if you have this relationship of trust, and different people raise different points, and you end up with a consensus, usually. So, I don't think it's impossible. We can use it very, very well to achieve consensus. So, I don't personally see any particular difficulty. There may be issues, as I mentioned earlier, with body language and reading people's face. And we know from psychology and so on how complex all of this is. So, it's easier to read body language and people’s facial expressions when we are face to face. So that is one aspect that we have to be aware of when we're talking about, when we're using electronic video communications. It's really difficult, even on the family ones – we all have these family Zooms or FaceTimes. And our loved ones whom we think are so beautiful, look so ugly and they look so unnatural, and you're saying, and they don't know when to come in on the conversation. So yeah, there are definite limits, but in a business situation or a political, or whatever, you can have that conversation, people can bring up the points and you can get to a consensus, but on the social aspect of it, very difficult.

Robert
You could do a hearing, but I don't think we found a way to do a party yet.

Beverley
That's, it, we can't do parties on Zoom. I have tried. I mean, I've been invited to a couple of parties on Zoom and people bring their little drink, but it's not the same, no.

Robert
You were fortunate, I think, to retire, and there were some wonderful events marking your retirement, but it would not have been the same as a retirement party on Zoom. 

Beverley
No, we had some good parties.  

Robert
You mentioned the polarization, as people are following their own little Facebook groups to get their news. How do you yourself gather information from the media outlets these days?

Beverley
Well, when I was a judge, you know, the judges have to be very circumspect, and you don't want to get involved in conversations that people might think are showing bias, or even the people you're having them with are biased. So, I just did what almost all judges did, I think, and that's, stay off Facebook. And now I have not gone back on it. I could, but I find myself really busy and I just rely on those around me to say, oh, you know, aunt whatever, Nancy had this problem and everybody in the family Facebook is talking about it. There are others to do those things, but… and that's sort of a copout on my part, but I haven't ever got into much of the social media at all. 

Robert
You're consuming news from others. You're consuming harder news in a range of ways, I got it.

Beverley
But harder news, yes. Everything from your telephone and your computer, and newspapers. I still rely on newspapers, and I have a wonderful group of associates and friends who often will find an article in some newspaper I might not ordinarily see and send it to me. So, I get quite a bit of information. But the quality of some of it is really frustrating. I mean, you're sitting, waiting for a doctor or something. You pick up your iPhone and you get a story on the news app. And you get about two lines and then you can't go anywhere. And so, I find it very frustrating, because I tend to be someone who likes to read in depth. I like to read the opinion pages. I like to see, what actually happened, and this little headline, as we all know, can be terribly misleading. And so, it's not the way I like to get news. I still like more in-depth, but you can subscribe online to newspapers and get that kind of analysis, magazines, that kind of thing.

And because social media is so active, we're all I am on emailing and texting, and that kind of thing. And lots of people will say, well, read this or this is a good analysis. And so, that's how I'm getting my news these days, as well as actually subscribing to some of newspapers and reading them.

Robert
Do you have any advice? I mean, you've had an extraordinary career, really. And, as you mentioned, communication has been running all through it, from being a lawyer, to being a teacher, to being a judge, and now an author. Do you have any final advice for us about communication?

Beverley
Oh, I'm very bad at the big questions, but I think listening is important. I don't think you can communicate well… Too many people think communication is about me telling them what to think or what to do. And there is a close-mindedness that comes in. And I notice it a lot in some of the new approaches, like the insistence that on our campuses, that certain words not be spoken or certain ideas not be discussed. And it's as though. Okay, I've read about this, I've made up my mind. This is very bad, whatever it is. And therefore, I've solved the problem. It's all over and it can go away. So, I don't want to have another discussion. It's just that there are these mindsets that come in, where people don't want to explore. And I think exploring conflicting ideas is why we have achieved so much in our civilization. I speak broadly of our Western libertarian civilization. But there are powerful forces that want us only to speak what they tell us to speak, and they're on all sides. And of course, one is very worried about illiberal democracies, quote, unquote, that seem to be ascendant now in so many parts of the world.

Robert
Beverley McLauchlin, it has been a tremendous pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much.

Beverley
Thank you. Lovely to talk with you.
 

 

Host  Sophie Thériault

Guests: Françoise Bertrand and Antoine Pellerin

 

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Françoise Bertrand, a corporate director with a prestigious career, and Antoine Pellerin, a lawyer in administrative law and a man of theater, discuss "Influencing Others: Persuasion, Negotiation and Diplomacy for Conflict Resolution". Ms. Bertrand draws on her long history of experience to recall how communication can influence one's society. Mr. Pellerin argues that the role of government is no longer simply to make good decisions, but also to explain them. And they both emphasize the fundamental aspect of listening and paint a picture of brave spaces to move issues and relationships forward and to voice dissent.

 

 

Host: Robert Leckey 

Guest: Tammara Soma

 

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In this episode, Robert Leckey and 2014 Scholar, Tammara Soma, an Assistant Professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and co-founder of the Food Systems Lab talk about creating trust-based relationships between the academia and community-based organizations, ensuring accountability in terms of the outcome of the knowledge itself, and about the power of images and storytelling.

Transcript

Robert Leckey
Welcome to the Communications and Sharing Knowledge series of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Brave Spaces podcast. 

Tammara Soma is an Assistant Professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, where she conducts research on issues pertaining to food system planning, community-based research, waste management, and the circular economy. Prior to joining SFU, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, and the Food Equity Coordinator at New College (University of Toronto).  Her dissertation investigates the issue of urban food waste in Indonesia, by exploring the transformation of household food provisioning practices, due to factors such as urbanization, the modern supermarket revolution, the growth of the middle-class, and market liberalization. She is a co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Food Waste.

She has written for the Huffington Post, Policy Options, and Alternatives Journal. She's frequently interviewed by media, such as the BBC, Global News, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, CBC, and TVO’s Agenda. She is a Joseph Armand Bombardier SSHRC CGS Doctoral Fellow, an International Development Research Centre Doctoral Award recipient, and a SSHRC Top 5 Storyteller finalist, and a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholar from 2014.

Tammara, great to have you here! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how communication and knowledge sharing have been central to your work?

Tammara Soma
Absolutely! Thank you so much for having me!  So yes, communication and knowledge sharing is central to my work at Simon Fraser University and also the Food Systems Lab, because as a scholar, I do view myself as a public servant.

In my work I am constantly dealing with complex systems problem. And being a good communicator and being passionate about sharing the knowledge is a key part, I believe, of serving the public. So, at Simon Fraser University, which prides itself as a community-engaged university, I serve as the Researcher-in-Residence of the SFU Community-Engaged Research Initiative. We also call it CERi.  And so, the hallmark of the work that we do at CERi is accessible and engaging knowledge mobilization and supporting inclusive participatory research.

Robert
Just to follow up. Some professors… understanding that we all work in publicly funded institutions, but some take that responsibility as teaching the students in the room in front of them and publishing in scholarly journals.  Can you just say a bit more about how, for you, the public dimension leads you to be reaching outwards more?

Tammara
Absolutely. You know, the public dimension for me… of course, I do a lot of work engaging students, including students outside of my department, outside of my faculty. But I also work a lot with community organizations. In fact, for my work various community food community organizations are the people that I do hope to serve, particularly because many of the issues that I work in the food system, are particularly issues that impact them, issues around food access and food insecurity, issues around food injustice. And so, I'm very passionate about reaching beyond the academic institution level to the public.

Robert
Tammara, when you're mentioning, engaging with communities, and you're talking about issues such as food insecurity, you’re evoking, I think, working with some vulnerable people. How do you create relationships of trust and accountability in the work you do?

Tammara
That's a great question. You know, creating a relationship of trust and accountability can take time and it's important for me, it's important not to rush the building of trust. Because often I find in academia, we're pushed by deadlines, we’re pushed by, you know, the grad rep, the reporting mechanism, and you can't rush that.

And so, creating long-lasting relationships, for me, starts with stating one's intention. So, I state my intention: this is what I hope to do; this is how I hope to serve you. And also maintaining honesty and listening.  And for me also, because, you know, as a researcher, it's not that we're just the expert, but we're also going on a learning journey.

So, being accountable is also like giving credit where credit is due, admitting gaps and mistakes when mistakes are made, and always going through a process of bettering oneself, also as an individual and as a scholar.

Robert
And do you loop back to people you work with? I mean, do they see the final results of your research?

Tammara
Absolutely. I think that one of the biggest issues, especially when it comes to researchers… and I also work in Indonesia and other parts of the world… and so, one of these issues is called like the parachute researcher, where they come, they get what they want and then they just leave. Then they publish in an academic journal because that's what is valued often in academia. But then the people, they don't see any outcome of it, they don't have a report back, a mechanism. And that's something that I'm very passionate about – to make sure that there is accountability in terms of the outcome of the knowledge itself.

Robert
So, you don't see yourself just sort of swooping in to extract data from people?

Tammara
No, absolutely not. In fact, for me, a lot of the participants who work with our projects are, you know, we develop long lasting relationships and we continue to collaborate on various projects together. 

Robert
You spoke, Tammara… you certainly expressed a duty to be engaging with other communities, but can you just elaborate a bit? Why is it so important to foster and participate in, and navigate conversations across different communities and outside the academy?

Tammara
In 2016, when my colleague Belinda Li and I founded the Food Systems Lab, we started to create a space, basically, where we can address complex systems-related issues by bringing very diverse people together, but not just people who agree with each other.  So, we felt it's important to also understand and navigate through competing priorities and competing interests.  

A lot of the work that I do as a professional community planner is dealing and working with community members who may not always agree with one another. And so, for us, we do this by deep engagement, a lot of listening, conflict resolution.  And I think this is important because, as you probably know, increasingly we are polarized as a society judgment comes, right? Judgment comes very quick and fast in social media, one often does not get a second chance. And so, in my work, we try to create a space for people to be vulnerable, to be honest, because being vulnerable, listening and suspending judgment can also allow for spaces of healing and the building of relationships with people that would otherwise not build relationships at all.

Robert
I love what you're talking about. Concretely, how do you foster, how do you sustain space where people can be vulnerable in the way you're mentioning?

Tammara
So, the building of relationship is key, because when people trust that I will give them an ear that I will suspend judgment and just listen. Even though I might disagree with it, even though sometimes their argument or their ideas might actually hurt me personally. But I give them that space to be vulnerable, to be honest, and suspend judgment, just so I can get a glimpse or a sense of like what they feel, how they got to that conclusion and maybe some of the deep-rooted causes of the problem, and some of the fear that then gets transformed into certain attitudes or behaviors.  That's a training that I do for myself, but then I hope to build relationship in that way by suspending judgment in some cases.

Robert
It's fascinating. You've talked about the objectives you're trying to pursue. What specifically are some of the different media or creative platforms that you use when trying to democratize knowledge outside the academy?

Tammara
Oh, that's great. So, I love storytelling. Oh my gosh, I love storytelling! That's why I entered that SSHRC storytellers’ competition.  So, storytelling is something that I grew up learning in my culture. I usually start my class or my presentation with the story.  And I think we all know that storytelling and oral traditions are key teaching tools for many indigenous communities here.

But so, in addition to storytelling, I also, at the Food Systems Lab, we love the multimedia approach. So, we do a lot of filming of our research output. We upload them on YouTube. I participate in a lot of podcasts like this one. And of course, media engagement, magazines, newspapers, and what have you.

But I also do a lot of public speaking for public libraries, schools, for children. And increasingly, I have been doing a lot of speaking to senior groups, because there are on Zoom. They can't really meet up in person in many cases. So, they are doing a lot of lunch & learns, the senior groups here in BC and beyond. So, I'm very passionate about supporting them as they seek to continue education. And I love connecting with seniors.  And of course, a lot of our work are made available and accessible on our website. So many people would actually contact the Food Systems Lab after stumbling on our website. And so, for the listeners out there, you can check foodsystemslab.ca if you want to learn more about our work.

Robert
I've got to say that your website is gorgeous, right? It's an extraordinarily beautiful site. But I find it really intriguing that the combination… I mean, storytelling can sound kind of timeless or ancient, but that you're linking it, that you're using YouTube, it's on the website that you're having lunch & learns over Zoom and so on with seniors… It seems to me a really beautiful use of traditional techniques in the current moment.

Tammara
Oh, thank you so much. And by the way, I want to credit my colleague, Belinda Li, because she was the one that developed the website. So, a credit is where credit is due.

Robert
You've talked... I'm thinking again about trying to make the outputs of your research accessible to communities and individuals or leaders who might be affected by the results. And you already said, oh, you don't get a second chance and you got to build trust, but do you have any further thoughts on some of the challenges in really trying to make your research accessible?

Tammara
There are many challenges, actually, but maybe I'll talk about a few. So, the first one is language.  I was actually honoured one time when an academic told me that my research is something that her grandma would understand and would care about, but she wondered if it was academic enough. You know, it was an academic critique, like, it makes sense, I think my grandma would care about it and she would totally be motivated to do something. But is it academic enough? And I think that's a problem, right? I think that's actually a problem in academia, that attitude of, why are we making it so complicated, in terms of the lack of accessibility of language? So, in general academic writing is largely inaccessible to the public. There's usually a lot of jargon, it's dense. And so, for me, I like to synthesize it and make it more accessible.  Maybe that's also because of my background – coming from Indonesia, having had to learn English as a non-English speaker. So, I know how important it is to have clear and accessible content for myself, in a way.  And also, I do a lot of work to translate my articles into op-eds, shorter blogs, and, for my work in Indonesia, I also present in the Indonesian language and try to write some short pieces in Indonesia. Because, obviously, if I am publishing in an English journal, it's not necessarily going to help the Indonesian people.
Language is definitely one challenge. 

And I will just say one more is the issue of paywall. And I think we all know this, and the thing is, increasingly, research grants, like SSHRC will allow us to set aside money to make our paper open-access, but some of the fees are so egregious that, personally, I would rather use that money to support and pay for more students or even pay more community participants. It's just, yeah, it's unreasonable.

Robert
It's thousands of dollars and you look and you say, this could be… what else could I do with that money, right?

Tammara
Yeah. One of them I saw was $11,000 US.

Robert
Whoa! Your comments about language, it's really interesting. It reminds me quite early in my career, the editor of an international journal gently told me, when returning the peer reviews, that I should remember that there would be lots of readers for whom English was not the first language. And I don't always live up to that, but it's a good reminder to communicate more simply than we often do.

Can you think… you're clearly super intentional and committed to trying to democratize knowledge. And I wonder if there's an example where you've really sensed the meaningful impact from doing so?

Tammara
Yeah, that is so important, particularly important in the work that I'm currently doing.
I just kind of want to tackle this issue of democratization of knowledge, because democratizing knowledge can help empower communities. And I would also argue that a shift – and I would caveat this with, where appropriate, because it's not always appropriate – on democratizing the idea of who is the expert.

So, in my work, we receive a funding from the SSHRC, New Frontiers grant for a photovoice citizens science food asset project, working with diverse community members in Vancouver, Port Alberni, and with the Kitselas First Nation.

Robert
Could you just repeat once more the name of the initiative?

Tammara
Oh yes. So, it's a SSHRC New Frontiers-funded grant on a photovoice citizen science food asset project, and we conducted this project in the City of Vancouver. Yes, photovoice. Do you know what photovoice is? Maybe I should explain to the listener? 

Robert
Please tell us just a bit more. 

Tammara
Okay. Photovoice is actually very simple. So, it's, basically, photography and storytelling. And so, connecting the two together. So, citizen scientists or participants will take photos, depending on the research question, depending on the project itself. For example, in our case – food assets, food places, and spaces, and culture, you know, cultural food assets that matter to them, that is meaningful to them. They would take photos of that and then we would connect and then we would go through the photos, because there's that saying right, a photo is worth a thousand words. Something like that. Exactly. So, it's a really beautiful and very fun research approach to do. 

And so, in this particular project, the citizen scientists are the experts. So, they have a say in the research outcome, research design, and we as researchers facilitate training in photography, but we learn from the citizen scientists about the key food sites, the key food knowledge, and key food assets that are critical for their foods, for their food system resiliency.  And so, it was really meaningful to see so many of the citizen scientists feeling empowered to be part of the research process. And that is, actually, the power of democratising knowledge. 

And I would just say one thing is that often… I don't know about you, but sometimes for me and for others, maybe you feel relief when a study is done. But in fact, in this particular case, so many of the citizen scientists in the photo voice project actually asked me and wished for it to be continued. So, I think that it's important to have democratized knowledge in that way, but also to make sure that there's a medium of outcome that will then make the citizen scientists proud. And in this case, we have photo books that are available in the Food Systems Lab website, to be viewed.

Robert
It sounds to me like you're really empowering people to participate in, to share knowledge on their part. I mean, it just sounds like a completely different level from having people sit in a focus group or do a sort of qualitative interview. It sounds very, very empowering. 

Tammara
Well, that's kind of the purpose of it.  But I will definitely say that in the Lab, how we work with even focus groups and qualitative interview is that we give it our all, we give 100%, and always we try to honor and recognize the fact that many of the participants who are busy are spending their time to support research. And so, because of that, we try to show our appreciation as much as we can through our mannerism, through our behavior, and through thanking, thanking them so much. And of course, paying them when it's a lot of work.

Robert
You were quite deliberate a moment ago. You put in a caveat about, sort of, redefining who the expert was, where appropriate. You clearly value communities’ expertise, but what is the space that only the university-trained expert nonetheless needs to occupy? Or, what did you mean by that boundary? 

Tammara
When it comes to this kind of caveat of “where appropriate,” in terms of democratizing knowledge, I think that, in the case of the pandemic or in the case of health science, not everyone will be the expert in medicine or health science. So, I think it's important to also kind of make sure that we do listen to the experts. But at the same time, I actually watched something on Netflix, which, again, shows the power of democratising science or knowledge. There's a show where the doctor, who is a New York times columnist, she would be faced, and she would hear from all around the world and from around the United States of diseases or illnesses that are very hard to pinpoint. And sometimes it would stumble doctors, you know? And so, what she would do is she would actually post it on New York Times. Post a video of the person dealing with the illness and then kind of democratize it by saying like, “Hey, everyone around the world. What do you think is the problem here?” And then from that, she uses her medical training to actually kind of narrow down some interesting possibilities that would otherwise not have been thought before. So, I think there's a tool for that.  But again, in the case of the pandemic, not everyone can be experts.  

Robert
No. Agreed. You've got such a nuanced perspective on these issues. If you could recommend a book or article or video or podcast that has informed your views, that you would recommend to us, what would that be?

Tammara
Oh, my goodness. This is exciting.  

Robert
One or more.

Tammara
One or more. I will ask to recommend two, if that's okay. So, okay. The first is the book by, I think, you know him, 2016 Trudeau Scholar, Jesse Thistle, “From the Ashes.” My goodness! It is a book that is at once heartbreaking and hopeful.  And it is so amazing to see someone who faced so much hardship and struggle and yet worked so hard to accomplish so much. So, that book has motivated me to do more work on decolonizing the food system. And actually, my 14-year-old son just finished Jesse's book, and, he can't believe that I actually know Jesse. So he was like, what? You know, Jesse Thistle? I'm like, yes, I do!

Valerie
It is an extraordinary testimony.

Tammara
Absolutely. So, yeah, he's a hero in our house. And the next one… so the next one is a documentary on Netflix called “Salam” about the life of Dr. Abdus Salaam, who is the first Muslim Nobel prize winner in physics. And so, he came from an impoverished family, won a scholarship to study abroad in UK.  He was persecuted because of his faith by his country. And yet even through the persecution and the struggles, he was so passionate about serving the people. And so, when he won the Nobel prize in physics, he used his Nobel prize to build the international center for theoretical physics and devoted his cause to train scientists from the Global South. And so, I hope that one day I might have the opportunity to do the same. So yeah, those two.

Robert
That's wonderful. Tammara Soma, it's been such a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much.

Tammara
Thank you so much! Have a great day!
 

 

Host: Sophie Thériault 

Guests: Christian Nadeau and Benjamin Gagnon Chainey

 

Resume

Christian Nadeau and Benjamin Gagnon Chainey explore the theme Dialoguing with Others, Expanding Your Tools for Effective Communication Across Audiences and Media. Mr. Nadeau is a professor of history and philosophy and Mr. Gagnon Chainey is interested in literature related to the body and illness. For them, communication takes on new avenues. They believe that a plurality of points of view is fundamental to healthy and responsible debates, while recognizing that more closed spaces allow certain issues to be explored in a more favourable manner.

 

 

Host: Robert Leckey

Guests: Sara Pavan and Milad Parpouchi

 

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In this podcast Robert Leckey talks with 2013 Scholar Sara Pavan, a strategic planning advisor with BC Housing and Milad Parpouchi, 2017 Scholar, a researcher at the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University. They talk about how to get people interested in your ideas and research, and how respectful communication built on trust helps involve a variety of stakeholders in research and policy.

 

 

Transcript

Robert Leckey

Welcome to the Communications and Sharing Knowledge series of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Brave Spaces podcast. 

Today, we are discussing awareness of others, communicating with empathy, and building trust. Milad Parpouchi is a public health professional, a researcher at the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and a former Canadian Institutes of Health Research doctoral scholar.

His work focuses on the health and human rights of marginalized and vulnerable populations. He has conducted groundbreaking research on food insecurity, sexual behavior, criminal justice involvement, and health service use among people experiencing homelessness and mental illness. And he is an accomplished university instructor and public speaker. 

Beyond his work in public health, Milad is an active volunteer and community builder. He co-founded the Health Sciences Undergraduate Student Union at Simon Fraser University and serves as a mentor to prospective graduate students. He is also a professional pianist, keyboardist, and drummer. Milad is a 2017 Trudeau scholar and a member of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation's Alumni Executive Committee.

Sara Pavan is a strategic planning advisor with BC Housing, a Crown corporation that develops, manages, and administers a range of subsidized housing options and programs across British Columbia. Prior to that, Sara was a program evaluator at BC Women's Hospital in Vancouver, BC. Sara holds a PhD in political science from Queens University, and she completed a Killam post-doctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. Her academic work focused on the processes through which immigrants to Canada become acquainted with political institutions, develop attitudes, such as interest in politics and trust in political institutions, and become politically active.

Throughout her past and current experience, her main interest has always been the positive effects that social services and programs can have in engaging citizens, particularly those most likely to be marginalized in the public sphere. Sara is a 2013 Trudeau scholar.

Can you tell us Sara, a little bit about yourself and how communications and knowledge sharing have been central to your work?

Sara Pavan
Yes, sure. So, I'm a public servant. I currently work in the provincial public sector in British Columbia. I'm an immigrant to Canada myself. I was born in Italy. I've lived in Canada for 12 years. I worked and studied and lived in five different countries. Communications are central to my work right now, and have been central to my growth and my development as a person for the past decades, as long as I can remember. 

Much of my work right now is really about communicating, in the sense of packaging information, specifically about housing programs and services for many different audiences, right? So very often it's the same information, but it needs to be packaged differently when it's communicated to varied audiences, like the public, citizens, MLA or MPs, ministers, and policy makers. And in my previous life as an academic, I conducted very intensive field work with immigrant communities. As you mentioned earlier on in my bio, that was done with the purpose of really getting a deeper understanding of how folks that immigrate to Canada experience Canadian politics when they settle and as they build their new life in this new country.

So, overall, 525 people were interviewed during the course of my PhD research. And then later on, during the course of my postdoc, another further 30 people are interviewed in very in-depth interviews, and those included politicians as well. And during that process, much of what I realized was that the hardest part of research was not so much the conceptual and theoretical laying the groundwork for the field work, but it was actually about understanding, how I could explain the purpose of what I was doing. And getting people interested enough in it, to be willing to participate in my work. And that was by far the most challenging aspect. When that part of the work, the field work, was concluded, I had to also relearn how to communicate people's varied lived experiences in ways that fit the traditional disciplinary academic boundaries. And that was also yet another process and another challenge. And I think throughout all of these experiences, I've come out with an awareness that I never had before with such clarity in my head, that really communications are such a fundamental part of whatever we manage to achieve in life. We can do the most amazing work, have the most groundbreaking ideas, but we are not able to get people interested in it, in these ideas, then the impact that we have will always be limited.

Robert
Wonderful.  Milad, tell us a little bit how you come at the centrality of communications and knowledge sharing.

Milad Parpouchi
Sure. Thank you. I guess I'll start by mentioning that I'm a researcher working at the Center for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction, otherwise known as CARMHA. We're based out in Vancouver. My work involves investigating health and social interventions that promote recovery among people experiencing mental illness, addiction, or homelessness. I should mention, when I say recovery, I mean, living a satisfying and meaningful life as defined by people experiencing these conditions. Generally speaking, communication or knowledge sharing, these have been really important at all phases of our research, right from the beginning, whether we're talking about the conception of a study formulating a relevant research question, all the way through to the dissemination study findings. Throughout that entire process, we're collaborating, we're communicating, we're sharing knowledge, and really learning from a variety of stakeholders. And when I say that stakeholders… a few key stakeholders in most, if not all of our projects are policy makers, people with lived or living experience of mental illness, addiction, or homelessness, also service providers and indigenous people in indigenous-led organizations.

The goal really is to mount a research project that's relevant to the populations that it's about, not only in terms of the research question, but also, how is that research to be conducted? What kinds of questions are asked? And of course, ultimately, I think we want to influence health and social policy. And in order to do those things, in my experience, it's been important to communicate, to exchange knowledge, and really to collaborate through an effective structure with the people in groups that I just mentioned and in a variety of ways: interpersonal communication, written communication, social media, mass media interviews, community, conference presentations, and so on.

Robert
So Milad, you've talked a little bit about some of the different ways in which you communicate and how important that is, but when you're being deliberate about it, how do you really set about communicating in an enriching and effective way?

Milad
So, there are a few basics that come to mind. One is, trying to communicate in an accessible way to the audience that you're writing to or communicating with. Often, it's better to, I think, get your point across in a variety of ways. Few people have access to academic journals, for example. 

At an interpersonal level, I think, one's mindset is important within the context of communication – being mindful of how subtleties in your communication come across to other people and how it makes them feel. But the person you're interacting with may have a different opinion, for example. I often work with a variety of stakeholders in research projects, and they may suggest modifications that I disagree with. But before communicating, I really do try to adopt the mindset that, hey, I might be wrong. I think I'm right, but I might be wrong. And I'm open to new knowledge and new ways of doing things. I really think that that subtle difference in your mindset undoubtedly influences the way you come across in your communication, really to enable active listening.

Robert
There's a certain vulnerability in acknowledging that you could be wrong. 
Sara, carrying on, how do you think of yourself as building effective and enriching communications?

Sara
You know, I love what Milad said before me. And as I reflected about this question, I actually had very similar thoughts to what you just shared, Milad. You know, I like the way that the question was framed, because I think that effective and enriching are two aspects of communication that tend to go together. So, how do we know if communication is effective? We generally know it, because we come out of it feeling like we have learned something new, we have known a new person, or at least we thought about something that we knew about before, but in a different way.

And this tends to feel very enriching for the person that is, maybe, conducting an interview. And generally, when it feels enriching for us, it's very likely that it feels enriching for the other party as well. It's unusual that two people in a conversation would feel radically different about the experience. They may have different ideas. But they may feel similarly about the interaction and the experience. I think… one of the things that I always try to think about is when I want to communicate with people, I want to build a relationship with them. And I think I try to go into that process with the premise that listening and exchanging ideas doesn't mean that we need to agree, right? We may find some ideas appalling. We may not like them at all. We may find that they're not safe, they're not culturally safe, they're not racially safe. But if we want to really be in an horizontal relationship with the other people, we really need to go into the process with the mindset of listening and just being open to whatever ideas or thoughts the other party may bring up. And I know, in my experience, I've experienced this a lot when I was interviewing politicians. And I know, some of their ideas were not ideas that I would normally support, and yet in conversations with them, they shared a lot about their life histories and journeys, which actually helped me to understand a lot about why they held the views that they did.

And it doesn't mean that I ended up agreeing with their views, but I ended up realizing that we are actually human, right? And so, whenever we disagree with somebody, we can always remember that we have something fundamentally common to share and we can build on that, to be more relaxed and be present with the other person as we have conversations and interactions.

Robert
So important distinguishing the potential for meaningful communication from the question of whether we're already in the same camp, huh? Sara, building on that a bit further, are there specific ways you think of trying to build trust in these kinds of 
exchanges?

Sara
You know, when I was conducting my field work for my PhD, I really had very little experience of going out into a community that I had no ties to and trying to get people involved in my work. And so, I had to learn a lot of new things in a relatively short period of time. And I kind of had to learn how to fly the plane when I was already flying it. But I think, over time, this experience has helped me to be very intentional about learning, what builds trust in communications and in relations with others. And I think that right now, the question of trust is so important, cause I think one of the greatest social challenges that we are experiencing is the erosion of trust in democratic institutions, the erosion of trust in experts in science, right? So how do we build those bridges? How do we create and repair, create trust and repair distrust? 

You know, I think of three elements that I've learned through time. And again, like Milad said, I may be wrong, and maybe a few years down the line, I will say something different or I will have different ideas about these three rules that I use, or I may have new rules… But the first one of them is one that I learned from an indigenous elder that I was working with while I was a program evaluator at BC Women's Hospital. And one of the things she always shared with me is that, whenever you are building relationship with others, you have to remember that relationships go at the speed of trust, and trust goes at its own speed. So, you cannot force a relationship. You cannot rush it. If you are a researcher, if you're a policy maker, I know you have a limited timeline, but if people sense that you're trying to get into a relationship with them just to get something out of it, as opposed to just being in the moment with them and learning something from them, they will sense that really easily. And that will actually not help you build trust or build relationships at all. I know it's difficult to dedicate time to build a relationship, but it's very important to do that. We did it in personal lives, it's the same in our public lives as well. So that's number one. 

The second one also taught to me by the same indigenous elder is being authentic. And I know that there is a lot of talk about being authentic on social media. And I think people interpret being authentic in many different ways. I found out, for me, what really stuck was, you know, something that elder used to actually practice. Whenever you are in a work meeting and people are asked to introduce themselves to each other, people will normally start by saying what their work is, what their education is, what their professional credentials are. And she always used to stop people and say, okay, this is great, but I actually want to know who you are. What's your community? Why do you like doing what you're doing? What's your motivation? What brings you to this work? And I found that that was so powerful in actually making people reveal their human self and say something more than just what they're good about in their work. And again, it requires some vulnerability. It requires time, cause you cannot just expect that everybody will be so willing to share a lot about themselves when they've just met somebody else, but it can be very powerful, then it builds over time, right? So, over time it actually helps people to come together a as a community.

And the third element, connecting back to the conversation we had before about not needing to agree and just being open to learn from others is, I think, building on commonalities. And I know what I'm going to say… not everybody agrees with this, but something that really made me think a lot recently was… I was listening to a podcast by somebody who teaches, known violent communication. And she talked about, how can we get together with our relatives over Christmas or Thanksgiving? And knowing that some of them disagree with vaccine mandates, they don't want to get the vaccines, so on and so forth. How do we approach these conversations? And one of the things she said is, we have to remember to build on what we share with people. We may not agree with them on their views on vaccines and science, but what we agree with them about is, we all care about our health. We care about our health in very different ways, but we all care about our health, and it doesn't mean we need to agree with everybody else's views. But if we can start from knowing and sharing that premise that we all care about something in common, then that helps us to relax and be in the moment, as opposed to letting all of our opinions and beliefs kind of run faster than the interaction that we are having with a person in the moment. 

So, I know I'm going on and on here, but I guess the last thing I want to say is that I know I trained as an academic. I don't work as an academic right now, but that was my training. And in my scholarly work, I was trained for debate. I was trained to assess facts, to address criticism based on facts, and to try and persuade others of the value of my argument, based on the kind of intrinsic evidence-based value of my assertion. And I think this is great in science. It's great in the peer review process, it just makes our collective learning easier. It's fundamental to the work that we do in the social sciences, in the natural sciences, in the academic work in general. But when we think about the larger public, we have to remember that trying to persuade people based on the truth is actually very unlikely to succeed. I mean, I have family members that I don't really agree with a lot, and I tried in the past to persuade them with evidence. That didn't go very far, didn't go very well. So again, remembering that being right, sometimes, is less important than being able to make a connection. So, we actually have a chance to plant a seed in somebody else's mind and see where that seed grows, right? There are no guarantees that we are able to persuade somebody else, but if we try to persuade them with facts, we are less likely to succeed than if we just try to influence somebody by sharing who we are and trying to build a relationship with people.

Robert
So much wisdom in that. And your point, Sara, about how establishing trust takes time. Makes me think of some very unsuccessful efforts that universities sometimes make to consult indigenous communities. You know, they send an email and they say, we're consulting you and want to hear from you in two weeks. And we're going to move on in a kind of transactional way.
Milad, coming at this from the work you've done, how do you think of yourself as building trust?

Milad
One of the most effective ways of building trust is really to invite people, key stakeholders, to be part of the research, to the table, and perhaps to even be part of the research team, to do that often. This can involve what we've done in the past is to set up a project governance committee, where members of all stakeholder groups are invited to meaningfully partner on the conception…  all the phases of the research, from the conception, the design, the implementation, the evaluation, knowledge mobilization of the research projects. And of course, hopefully, you're providing appropriate compensation and most importantly, decision-making space. This is, I think, very important if you want your research to be relevant and credible to the groups who are affected, and really for the greatest opportunity for translating findings into action. 

To build off what Sara mentioned, it's true, we don't always have to agree. And often that's the case. Empathy is what I think about. Going into a conversation, I think, consciously reminding ourselves that people have different experiences that inform their perspectives and this may seem like a no brainer, but consciously, repeatedly, reminding ourselves that people have different experiences that inform their perspectives and being mindful of that actively, I think helps to communicate with others respectfully in the presence of disagreement, or if there're a variety or plurality of perspectives, if we really intend to have a good faith conversation.

Robert
So just thinking further on that. I mean, we know there are groups that have historically been underrepresented in the corridors of power in universities, and they have faced difficulties in accessing the ways that some other people have for sharing their knowledges and their ways of knowing. So, some groups are not able to share their knowledge through academic institutions, or through the research community, or through other knowledge mobilization venues. So, how do you think we can access or connect with such individuals or communities and help them share their knowledge?

Milad
Yeah, that's, I think very important. Thinking of my own field, maybe on a bit of a tangent here, but I say it's important because I think many current sources of distress, despair, of mental illness, of addiction are related to differences in the ideas and ideologies held by different members of societies. And I think some of that is bridgeable on the basis of evidence. 

Coming back to your question, some of the strategies, I think, we've already discussed well help here, but I think there are other strategies as well. I mentioned inviting people to a research project governance committee. But what if that proves challenging because of, like you mentioned, access difficulties, or perhaps it's a lack of trust? One strategy I think, and we've employed this, is to partner with organizations that are serving the population that you'd like to work with and in their communities. They may advise you directly or refer people themselves for the study of interest, because they may have already built that trust. Other practical or logistical considerations, I think, the location of, say, participant recruitment – ensuring that's not happening in a location or at a time that's uncomfortable for the potential participant.

You can seek advice from those who you recruit to the study on the best ways to reach other members of their communities and organizations. And of course, I recognize that there are known limitations to recruiting people through organizations. Some people aren't in contact with services or organizations. And there are other ways, I think, to hopefully successfully get around that, which is direct outreach, as an example.

Robert
And Sara, what do you think about how we can access or connect with the individuals and groups that typically don't have so much access to share their knowledge? 

Sara
I really agree with everything that Milad said so far. Maybe I would just add something about checking our own intentions beforehand, because I do know that now it's becoming more and more part of funding packages, requirements, and best practices, the idea of reaching out to communities that have been underrepresented in research.
And I think, we have to really check our intention and make sure that we are just doing that because we are required to do it for funding reasons, for funding requirements, or because it sounds good that we do it. But we have to check our intention and make sure that we actually value what people have to say. And I've seen negative experience out there, where people reach out to communities that have been underrepresented and they want to engage them in research. And then the communities feel that they're actually being let down by researchers, because they can sense that the engagement is done on a rush basis, just to check a box, but there's no real value to the knowledge and the experience that people are sharing. 

So, I think we have to always approach communities really believing that we value their knowledge. And we don't just think that that's popular knowledge that's useful, but we do have knowledge that is superior to that. I think we can say that scientific knowledge may be different than popular knowledge, but we cannot start with the premise that it's superior to it. Otherwise, I think, that it will be very difficult to build genuine relationships with communities that actually do need researchers to be frank and honest and work with them to develop work that actually will benefit communities that have been historically marginalized and made vulnerable by our systems of power.

Robert
It's really interesting to think that they can tell if we're not doing it…

Sara
Oh yeah. I've seen that time and again, yeah.

Robert
Turning back to Milad for a moment. Can you think of an example of what you would say was meaningful impact, that was the upshot of respectful dialogue and communication building on trust?

MIlad
Yeah, so I worked on a Pan Canadian…. it was a research demonstration project. It was called At Home/Chez Soi. I worked on the Vancouver site, and it essentially involved an experiment, testing a supported housing model called Housing First, which essentially involves the provision of permanent housing in the private market, combined with community-based health and social services for people experiencing mental illness and homelessness. 

The first activity of the study team in Vancouver was to convene focus groups of people with lived experience and also service providers in different settings, like shelters on the street, people in prison, and to ask them, what forms of assistance they would most value. They also advised on the development of the study protocol, there was space to meet and discuss different perspectives respectfully and with an open mind. The research team didn't come and say, hey, what do you think about this study design? It was asking them about their perspectives. And consequently, the study had an actually extremely high follow-up rate, it was 90 something percent. The research team partnered with community agencies who referred people experiencing serious mental illness and homelessness to the study. All of these activities, I think, ensured that the research was more relevant and sensitive to the needs of the participants and their communities. The study interviewers were trained. They knew how to debrief with distressed participants, being flexible in meeting participants in the locations and times that were convenient for them. They communicated in nonjudgmental and respectful manner. There were peer interviewers that were involved, and all of this undoubtedly contributed to trust building.

I'll mention at the same time policy makers at all three levels of government, they were engaged heavily from the beginning, with honest discussions about the study, the results as they arose. Later, there was a study published, I think it was in 2017, where key informants expressed that it was this continuous contact throughout the study, the trusting relationships between researchers and policy makers that had formed and really provided a space for different perspectives to come together, as opposed to just everyone going their own way or engaging in… building off what Sara was saying, just a funding requirement or tokenism. There was also a speaker's bureau, where participants themselves could present findings of the study and their own experiences, as one form of the knowledge mobilization. 

I should say, in the end, one of the impacts through this process was, the housing and support intervention that was tested in the study was adopted in Canada's Federal Homelessness Strategy. Now, of course, there were other important factors as well that made that happen. But honest communication between multiple stakeholders throughout the study, I think, was key.

Robert
Wow. Thank you very much. Milad, you were talking about engaging with the groups that aren't necessarily insiders in our academic institutions. And when you go back to share with them, where the work has gone or what you've learned from them, what are the ways in which you do that sort of follow up?

MIlad
Yeah. So, when I mentioned the speaker’s bureau through the At Home/Chez Soi study, that's one way, for example. The study doesn't… it's not like we have the findings and that's it, goodbye, and it's over. A lot of the times what we've done is to co-create materials for dissemination with participants, and to present those to community meetings, community agencies. And so, we're working with people who were participants and people with lived experience. And so, it's not a kind of, the study's over and now that's it. We were still writing manuscripts. This study ended… the At Home/Chez Soi project ended formally in 2013, and we're still writing papers.

One thing that kind of put a damper on things was COVID. And during that time, research projects… it was hard to meet with people because of public health restrictions and whatnot. So, there were obstacles. But the approach is to work with participants and the communities that they come from, to work on the resolution of the study, and what the findings are, and how we want to go about disseminating results.

Robert
And Sara, when you think of how you can see respectful dialogue and communication arising from trust, leading to impact, what do you think of?

Sara
I think that there are micro impacts. Like the one that Milad was just talking about as an example, and there's also macro impacts that you can see and feel at the interpersonal level. And I think that those can be very powerful and transformative, because just as we talked about the fact that people can sense whether a researcher, a policymaker or whomever, the expert is… people can sense whether they're being genuine or not. And if they are not genuine, they will feel, they would be unlikely to participate and engage. At the same time, when people feel that somebody is being genuine and really cares about the knowledge and the experience that communities have to share, that can really start to change the perception that people have of researchers and experts, right? So, we all actually hold a little bit of power in transforming existing perceptions and biases. Well, not biases, because some of them are based on evidence, right? Existing perceptions and beliefs and opinions that communities may have about experts out there, right? So, remembering that power, I think, is very important. And what we bring into interactions with people in our work has a lot of potential to transform the way that different communities, that whole different levels of power can come together. 

I wanted to share an example of a micro impact that I hope I had earlier on in my PhD work. I was interviewing people and one of the questions that I asked them was how people identify themselves. This question is very often asked in a structured way. So, the question would be, how would you identify yourself culturally, or ethnically? And then a number of options are suggested like European, white, British, indigenous, Asian. But I didn't actually follow up with any cues. I framed that as an open-ended question. In this specific case, I was interviewing a community leader. So, somebody that actually had a lot of experience talking to experts, talking to the public and doing a lot of public speaking. And I was met with silence for a while and, you know, I was getting worried. So, I just, oh my God, what did I say? And then he actually teared up and he said, you know what, thank you. I've never been asked this question this way. And you know, this has just given me a chance to think about myself in a way that I have not before. Now I felt honored to be part of that interaction. And I felt that it was very important for my own research as well, to be able to realize, how much labels that we create in questionnaires actually have a way of shaping people's perceptions of themselves. And when we've removed those labels, people actually had an opportunity to think in their own terms.

I don't know, the person never revealed to me how they felt, but I know that they were impacted. And I wonder to this day, whether they remember that interaction and what came out of it. But I just wanted to share that as an example of those little micro impacts that we can have in our interactions with others, and we can have those impacts in our everyday lives as well, right? Just remembering how we engage with others and what we are bringing to those interactions, and the potential that those interactions have to change power relations and systems.

Robert
In that moment you created space that that participant did not otherwise experience.

Sara
Exactly, exactly.

Robert
So, Sara, of all the ideas and things that have influenced you, if you had to recommend to us a book or podcast, or video, or other form of media that you'd recommend to us, what would that be?

Sara
Recently, in the past two years, I've been studying a lot about nonviolent communication. And this came out of a class that I was taking on leadership. One of the questions that I asked the instructor was, how can I learn to be assertive and how can I learn to be able to influence others while being kind and compassionate? What are the tools out there that can help me to do that? And one of the things that she suggested was, look up nonviolent communication. And this was a technique that was invented by a guy in the US called Marshall Rosenberg. I think he was a psychologist. I think he passed away a few years ago, who actually thought about nonviolent communication as a new language that people can learn, just as we learn a second language. And it's a technique of being in the moment with people, particularly in charged, intense conversations. Where we disagree, where there is conflict, where there's no consensus and it doesn't seem like consensus can even be found. And it teaches us to be in an interaction with somebody and listen to what they have to say, and try to think about the need that they are expressing while they're speaking with us, while also being aware of our own need, without actually judging either what we are feeling or where the other person is coming from. I'm no expert at nonviolent communication, I'm still very much of a student, but I think it's a technique that holds some potential, particularly to teach us a new way to, in difficult situations of which there are so many nowadays, right? And I think that social divides and tensions are not going to subside anytime soon. So, I think we do really need to learn new techniques as people, as experts, as public intellectuals to actually be in conflict with others while respecting each other.

Robert
People may listen to this podcast later. But it's hard for me not to think of all the trucks lined up in Ottawa at the moment. And so, yeah.

Sara
I don't know what the solution is to that. Because I know, I'm aware of the tension between listening to people and also being aware of the fact that some of what people have to say, maybe, shouldn't have a space in the public sphere, right? So, there maybe isn't a space for racist, violent, antisemitic rhetoric out there. That's all true. I'm not sure if I was a politician, what I would learn from nonviolent communication. But I tried to learn about that as a regular folk, as an individual, and tried to think about how I can use it in my everyday interactions with people that I may disagree with.

And I know there's people out there that, for instance, I never would've imagined that they were afraid of vaccines. They were against restrictions. They were against the vaccine mandate… Sorry, the green pass, whatever that's called in different provinces. And yet they are, right? And so how can I be in conversations with them while disagreeing with them and without our views becoming more and more polarized?

And I think that if we can learn how to do that, then maybe there is less potential for extremely radical and polarized situations like the one that is happening right now in Ottawa. There's no guarantees, we can only try and see how it works for us.

Robert
Milad, what would you recommend – something you've read, listened to, seen that has informed your views?

Milad
I would have to say, so Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But in case everyone's already read that, there was an article that was published a few years ago. I found it interesting. It was a group of graduate students that got together, and this was a peer reviewed publication, it's open access. It's called Finding the Hidden Participant: Solutions for Recruiting Hidden, Hard-to-Reach, and Vulnerable Populations. It's interesting, it’s in the context of my own field, but it gets at some of the things that we've been discussing about accessing or contacting, reaching people who have traditionally had difficulty accessing academic institutions, building trust. Really practical advice, and I found that very interesting and a good kind of primer, an introduction to the topic, especially for people just beginning research and working with vulnerable and marginalized populations.

Robert
Wonderful. Milad, Sara, it's been such a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much.

Sara
Thank you.

Milad
My pleasure. Thank you.
 

 

Host: Sophie Thériault 

Guest: Christine Brabant

 

Resume

In this episode entitled "Awareness of Others: Gaining Trust Through Empathy and Deep Listening," education specialist Christine Brabant shares her reflections on her research experiences in homeschooling settings, including Hasidic and Aboriginal communities.

Communication is at the heart of her work to establish trust with these communities, and while trust is established through empathy, it is also built through the researcher's posture of openness in order to get closer to her interlocutors.

 

 

Host: Robert Leckey 

Guest: Sara Angel

 

Resume

In this episode, Robert Leckey interviews Sara Angel, the Founder and Executive Director of the Art Canada Institute and an expert on art restitution and art crime. They delve into the changes in how the world is experiencing art and communicating art, the work being done by museums to increase access to art and to increase inclusion of different communities, both past and present, and about the changes in the very definition of art that are taking place today.

 

 

Transcript

Robert Leckey

Welcome to the Communications and Sharing Knowledge series of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Brave Spaces podcast. 

Sara Angel holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. She is an expert on art restitution and art crime and teaches on both subjects at York University. Angel is a frequent media commentator on Nazi-looted art. She has appeared on The Agenda, and her writing has been published extensively in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Maclean’s, ArtNews, and other venues.
Angel is the Founder and Executive Director of the Art Canada Institute, the only national institution with an exclusive mandate to further the education and awareness of Canadian art and its history, and to promote it to a broad public audience, within Canada and internationally. Prior to completing her PhD, Angel had an extensive career in arts, journalism, and publishing, including as a commentator for CBC television’s On the Arts, an editor for Saturday Night, and a columnist for The National Post and editor-in-chief of Chatelaine.

Sarah Angel is a 2012 Pierre Elliot Trudeau scholar and sits on the Trudeau Foundation’s Development Committee. Sarah, it's great to have you with us today. Why don't you start off telling us a little bit about yourself?

Sara Angel
Thank you, Robert. It's really a pleasure to be here in conversation with you. I am somebody who did my PhD on Nazi era-looted art.

So, I have a specialty in art crimes, but what I'd really love to talk to you about today is the art world inclusivity and how things are changing within the art world.

Robert
Have you observed a kind of change your evolution in communication in our society across sectors?

Sara 
Robert, I'll speak to what I've observed in communication, in the field of viewing art: museums, galleries, et cetera, and online. And really, we are at a point right now in history where we're seeing an enormous change in how the world is experiencing art and communicating art, and I'll explain why. And it's basically like this: public art museums were founded in the 1700s. The idea was, put out the material and people will come. And really that model hasn't changed. Very-very few cultural organizations have a robust online presence. And as a result, our cultural heritage, our visual art is restricted to those who have access to a bricks-and-mortar museum and who have knowledge of the subject.

However, the Internet is really shaking that up. Really, really changing things, because now artists no longer have to wait for a curator to say, I deem you an artist, for an art historian to say, I deem you an artist. Artists are able to put up their own content on Instagram, on online platforms like Artsy. And so, there is much more of a democratization that is taking place among artists through online means. I would say, however, that many museums are still working in a somewhat antiquated mode.

Robert
You talked about the contemporary moment and the changes you're witnessing. I think there's a lot of agreement that we're in an increasingly polarized society. And I'm wondering, what for you is the importance of communication and knowledge sharing in that context?

Sara
We're in a polarized society when it comes to the art world, because there's disparity between economic factors, geographic factors of people that are able to physically get to a cultural institution. In other words, we're polarized because our art institutions aren't offering access to all. They're offering access to all if you’re willing to go and pay an admission ticket and enter. I see a lot of polarization there. But the optimistic news is that through online means – the sort of work that the Art Canada Institute is doing, the sort of work that social media platforms are doing – the polarization is dissipating.

Robert
So, you took us through a kind of social polarization, I guess: who has access, cultural capital, and who has the means to get into a bricks and mortar museum? I'm wondering… another way we think of a society being polarized, maybe politically, with increasingly extreme views. And I wondered if you had a sense, how communication and knowledge sharing, including through art, fits into that piece.

Sara
I think it fits into that piece in terms of a political belief of where you stand in terms of access to culture. I will tell you, Robert, shockingly, there hasn't really been a significant amount of attention paid to cultural policy in Canada since Pierre Trudeau's government. Really, there has not been a tremendous amount of thought about, how do we make culture accessible to all and available to all? Something called the Museums Act was passed, which meant that there should be more museums in smaller places. We are at a moment right now, politically, where a deep amount of thought is required, in terms of thinking about how do culture and digitization intersect and what can we do? So, in that respect, I think it really depends on where you are on the political spectrum, in terms of thinking about who should have access to culture, how do we make culture accessible and available to all. 

Most of the thinking politically around culture of late has been about who is included in the cultural conversation, which is a really important conversation to have. Specifically, the conversation has been like this: until, really, about 10 years ago, indigenous art was separated into a different cultural sphere. Most indigenous art would be placed at the museum of history or in ethnographic collections. Right now, what we are seeing is a very, very important shift, where indigenous art is becoming part of contemporary art, and there is no longer the separation, which is entirely how it should be. So, that conversation is happening. And yet at the same time, in terms of access to art… while, for instance, Inuit art is becoming part of the mainstream conversation, part of the mainstream collections and museums across the country, however, what we don't yet have is an ability to provide our Northern communities with access to art through a digital means.

Robert
I want to pivot a little bit to talk about meaningful interactions and specifically mindful interactions. And I wondered, in your view and experience, what kind of skills and actions, situations, attitudes, environments, or other aspects of emotional intelligence help us foster mindful interactions?

Sara
Robert, I'm so glad that you asked me that question, because it's something that I think about a lot. And what I think about is this: I'm always thinking about art. And what I would say is how to get people on the bus, how to get people interested in art, how to make all Canadians feel that our cultural output, our visual culture is for them.

And in terms of emotional intelligence, I think the first thing that we all have to think about is that everybody wants to be a part of the conversation, but the conversation is for everybody. But if we want everybody to be a part of that inclusive conversation, it means using a language, a rhetoric, a welcoming type of sensibility to make all feel part of the conversation.

In my opinion, for far too long, there has been a stratification of an art elite who understood what the art conversation was about. And then, everybody else who could try to figure things out if they chose to, but often they didn't, because they felt that the conversation wasn't for them. So, in terms of skills, I would say, the most important thing when it comes to making sure that art is accessible, is simply to say it clearly. I work with over a hundred museum professionals, art historians on a daily basis. And one of the things I will say a lot is, what are you trying to say? What is the message that we're trying to get? How can we engage an audience who doesn't know about this topic and make it feel relevant to them? In terms of attitudes, the attitude and the piece of wisdom that we need to keep in mind is that art, I believe, like so many other things, is a language of sorts, and it's a language that if one has access to and a familiarity with at an early age and is made to feel that it is for them, that it is a language that they can understand, that works really, really well. And as well, it's important to know that that language is a language that, again, can't be overly complex, can't be impenetrable, has to be considerate of all cultures, backgrounds, and the diversity of our country.

Robert
Hearing you speak, Sarah, about saying to artists, what is it you're trying to say? The same kind of instinct of trying to make things accessible, I think, applies, certainly, to researchers and scholars in many other fields within the Trudeau network and elsewhere. A lot of people who produce a lengthy scholarly article need to be asked what they're really trying to say, if they're going to spin that out to a broader audience, 

You've talked about this a little bit, but let's make it a little more personal. So, how do you personally work to initiate mindful interactions? And, from your perspective, what are the attributes of a really impactful, mindful interaction?

Sara
The way that I work personally, Robert, is that… again, thinking about art, the subject that consumes about 95% of my head space… what I think about is not trying to address it all in one sitting. In other words, if I am taking a group of students into a museum space, I will think about, rather than showing 25 works of art to, maybe, show three. So, three I will think about in a classroom when I'm talking about art, rather than to try to get through decades of history, to point out five, six or seven critical moments in history. I think, by reducing the broad picture to key elements and providing insight around those moments or around those works of art, subject matter, it allows one to really begin to be able to focus, to be mindful, to remember the instances, to remember the stories, rather than being overwhelmed by the multitude of information.

Robert
It's fascinating hearing that, Sarah, and it's making me think of my personal journey as a teacher. I look back at the volumes of reading I might have assigned in classes at the start of my career. And over the years, you sort of reduce, reduce, reduce, and you realize, it's better to have a meaningful discussion with something the students have had time to really read, rather than these masses that they've just been skimming. So, I find that really rich.

Sara
I think it is: reduce, distill… It doesn't mean that one can't go deeper, but I think, it provides the key touch points to focus on and then allow the conversation to broaden from there.

Robert
Now you hinted at this, when you spoke about how indigenous artists might be moving from the history museum into the art gallery, but the kind of question of who belongs in a museum or gallery has clearly been contested, subject to debate, and it's changed over time. Can you tell us, as you read things today, who has standing as an artist now, and has emotional intelligence been part of these changes or is that a separate conversation?

Sara
I will, first of all, say that the question of what defines art today, who gets to decide what is art today, what we consider as art today, is being radically transformed. As we are speaking right now, there are a few things that I can point to. 

There is an exhibition that was recently on at the McMichael Art gallery in Kleinberg. It's opening at the Vancouver Art Gallery in June. It will then be heading to the National Gallery of Canada next year. “Uninvited” is a term that was created to describe all the women artists who were making art while the Group of Seven were making art and who were not invited to be part of the Group of Seven shows. It's really a brilliant title. And I'll tell you that the reason they weren't invited, it wasn't because they weren't creating good works or they weren't artists, or they weren't skilled practitioners. They weren't invited, because they were not a part of the Academies, the schools that the Group of Seven went to, they weren't invited because they couldn't go to the same clubs as the Group of Seven went in some cases, because they had families or because they had other pursuits. Or because, in many cases, they were addressing different subject matters than the Group of Seven was painting. The Group of Seven was very interested in landscape. Many female painters were interested in what was going on in a more socioeconomic sphere. So, all this is to say is that this exhibition came forth and has been really receiving profound attention. Because what we are seeing is people are going to the exhibition and they are seeing works by women artists who are from across the country, from across many different cultural backgrounds, geographic areas. And what Canadians are discovering is, wow, who are these artists that I have never heard of? But they're fantastic artists that have not been invited.

So, what it's really making art historians and museum professionals do is to reassess, what makes an artist part of a canon? In many ways it's been because of, as I mentioned before, the schools they went to, the associations they were part of… Sometimes it had to do with, simply, the materials that were used. So, for instance, something like bead work or textile work 50 years ago was not considered art that could be a part of a museum. That is shifting up. I don't know if that's so much emotional intelligence or simply just intelligence and a more inclusive way to thinking about what constitutes our cultural heritage and education.

Robert
That's fascinating and really important because, I think, sometimes the instinct is to say, oh well, I guess back then women didn't have the leisure, the space. They didn't have a room of their own, they didn't have the resources to create. And you're telling us, they were creating.

Sara
It's true, the perceived wisdom is “not a room of one’s own” and “not the means,” but what we are learning is absolutely that is not the case. It's really what the case has been, how do we define what belongs in a museum collection? And so, that is something where there is really a fundamental shift taking place. For the better, thankfully.

Robert
And I'm wondering if you can give us an example of where you've observed a really meaningful impact that flowed from trust-based and respectful dialogue and mindful interactions.

Sara
I'll tell you about one that has really impressed me, and I had an involvement in it personally. It was a commission that the Canadian artist Kent Monkman created for the Metropolitan Museum. It was a commission that was unveiled in December of 2019, then, unfortunately, was hidden from the world for some time because of COVID. So, I'll tell you this story. The Metropolitan Museum decided that they had to reconsider what they were including in their collections. They're very European. Western colonial approach to institution building. And in order to do that, they did a really interesting exercise and they asked Kent Monkman, would he create two works of art, two large paintings – a diptych – that would be installed in the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where literally hundreds and thousands of people go through every day.

And there was a lot of conversation, a lot of dialogue with Kent. What do you want to do? How do you want to have this approach? Incidentally, my involvement was that the Art Canada Institute published the book about those two paintings. So, that is how I had a conversation and was part of the discussion. In any case, Robert, what ended up happening was Kent said, what I want to do is I want to look at the collection in the Metropolitan Museum and I want to create two paintings that riff off the collection, but change the narrative of art and history. Because, one thing that Kent Monkman had observed is that in history painting, in North American history painting, indigenous peoples were not part of those paintings. There would be vast landscapes that were romanticized, with no indigenous presence in them. There would be moments of history with no indigenous people in them. So, a really interesting conversation began, where Kent spoke to the European curators, the modern curators, and was given an invitation and opportunity to both learn about works in the Metropolitan Museum collection and then reinterpret those works with a viewpoint to including indigenous peoples in the history of art, in the history of great history paintings, which is one of the most important tropes of art making. And then, most interestingly, to revisit the narrative with a more hopeful, inclusive, and an opportunity to see the world in a fresh and new light.

And so, that was something that I saw, where there really was a very considerate, very insightful, very intelligent conversation that took place between a Canadian artist, a Canadian Cree artist, a major art institution, and then really has had an impact globally.

Robert
Your talk about the landscapes empty of First Nations people. It’s making me think that the jurists – the lawyers and judges are grappling with the longstanding doctrine of terra nullius, the idea that Western settlers came and found an empty land. And it's reminding me that if we're going to grapple with that and change it as a matter of law, we have to be thinking of the images we're seeing too, and that the narratives that they tell us explicitly or implicitly. 

Now I'm going to turn to a crazy hard question, I suspect, for you, given how you spend 90% of your time. If you had to recommend one book or article, or exhibition, or podcast, or other kind of artifact that all the listeners today should read or see, or listen to, and that's had an impact on you. What would you recommend to us, Sarah?

Sara
Well, you know, Robert, I'm going to make a recommendation based on two things that I have spoken about, because they're the two that really have impacted me, and most impressed me recently. And so, one is that I would recommend to everybody that they order the catalog or the book that accompanies the show Uninvited and as well go and see the exhibition when they're in Vancouver or at the National Gallery of Canada. There's going to be lots of opportunity to see that show.

But I would say that the scholarship in that book… There were over 30 art historians who were invited to write about those who were uninvited. And I guarantee you, for anybody who looks at that book, it's full of extraordinary art, and it's art that really changes the narrative and our understanding of this country's art history. And then the other thing that I would recommend is, and this is a little bit self-serving, because the Art Canada Institute did publish Kent Monkman's book on his Metropolitan commission. The book is called Revision and Resistance, and it looks at those two paintings, and it really unpacks their importance. There are four fantastic essays that go along with the book. And again, my belief is that Kent Monkman is the most important artist working in Canada today, for the reasons that I've told you about already. So, I think it really bears scrutiny to look at those two paintings and to understand them in more depth, because it is not just understanding two of the most important works of art that have been created in recent times, it really, those two works indicate a way that we have to change our thinking about how we create art, how we talk about art, how we collect art in the future, who is a part of the art world. And so, there… so, much is encapsulated in those two works. And the other thing I should mention is that I am told that those two works that are now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection are going to be traveling to Canada in the not-too-distant future. And so, when they're here, of course, everybody should go and see them. 

Robert
Sarah Angel, it's been such a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much!

Sara
Thank you, Robert. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.