Ideas - Slowing Down in Urgent Times: A Lesson in Hope

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Educators are wired for hope, according to professor Jessica Riddell. In her lecture delivered at the University of Prince Edward Island, she underscores the importance of slowing down in urgent times, and urges educators to to teach hope, share it, and imagine a better future.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. In these challenging times, how about a little hope? In these challenging times, how about a little hope? When despair feels monolithic, hope gets proximate. There is an elegance to the granular, and it is in the daily encounters and tiny tweaks everywhere, all the time, that will build the world we have imagined.

Jessica Riddell is an author and award-winning English professor. She teaches early modern literature at Bishops University, and her recent books focus on the concept of hope. Riddell emphasizes universities are an anchor of hope in society, but they are faltering and need to become more innovative to fulfill that mandate. She delivered the University of Prince Edward Island's 2024 Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy. Her lecture is titled, The Times Are Urgent, We Must Slow Down, Building Hope Circuits for Ourselves and in Community. community. The times are urgent. We must slow down. I first encountered this phrase from Nigerian poet and scholar Bayo Akamalafé in the early days of the COVID lockdown, and it rearranged the furniture in my

brain. We understand the first part of that sentence only too well. The times are urgent. Indeed, the word of the year in 2022, according to the Collins English Dictionary, was permacrisis, a new term designed to represent, quote, an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events, end quote. And then 2024 looked at 2022 and said, hold my beer. In just two years, the world feels even more rife with horror and heartbreak, from geopolitical instability and climate grief to war and genocide, from the dissolution of human rights to the deterioration of civil discourse, all mapped onto a backdrop of growing intolerance for difference and decreasing commitments to our common humanity.

The times feel increasingly urgent. It is hard not to oscillate between fixation and disengagement, between depletion and despair, between rage and helplessness, sometimes even in the same hour. And this is because our brains are wired for stories of catastrophe and dysfunction. These are, as American podcast host Krista Tippett calls them, the dominant narratives of our time. We get dopamine hits from doom scrolling. Screens give us instant rewards

in our neural centers, whether we're watching a catchy TikTok dance or witnessing Twitter trolling. Social media gives us emotional whiplash when our feed features a news item on the war in Ukraine, a news item on the war in Ukraine, followed by a post called Bread or Corgis, which puts pictures of bread loaves next to corgi butts and asks us to determine which one is which. I do recommend this delightful set of memes for anyone needing a dash of wholesome absurdity. But as a society, we are addicted to narratives of crisis, and the dominant narratives of our time center on scarcity, lack, and loss. And something different is always possible. Let's return to the title of this talk again. The times are urgent, we must slow down. My default response when times are urgent is to speed up. So the second part of this sentence, we must slow down, knocks me sideways. Thanks to late stage capitalism, when things get hard, I have learned to hustle harder. I work more,

teach more, write more, meet more. And I invite you to think about your own response to crisis or pressure or intensity at work or in your studies or at home. Many of us stay up later, race between meetings, strike committees, make charts, cram, caffeinate, eat your kid's Halloween candy. That's me. I do that. But if we want to get real, we also have to acknowledge that despite our complaints, we get something out of this rush. We feel essential, irreplaceable, needed. We are addicted to scarcity because it makes us feel relevant. However, it is also burning us out, making us sick, and bolstering the systems that are chronically in crisis. And on a practical front, individuals and systems cannot live in a state of perma-crisis. It degrades the bonds, relationships, and connections that make up the fabric of our communities.

The result is individual and corporate brokenness. If crisis is the new normal and uncertainty is the only thing we can anticipate, we need to learn how to do the opposite of what we have been conditioned to do. We need to rewire. Our old strategies are failing us. Our default responses no longer serve us. Our challenge becomes, how do we move into spaces of joy, purpose, and abundance when we are overwhelmed? This is where bio-akamalafi comes in to remind us we must slow down. And if we slow down for long enough and intentionally enough and stop getting distracted by corgi butts, we can surface the systems within which we are immersed, understand the forces that are shaping our

experiences, and have the courage to imagine a different world, and then build it together. For the better part of the next hour, I want to invite you to live into the following questions with me. How do we design hopeful and resilient systems for ourselves and others? How do we rewire our mindsets from scarcity to abundance, from crisis to flourishing, from lack to wholeness? And then how do we rewire our organizations at a structural level from our own local and proximate contexts? What uncomfortable truths and discomforts do we need to stay with in order to do this transformative work? And perhaps most importantly, how do we labor with joy and delight, purpose and pleasure?

Now, the Hope Circuits project emerged when we all slowed down. If you remember the early days of the COVID lockdowns, everything stopped, even as everything felt urgent. We were in crisis, but we also spent our days in pajamas. We watched with horror at images of people in hazmat suits in hospitals as we monitored our sourbread starters. We juggled children while working from home, but we also had Zoom parties. When things slowed down, systems that had become invisible to us became visible. We started bumping up against structures that no longer served us and realized that some of these systems never served many. The dominant paradigms within which we are immersed

came into sharper focus, and the things that had been latent or submerged came to the surface. We saw exhilarating community organizing and social movement building like Black Lives Matter, and we had a front row seat to the audacity of hope forged out of heartbreak and structural violence. Everywhere we looked, people were challenging the actual in the name of the possible. Now in my tiny corner of the world, I was on my own messy journey, both personally and professionally. Just as the 2020 lockdown happened, my co-authors and dearest thought partners, Dr. Lisa Dixon and Dr. Shannon Murray and I

had just finished the first draft of our book called Shakespeare's Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning. We were jubilant, even smug, with our shiny new theoretical frameworks for critical hope, critical empathy, and critical love. We discovered that these trinity of virtues in Shakespeare's works helped us unlock the plays and our classrooms in totally new configurations. And along the way, we found our authentic scholarly voices.

and along the way we found our authentic scholarly voices. For the first time in our academic careers we had written something that sounded like ourselves in all our weirdness and irreverence and curiosity. It was a heady time and then the universe intervened. In March 2020, as the world was shutting down, my 40-something-year-old husband, smoothie-eating, salad-consuming gym junkie, was diagnosed with lung cancer. In a strange twist of fate, the path to diagnosis began the day public schools closed in our region. schools closed in our region. Our small children, at that time aged four and six, were sent home abruptly, and the world as we knew it was irrevocably changed. The confluence of personal and global disruptions tested my theoretical frameworks to their limits. I howled into the abyss a lot. I hid under the covers. I lay on the floor. And I also had dance parties in the kitchen with my kids. I started painting for the first time, mostly wobbly lemons and lopsided pears. We did family yoga in the living room with our dog and cat, who were over the moon that they had the humans home. Ultimately, these convergences not only reinforced my belief

in the concepts of critical hope, but highlighted my reliance on them. I needed hope to get me out of bed when the world felt urgent and immense. And I clung to our book like a life preserver, reading and rereading the lessons on hope and empathy and love we had written before the global pandemic, not knowing at the time how much our future selves would rely on these hope muscles. And yet, because our book theorized how hope is enacted in classrooms and in the theater, both of which had closed for the unforeseeable future,

I felt unmoored and dislocated from the anchors of hope I had assumed would be enduring and unchangeable. So on June the 1st, 2020, as my husband was on the operating table undergoing a lobectomy to remove a large tumor, I started to write my way into hope in the context that I knew best, higher education, and began to write a love letter to universities as the anchors of hope in our communities. Writing allowed me to break open and avoid breaking apart. It was a coping mechanism, an act of defiance, and an invitation to start saying the quiet parts out loud. Now, as far as love letters go, this book is both spicy and earnest in equal measure, but it has an enduring and unassailable love for our universities and the people within them. So I set out to challenge the actual in the name of the possible,

bolstered by the concepts of hope, empathy, and love. And it turns out I was writing the book I needed to read. And over the years, I've read hundreds of books indicting higher education. We are given in these books with forensic precision everything that is wrong and broken and irreparable. Futurists, pundits, historians forecast a dystopian future that feels inevitable, partly because they say it with such confidence. I'm a sucker for this trap, so much so that one of my friends sent me a greeting card that said, wishing you the confidence of a mediocre white man. But the thing is, we are building our future right now in real time. Nothing is inevitable.

As one of my favorite hope authors, Rebecca Solnit, reminds me in her response to Doomsayers, and this is a quotation, a little spicy. She says, where the hell did you all learn to make confident prophecies about the future in that all-knowing tone of objective bosshood? Also, have you visited that place between absolutely never and totally inevitable? If not, you should visit. It's quite roomy. P.S. The future hasn't happened yet. Sometimes it's surprising. P.P.S. Do you notice when the future you announced does not actually come to pass as promised? End quote. So Rebecca Solnit gave me the confidence to start writing my way out of despair and into hope circuits. From the outset, I wanted to invite rather than indict. I wanted to dream rather than disdain. I wanted to build rather than deconstruct.

I didn't know what the shape of the project would take at the time, but I did know that I couldn't do this work on my own. The soul-building work of hopeful systems change can only occur in community with others. So, for two years, I lived into an emerging set of questions with over 300 people. My first set of questions were purely an imaginative exercise. I asked, if you could start a brand new university, what would it look like? What would we teach and learn? How would we govern? How would we research? How could we fund it? And how could we build a world that is better, more just, and empathetic through well-designed

systems? And then, as the conversations evolved, so did the questions we lived into. I started to ask, what happens when we realize we don't have the luxury of building a brand new university? What do we do with the broken systems we've inherited? How do we recenter human flourishing and place it in constellation with values such as love, purpose, curiosity, delight, and then embed them in the academic enterprise. Now, one of my maritime friends uses the expression, you have to dance with the girl that brung ya. And I think that is spot on for how we manage our publicly funded universities in Canada. Are they imperfect? Yes.

Do we have delayed maintenance in infrastructure, both physical and structural? Certainly. Is higher education the one industry that makes hope its central mission? Absolutely. Determined to build hope circuits in higher education, I immersed myself in conversations with thought leaders and luminaries, with authors and artists, with physicists and philosophers, first-year students and senior faculty, junior staff, and seasoned administrators. What materialized in this long-term collective sense-making exercise was a set of 10 conceptual tools that I would like to spend the remainder of our time together exploring. These 10 conceptual tools help us rewire from moment to mindset, from our default responses into new learned ways of being. And it emerged in interviews with people who navigate complex systems and have learned how

to metabolize the disorientation, discomfort, and despair that often accompanies complex systems change. The conceptual tools in no particular order are as follows, and we'll go through them together one by one. The first one, spoiler alert, slow down and pause. The next one is surface the systems, practice divergent thinking, commit to unlearning and relearning, live into the questions, stay with the trouble, reimagine authority and expertise, take a systems-level approach, change your language, change the world, and finally build intentional community. Depending on your situation or your situatedness,

some of these tools will come in and out of focus, emerge as a dominant tool, or step back as a secondary one. Some of them might resonate more in a particular nexus or context, but they are designed as an invitation rather than a prescription. Let's go through these tools one by one. We've played with slowdown and pause already. One of the side effects of living in chronic states of crisis is that everyone is busy. Work is unrelenting. Time is of the essence. There seems to be no time for reflection, much less strategic visioning. And yet slowing down and stepping outside the whirly gig of our daily lives helps us see more clearly, to take stock of what has happened

and to prepare for what is yet to come. But what does this look like in practice? I'd like to give you four little snapshot examples of organizations that are reframing our relationship to time at a systems level. One university moved to a four-day work week this summer for all employees. No reduction in pay, no banking of hours needed, just the belief that when people are valued and trusted they can get their work done in less time with greater agency and empowerment. I'm working right

now with this university to research what impact this has on relational well-being and institutional health. And I can't wait to share what we learn. The next example is a university that set their email parameters so that no emails go out before 8.30 in the morning or after 5 p.m. at night. Now, if you send one at 7.30 p.m. on a Wednesday, I won't get it in my inbox until 8.30 Thursday morning. Now, there's an override button if the matter is urgent, but very few things need to be sent at 4.30 p.m. on a Friday of a long weekend.

I'm thinking of somebody in particular in my inbox. No shame. No shame. There's a university president in Canada who I greatly admire who put in her automatic signature right at the top of her sign-off the following. This is a quote. Although it seems like everything is urgent sometimes, that is rarely the case. Please reply to this email when it works in your schedule. End quote. I love that. It is an automatic response every time she sends an email.

And finally, an educational think tank called EduNova, led by the luminous Shauna Garrett, closes offices for a week in the summer. Staff still get paid, and it doesn't count as part of their vacation. They all just get one week when no one else is working. They get to slow down. Now, once we slow down, this is the next conceptual tool, things start to come into focus. We surface the systems. David Foster Wallace, American essayist, illustrates the importance of surfacing systems with the following parable. He says, there are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other

way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys. How's the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks at the other and goes, What the hell is water? David Foster Wallace explains the parable's message in the following way, The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about, end quote. In other words, we are all in the water. It is just the systems that shape our experiences are often invisible.

We can make the water visible by asking fundamental questions, going back to first principles, and rumbling our assumptions. Only then can we appreciate how water shapes our everyday existence. David Foster Wallace argues that, quote, the real value of a real education has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness. Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us all the time that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over, this is water, this is water. The third conceptual tool that I love as a literary scholar is practicing divergent thinking. Once these systems become visible, the next step is to grasp their complexity and find a point of intervention. Otherwise, these systems can feel impervious, intractable, and intimidating if we try to address them straight on. To build hope circuits within institutional systems,

divergent thinking helps us conceptualize a problem from a different angle. I use a lot of metaphors to help people look at complex problems through new lenses. And science writer Eric Ravenscroft explains what happens to your brain when you encounter a metaphor. He says, quote, When you make new connections between two ideas, it's not just a metaphor. Your brain is literally restructuring itself to accommodate new processes. The more plastic your brain is, the more you're able to form creative or inspirational thoughts, end quote. So to rewire our brains for hope circuits, we can use metaphors to increase neuroplasticity and see connections that were not there before. neuroplasticity and see connections that were not there before. I'd like to share a story about how a metaphor made me see and then do things differently. Several years ago now, a colleague

and I developed and delivered a workshop at an international conference that went spectacularly wrong. For various reasons that I can only share after a glass of wine, groups turned on each other, concepts were lost in translation, and words were spoken. Needless to say, we did not get close to meeting our learning objectives. I left the session in despair. And when I shared my failure with my friend Lisa Dixon, she looked at me and said, what did you expect? Do you blame the salmon or do you blame the dam? Again, the furniture rearranged in my brain. In other words, the participants followed our misguided guidelines. We were trying to encourage participants to surface blockages at the systems level,

but we didn't provide enough framing, so the salmon blamed each other, not the dam. Once I saw the dam, I could not unsee it. Salmon pool in places where they are guided. Once we see the salmon behaving strangely, we need to pause and then surface the systems. And to extend the metaphor with your patience, in order to save the salmon, we have to go upstream to dismantle the dams, while at the same time building salmon ladders for those fish pooling in places that do not serve them. pooling in places that do not serve them. on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

You can also hear ideas wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in.

Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Let's return to Jessica Riddell delivering UPEI's 2024 Shannon K. Murray lecture on hope and the academy. The next conceptual tool is commit to unlearning and relearning. We live in a society that places inordinate value upon people having

opinions and not enough room or incentives for people to change their minds. I'd like to encourage you to spend the next day or two going through your day holding your opinions lightly and your values tightly. What beliefs or perspectives no longer serve you? What opinions or behaviors might you release into the world? What myths have you been unreflectively reproducing? What stories are you telling about yourself or your place within the larger scheme of things? And what grace do you offer others around you to do the messy work of unlearning and relearning? Taking a systems approach is the next conceptual tool,

and I want us to sit for a minute and recognize that the systems are built by architects, by real people over time for a very particular purpose. And they're working the way they're designed, or at least for the time they were designed. So that means when we look at the systems built on mystification and exclusion, it's working the way it's designed. And every single one of us is an architect, a builder, an illuminator. We just need the right tools to rewire within our own spheres of control and influence. We can ask ourselves, what are the things we can do this week, this month, this year

in our own context to support flourishing? Who do we need to engage in conversation to build shared vocabulary so we can do the work in multiple and aligned spaces? How do each of us encounter people in line at the bookstore, at a meeting, in the hallway that gives us an opportunity to exercise our hope muscles? These are questions that engage both individual agency and collective action. They're also hard answers sometimes to surface, which is why the conceptual tool stay with the trouble is so important. In the hundreds of conversations about hope circuits, whether they were focus groups or summits, one-on-one interviews,

workshops, classroom practice. The conversations started with hope and then often surfaced unprocessed grief, despair, and rage. The discomfort is not an indicator necessarily of things going wrong. In fact, it might be a sign of metamorphoses. We know this from our own experiences of transformation. Growth is hard work. Many of the luminaries I interviewed for Hope Circuits have figured out how to metabolize their discomfort because the things that keep them up at night are the things that get them out of bed in the morning. And we have so many guides in understanding how to tap into our purpose, both as individuals and as a collective. James Baldwin says, hope is invented every day. Dory from Pixar's Finding Nemo advises us to just keep swimming so that together over time we'll figure

it out. The classical philosopher Epictetus advice is to resist and persist, which also frames hope work as ongoing. It is in these repeated performances grounded in daily actions that we build robust hope circuits. The next conceptual tool is reimagining authority and expertise. And of course, James Baldwin, Dorian Epictetus are a strange trio of bedfellows. An American author-activist, a cartoon fish, a stoic philosopher do not usually coexist in very serious books characterized by scholarly rigor. and all of those are in capital letters. However, rethinking our relationship to authority and expertise is at the heart of hope circuits. In Decolonizing Education, Canadian educator and Mi'kmaq scholar Marie Batiste

asserts that, quote, the ultimate struggle is a regeneration of new relationships among and between knowledge systems. Each strategy taken to rebuild capacity is a decolonizing activity that turns collective hope into insights, voices, and partnerships, not resistance, resignation, and despair. The eclectic mixed use of sources is itself a tactic to foster divergent thinking by presenting novel connective threads to make room for the possibility of a collision of powerful ideas. When authority and expertise are decentered and reframed, we open new spaces, new horizons, to pursue our shared values through playfulness. At the core of this project is a delightful irreverence that connects the heart and the

mind inextricably in the pursuit of new knowledges, both in its acquisition and creation and sharing and reimagining. And of course, reimagining systems starts with language. So change your language, change the world means that we create experiences in language through stories with words. Narrative shapes our reality and relationships to others and orientates our place within the world. What stories you choose to tell and what part of the stories you focus on shapes your reality. Consider the following example. On a Monday morning, a frazzled academic mother might find herself in a perfect storm of forgetfulness. She forgot to pack lunches, sent tiny humans to school without gym clothes,

and overlooked the permission slip deadline for a much-anticipated field trip. After racing home, dropping off forgotten items with the school secretary, and scrambling to gather herself together, she is late for her first meeting of the day. In this scenario, two different stories are possible. One narrative might go, oh my goodness, everything has gone wrong. What a Monday. And this scattered scholar might then carry that energy into every meeting for the rest of the day. But another version is possible. She could choose to say, well, all the things that could go wrong happened in the first hour of my Monday morning,

so we're in for smooth sailing for the rest of the week. And this perfectly imperfect professor then carries that energy into every meeting for the rest of the day. I have told both of these stories. Neither story is true and neither story is false. The story itself is the choice. How we tell these stories has a tremendous impact on the tone and tenor of our everyday lives. The future is a space of our making and our chosen language will shape it concretely. I can make a lousy week or manifest an auspicious day through the sheer power of my words. I choose to live in the second story because it issues forth a life of abundance, generosity, and hope, even in all of its messiness.

One of the conceptual tools that I use every day is living into the questions. From language, we go into the penultimate conceptual tool that has really rewired my brain because it frees us from the tyranny of being right and moves us into spaces where we can get it right. German poet Rilke urges us to live into the questions for which we do not have answers,

and he wrote a letter to a young poet and gave this piece of advice. Quote, I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, even as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday, far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into an answer.

Now at the beginning of the talk, I invited you to live into questions with me, and I want you to think about how the quality of questions shapes the quality of our lives. One of the questions that I'm living into right now is drawn from a line in American poet Mary Oliver's poem, where she writes, tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? I think about this every day. And most days I don't have an answer. But how I live into that question, from how I spend my time to what projects I focus on to how I parent,

shapes the quality of my life in profound ways. And sometimes it means Dairy Queen on a random Tuesday night with a banana split and three spoons. Finally, and for me most profoundly, we cannot live into answers alone. We need to build intentional community. In relational work, connecting to different ecosystems allows us to flourish as humans. Taking a page from Bell Hook's book, All About Love, she proposes, quote, rarely, if ever, any of us are healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion, end quote. I agree. A recurring theme that has emerged through my conversations is that hope is generated in relationships,

whether it's a howl into the abyss, a dream and scheme, a check-up or check-in, or merely a belly laugh. Communion is fundamental to reimagining our systems. I realized, and I think I probably knew it intuitively, but it didn't surface for me until it was in conversation, that when despair feels monolithic, hope gets proximate. There is an elegance to the granular, and it is in the daily encounters and tiny tweaks everywhere all the time that will build the world we have imagined. As James Baldwin reminds us, quote, the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality,

then you can change it, end quote. And hope is not the absence of despair. Hope requires us to sit in uncomfortable truths with a grace and a willingness to break open, not break apart. Hope is a skill to hone through practice and repetition, another go, another brick wall, another valiant effort. Let us not forget that hope is badass, dynamic, unruly, audacious, and fierce. One of my favorite memes that circulates on social media is Matthew at Crow's Fault, and he says, quote, people speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider's webs. It's not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go. End quote. It's a lot to ask, but what better space to engage in this kind of hard hope work than at a university? As publicly

funded institutions, our social mission to a broader society calls each one of us to do the work of making the world better, more just, and more humane. The ultimate aim of education is to help each of us tap into our full potential and purpose, not just for individual success, but for the collective flourishing and relational well-being of us all, which includes an enduring commitment to the health of this world that we are lucky enough to inhabit. Universities are in the business of hope. We are driven by critical, clear-eyed, candid, curious, and ultimately clarifying work that preserves enduring knowledges and builds new ways of understanding and being in the world. Learning is the most hopeful of pursuits,

whether you are in classrooms or boardrooms, break rooms, or showrooms. Humans are insatiably curious about the world, which means we are all wired to be learners, even if we haven't named ourselves as such. As we write together in Shakespeare's Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning, quote, learners and learning are not metaphors for hope, but rather hope embodied, hope on the move, hope as an agent, a method of acting, and a way of seeing. Transformational, messy, complex, always in motion, hope is inseparable from learning, end quote. Each one of you encompasses qualities of hope, courage, love, intellectual quest, and appreciation of beauty that makes us human. Beautiful, messy, imperfect, whole beings that are constantly learning,

adapting, and transforming. Every single one of you are superheroes because you are learners. are superheroes because you are learners. Indeed, our true superpowers and potential lies in our emergence. We are never what we are, philosopher John D. Caputo writes. Something different is always possible. So as you move through this world with all its thrilling possibilities and creative futures, I invite you to challenge the actual in the name of the possible. I invite you to identify the questions you want to live into. I invite you to be more attentive to the stories you hear and the stories you tell. And I invite you to build intentional community

where you can do this work with joy, abundance, purpose, and pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Austin Lyons, and I had... I don't know if it's a weird question, but it might be a bit of a difficult one, at least in how I frame it. When I'm not a student partaking in lectures

at the university here, I am a teacher in the classroom of the public school systems from K-12. And especially over the last year with the sort of rise in political conflicts globally and climate change issues and everything that's kind of present at the moment, I struggle quite a bit when I'm speaking to my students and carrying myself as a teacher, considering their future and working tirelessly to ensure that they are making the most of their future when I'm not even sure if that's a future that has much hope in it. And I don't know if you can, or if, well, to rephrase it,

I don't know what advice you might have pertaining to how I can better navigate that in a way that is more hopeful for the sake of my students of all ages from grade three to just before university. Well, thank you for that question. That is a kind and generous one. And it is a difficult one, as you say, that K to 12, that generation that is coming up. I have a nine-year-old and an 11-year-old. And I was actually reminiscing yesterday, we went out for dinner, part of my 3M cohort. Nine years ago, I had a brand new baby. And we sat in a circle for five days in Banff as a cohort, as the 10 of us from that year. And I had this brand new baby and I put the baby in the middle of the circle

on the floor and we all sat on the floor and we said, what would education look like in 18 years when Henry goes to university? What could we imagine it looking different hopeful just inclusive equitable transformative humane and we built our five-day conversation around this baby who was a perfectly adorable talking stick we just sort of passed him around. And we wanted to imagine that. And last night we had a conversation. Nine years in, we're halfway there. Henry's going to be 18 in another nine years. And if he chooses to go to university, if he chooses a different path,

what have we changed in our systems and where do we locate hope? So it's a burning question, I think, for so many of us is how does this generation that is coming up who is inheriting a world that is scarier and more uncertain than the world that we lived in and certainly our parents did, what does it look like to invite them in to do the generative work of hope making when things feel overwhelming and immense. And I think one of the things that, you know, I work in the higher education system, I surround myself with young people all the time with sort of emerging adults, as they call in developmental psychology. And what I have found is that they are our greatest mentors. They are

our greatest guides. They are the ones who are going to give us hope. They're the ones who are going to figure this out. They have language and tools that are so much more developed than I ever had. They have awareness of identity and disposition and intersectionality. Inviting them in to do the co-creative work of building a future is absolutely essential one of my friends works on generativity which is building legacy after you you know that you will never benefit from and in traditional notions of generativity the assumption is the older you get the more generative you are right that? That you want to leave something after you pass on. And what her work is doing is completely flipping it. And what her research suggests is that young people are incredibly generative.

They are incredibly legacy building. They are incredible in their collective sense of purpose, as long as they feel a sense of belonging and mattering. So that is the work that you, it sounds like you are doing in incredible ways that you're creating spaces to invite them into conversations about what a future might look like and to give them the knowledge

and the tools necessary to build it. And I think that that is really powerful is to put the deep respect of young people as thought partners, as mentors, as guides for us to decenter authority and expertise based on age, to reverse it, to sit and listen to what they want to build. I think it's incredibly powerful and it's a source of hope for me all the time. Thank you for the work that you do in K-12. Of course. Thank you. Hi, Jessica. Thank you for being with us today. I'm Jacqueline and I work with students here at UPEI

and I've been thinking a lot about what you said about movements earlier and also your acknowledgement that we are living during a time of genocide and we're seeing a lot of movement around Palestine right now, particularly on university campuses. And with that, what we're seeing, I think, is youth showing us hope, showing us how to have hope, showing us how to come together in a movement. And I think a lot about how this particular movement, I'm hearing a lot of people say, we're not free. None of us are free until all of us are free. And I think that's a really important statement and also really important for hope.

And I'm wondering about how we're responding to students coming together in these movements. So, you know, sending police to encampments, for example, and how our response to this is potentially reducing hope of our youth, but how maybe we could imagine a different response that could celebrate the hope that we're seeing in these movements. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Yeah.

So I write about this a little bit in Hope Circuits 2.0, and I write a little bit about a jarring experience I had where I was attending a panel of four university presidents in, oh goodness, March of this past year. And they were talking about the future of higher education and the future of universities. And it was in a university faculty club. There were 100 people there. It was a closed invite-only board members panel. And we're sitting there, and one of the presidents said,

universities are the best public space, the best town square, the best place for us to not just tolerate candid and contested conversations, but to encourage them. And a mere six weeks later, that university president filed their first of many injunctions to remove the encampment on their campus. And that six weeks switch, and this is back to Renee, the rhetoric and then the operationalizing, was so distressing. At a time where our universities are experiencing a decline in public trust, a decline in enrollment, a decline in the value of higher education at a time where we actually really need it. We need to sit in the messiness. We need to sit in hope and activism and advocacy. Edward Said said in a 1992 Reith lecture, we have the responsibility as public intellectuals to speak truth to power, to hold governments to account, to hold corporations to their jurisprudence. We must lift the rug and look

underneath it. We have the power as academics and individuals of beautiful ability to communicate. We must be leading conversations about what it means to create better and just worlds. I think about that a lot, right? Said was writing in 1992. He was doing lots of work in Orientalism and how to work and repair and build connections between and across countries, dispositions, ideologies. And, you know, I think that the encampment issue has exposed and brought to the surface the fact that we're not doing this very well. And maybe we actually haven't done it well in the past. We've seen social movements born on campuses, right? We've seen that kind of action and activism and the catalyst for change starting on campuses. But I think, Jacqueline, your question is very

important, is how do we maintain hope in systems change in our young generation when it is inconvenient to systems and centers of power. And I think we need to sit and have really candid conversations between and across our divided groups because we're not practicing what we preach and we're in fact, as you say, doing a real disservice to the capacities and muscularity of hope in our young people. So thank you for that question. I don't have an answer, unfortunately,

but I think what it does is exposes and surfaces our integrity problem and invites us instead of we are being indicted. We're indicted on all fronts on how we're handling this. I think we also need to invite ourselves to sit in the messiness, to stay with the discomfort and to feel that we have the space to break open rather than break apart. And this is a moment. This is a critical inflection point.

Universities are facing existential crisis. Who are we? What is our purpose? What are we doing here? What is our role? And what is our contract to a broader society? And if we don't have those fundamental conversations, we can't get to and live into answers, which I think we so urgently need. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. You were listening to The Times Are Urgent. We Must Slow Down. The title of UPEI's 2024 Shannon K.

Murray lecture on hope and the academy. It was delivered by Jessica Riddell, professor of early modern literature at Bishops University. Her latest book is called Hope Circuits, Rewiring Universities and Other Systems for Human Flourishing. Mary Link was our producer for this program. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Richie Bulger. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nika Leluksic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.