Ideas - Where to find 'critical hope' in hard times

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

In an era of political polarization and fatigue from ongoing crises, hope is critical. But it's not something you have; it's something you do, argues education scholar Kari Grain. "Critical hope" in action is not just the belief that transformation is possible — it's necessary. In her book, she explores seven principles for practicing hope that confront toxic positivity, social injustices, and gives anger and grief a seat at the table. *This episode originally aired on Dec. 22, 2025.Kari Grain is a professor at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Education, where she leads the Masters program in Adult Learning and Global Change Program. She delivered the University of Prince Edward Island’s 2025 Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy.

Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CVC's On Cover and the Fifth Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word. Leave me alone.

The Mile Zero Murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. These are hard times for hope. And hard times need hope, says scholar Kari Gray. Not whimsical hope, but critical hope. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. People often associate cynicism with, cognitive intelligence and high levels of trust or hopefulness with a lack of discernment.

But research has found the opposite to be true. In fact, cynics do less well on cognitive tests and have a more difficult time spotting cheaters and liars than their more trusting counterparts. Grain is a professor at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Education, where she leads the master's program in adult learning and global change program. She delivered the University of Prince Edward Island's 2025 Shannon K. Murray lecture on Hope and the Academy. Grain explores how hope can come from three areas, teachers, critical thinking, and biomimicry, the practice of observing how nature of functions in order to address human problems. Thanks so much for having me.

So last week, I brought a question to my class of graduate education students at the University of British Columbia. I said to them, I just need to check my assumptions on something. Everyone I've been speaking to at universities and colleges seems to be grappling with this significant sense of despair and hopelessness right now. But I said to them, do you also feel this? Do you also feel that this is a time where there is less hope? And I could barely get through the end of that question before they had widened their eyes and leaned in and nodded vigorously, and some even laughed aloud at the obvious nature of that question and its answer.

They unanimously and emphatically agreed that these are hard times for hope. I have observed that hope tends to be a topic of great interest when there is an interruption in its flow. when the reservoirs of hope have dwindled or run dry, when it feels subversive, tiresome, or even impossible to have hope given the circumstances. We are, as many might attest, in such a moment. On the global stage, we are living through an era of blatant impunity, an undermining of democracy, rampant political polarization and censorship,

and perhaps most urgently, a climate crisis that keeps taking a backseat in both politics and priority to other urgent unfolding sociopolitical crises. The late poet activist Andrea Gibson wrote that when the truth isn't hopeful, the telling of it is. But hopeful truths exist too.

Babies still giggle at the sloppy surprise of a dog's tongue across their cheek. On British Columbia's West Coast, this year has seen a surge in sock-eye salmon returning to the Fraser River. Somewhere here in Charlottetown, a stranger gives up their seat on the bus for a person who needs it.

Sunlight on a dewy spider web still looks like diamonds dangling on a wire. If we are paying attention, we can bear witness to moments of dazzling beauty, to all sorts of good news stories, that don't make headlines, and to joyful demonstrations of care that form the bedrock of community.

Now, despite these vibrant moments that sustain us in daily life, the existential, environmental, and political threats that we face currently are profoundly challenging to navigate. In so many ways, thousands of university staff, faculty, and students are facing interruptions and blockages of their life. life's work. This moment in time truly represents a damning of the flow and direction that higher education has long been working to sustain. And I am here to suggest that we are not meant to navigate these turbulent waters alone, that every single person at any stage of life can benefit

from a teacher who can help them navigate this era characterized by an interruption of hope. but who and what can be a teacher. For this annual lecture on Hope and the Academy here at UPEI, I'd like to explore three key ideas with you. First, the sacred societal role of the teacher in times of crisis, interruption, and uncertainty. Why do we need teachers at all stages of life, even beyond our school-aged years?

I suggest that teachers, this sacred kind, help us navigate our ever-changing relationship to hope. And second, we will dip our toe into the water of critical hope and examine some common critiques and strengths of hope for cultivating change. And finally, I'll invite us to reflect on water as teacher. In the path of lifelong learning, as some of us move beyond our years as students and schools and universities,

where teachers are gifted to us in daily life, is it possible that water can be the teacher that we need? Biomimicry is the practice of observing designs and processes in nature in order to address human problems. For example, the invention of Velcro was inspired by the natural design of sticky burs and seeds that attach to your clothes. In architecture, honeycombs are known as particularly strong, structures, so they've been used as inspiration in countless buildings. We know that biomimicry can

help to solve some straightforward challenges in art and design. So in this era that many are describing as a polycrisis, what can water and its behaviors teach us about hope in times of challenge and interruption? So let's consider the role of the teacher. There is a prompt that I give my education students when we begin our exploration of what makes an exceptional teacher. I say, tell me about a teacher who changed your life. It's an exercise in reflection, a practice of meaning making through the art of storytelling. Why and when do teachers matter? And I do not mean teacher only in the vocational sense, as in a person who bravely and consistently educates the children and young adults of society.

I do not just speak of the teacher as an assigned individual who conveys the curriculum, but a teacher who becomes transformative. That type of teacher is sacred, and not just individually, but to the functioning of a healthy society. The beloved black feminist educator Bellhooks

wrote that, there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred. Our work is not merely to show, share information, but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. So, I return to this prompt. Tell me about a teacher who changed your life. I'd like to tell you about a few. As I share these snapshots of transformative teachers in human form, I invite you to reflect on your own experiences and whether you have had similar encounters. In high school, I had a teacher librarian named Mrs. Knox.

She found me tucked in the corner of the library one day reading Emily Dickinson poetry with a light in my eye. Dickinson wrote, Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. It sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. The following week, Mrs. Knox gave me a small green pot of soil with little white snowdrops peeking out. She said, snowdrops are the first flowers to poke through the soil after a long winter.

These flowers are nature's version of hope. Mrs. Knox saw nature not just for the material reality it grows around us, but how it represents the passage of time and the metaphors that it offers for our existence. Snowdrops are not just flowers, they are radical trailblazers. They are the friend who joyfully stampedes into a chilly ocean before everybody else does. They are the indication everybody was waiting for that the hardest part is over, and spring is on her way. Maybe you too have had a teacher who taught you about finding hope in nature.

I also had a music teacher named Mr. Schnellard, who on his first day at our high school, walked in, sat down at his kids, keyboard and launched into Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. He sang the entire song for us as a one-man band, and he went for the high notes with skill and a wrinkled forehead. It quickly became clear that our new music teacher loved music. In the years that followed, he unabashedly shared his enthusiasm and passion with us. He taught me that when the responsibilities and challenges of life become too heavy, I can turn to the arts for joy and healing. Now leave that bandroom, walk down the long hall,

and across from the library, resided my English teacher, Mr. Brooks. I had never before witnessed, a teacher so skillfully engaged the students that other adults had written off as bad apples. In Mr. Brooks' English class, everyone was valued, and he held every learner to high standards. The kids who usually skipped class to hang out in the smoke pit,

eagerly attended Mr. Brooks's class, and even showed excitement to be there. Maybe you too have had a teacher who saw the best in everybody or who held you accountable to your highest potential. Now, exceptional teachers aren't just in classrooms, of course. In college, I had a volleyball coach named Steve. During one particularly intense championship game, I was failing miserably.

The other team had figured out that all they needed to do was dump the ball into this one spot that I was responsible for. And I was repeatedly surprised and unable to get it. We were losing the game because of it. Now, many coaches would have pulled me, and I wish that he would. It probably would have been the right move.

But Steve pointed at me and leaned in, and he tilted his head sideways, and he said quietly to me, You know how to fix this. Stand on that attack line, stay low, and get under it. They will do it again. Despite my embarrassment and shame, I did what he said. And when the ball came, I had adapted.

And I was able to dig it up every time after that. I'm sorry to report that we still lost that match, and the gold medal for that matter. But he taught me that when you screw up, you stay the course. You keep showing up and you get better. Maybe you two have had a teacher who believed in your potential even when you didn't. Now, in my own student's accounts of teachers who have changed their life, interestingly, there's no unifying characteristic or trait,

but it makes sense because different people need something unique depending on their identity, on their stage of life, and what they're going through. But the through line, the common thread of a teacher who transforms, is that they help to nurture our relationship to hope. Maybe it's through accountability or tough love, generosity, or fierce persistence, but no matter the form it takes, an exceptional teacher sparks a hopefulness in ourselves

or the world around us. Although I have described for you some recognizable types of teachers, the humankind, we may also find less recognizable teachers in nature, and particularly in water. This is the kind of teacher that biomimicry invites us to learn from. And it is the kind of teacher that cultures around the world have been learning from for time

immemorial. Water carries with it profound wisdom on how to respond to interruptions and crisis, and it may offer us insights on how to keep the flow of hope alive. So let's first explore hope as a concept. Hope is a topic that has been researched and written about across many disciplines. And there is some common and sometimes justified critiques that hope attracts. For example, hope is often imagined as a soft, even naive concept, or uncritical optimism that glosses over structural inequities,

or ignores negative projected outcomes. At its very worst, naive forms of hope can lure people away from the urgent work of change. Stanford neuroscientist Jamil Zaki has identified in his research that people often associate cynicism with cognitive intelligence and high levels of trust or hopefulness with a lack of discernment. But his research has found the opposite to be true. In fact, cynics do less well on cognitive tests and have a more difficult time spotting cheaters and liars than their more trusting counterparts. Since the publication of my book, Critical Hope, I've had the daunting joy of touring to university campuses and conferences across North America to speak on these topics. Some audiences, if they're unfamiliar with critical hope,

anticipate a motivational speech. They are often surprised when instead I begin by naming sobering realities of the polycrisis. Global systemic injustices, intergenerational trauma, a growing inability to dialogue, across difference, the consequences of climate breakdown, the rise of artificial intelligence, all of these wicked problems that are interwoven to create the socio-political landscape

in which learning takes place. One of the central misunderstandings I encounter in discussions about hope is that it is somehow intrinsically good. I don't believe that to be necessarily true. because hope alone without being critical can sometimes, sometimes be dangerous. It can be dangerous if it is passive, if it is merely for the sake of feeling good, that would be something akin to toxic positivity, if it avoids difficult knowledge and discomfort, and if it's based on false information or oversimplified solutions. These types of hope can be dangerous because they can stymie that urgent work of change.

But hope can also be a lifeline. My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer about two years ago. Before her treatment started, I went to visit her in Parksville on Vancouver Island, and I wanted to talk to her about some of the possible outcomes of this diagnosis. Something you need to know about my mom is that for my whole life, she has been this beacon of hopefulness at any cost. She finds silver linings in everything, and she likes to focus on the joyful things in life

rather than wasting her time and energy on unpleasant things. So we went for this walk, this beach walk together, and I remember sort of chasing her down the beach and trying to talk to her about her fears and about the potential for her treatment to go poorly. I wanted her to feel like there was space to not be hopeful for once. And at some point, I caught up to her, she turned around and she looked me square,

in the eyes. And she said, Kari, I have been working with the sick and the elderly my entire life. And I know based on watching the health outcomes of so many of my patients, that my best chance at getting well is to be hopeful. I do not have time or energy for your negativity. Her hopefulness, to my surprise, was never naive. It was fiercely pragmatic. And I'm still reflecting on all the ways that hope can be a vital lifeline, in fact, a survival skill for people in crisis. Now, hope, as it turns out, is quite complex. To study hope is not to believe in its unqualified goodness. Rather, I study it because I'm fascinated by its contradictions,

how my own relationship to hope has shifted over time across social contexts, and by the way, it materializes unevenly, even unpredictably, in many different spaces. So consider how some individuals with abundant structural privilege can feel utterly bereft of hope, while others who face persistent marginalization or economic precarity may possess an unshakable reservoir of it. Now, the reverse can also be true. I have seen wealthy upper-middle-class circles

embrace the language of manifestation, this belief that visualizing your desires and affirming them daily will magically bring them into being. Now, such ideas are seductive, but they tend to flourish in contexts where social and economic capital already do much of the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, people living through war

or working multiple jobs just to buy groceries and pay rent know too well that manifestation without structural change is an empty promise. This is, of course, to say that hope is not a monolith, It is deeply human, highly contextual, and it is consistently intertwined with other emotions and systemic realities. Nothing teaches us more about its contours, its presence, its absence, and its fragility than life itself. A cancer diagnosis? The rush of falling in love, or the pain of unrequited love, the birth of a child, the loss of a home or a homeland, a wall.

by the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean at sunset. The fraying of democracy. More than any research or framework can do, each lived experience teaches us something different about hope, its necessity, its limits, and the ways it can catalyze transformation. So what distinguishes critical hope from hope alone? The term critical hope was coined by the late Brazilian activist educator Paolo Frere.

He talked about critical hope as he, much more than just hope on its own. For hope to be critical, it needs to be action-oriented. It needs to engage with politicity or this characteristic of being political. It recognizes historical concreteness, or the way the decisions made in one era, have direct material consequences for the next. He believed in ontological incompleteness, or this notion that every person as a learner is perpetually in the process of becoming. coming. Dr. Cornell West has also written extensively on critical approaches to hope, though he doesn't actually use the term critical hope. But in his book called Race Matters, Dr. West writes that,

for as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. So critical hope is intimately entangled with ideas around social justice. In my book, Building on Frere and Cornell West and others, I define critical hope metaphor. as a dance, a heated entanglement between the critical awareness of the problems at hand, and the spark of spirit that sometimes, in contradiction to our own experiences and sensibilities, insists on hope, not naive hope that things will just get better, but an abiding wisdom that change cannot be created without a foundational starting point of hope. My most significant epiphany in the writing of that book

was the realization that I had been sold a lie. I'd been told that anger and grief were somehow oppositional to hope. In reality, any major social movement that has been transformative has involved hope working together arm in arm with emotions like anger or grief. The civil rights activist poet Audra Lorde wrote extensively on the uses of anger, and she said anger is loaded with information and energy. Now, these conflicting emotions are not opponents at all. They are collaborators and co-conspirators in the pursuit of change.

A transformative teacher, the sacred kind, instinctively knows much of this about hope and shares it in their teachings. In the field of adult education, we have a term called lifelong learning, and although its meaning is quite self-evident, It denotes the continuous pursuit of education and skills for personal, social, or professional knowledge. When Frere talks about ontological incompleteness, he would likely say that even adults who are well-established in their careers

and their personhood are still in the process of becoming right up until the moment they die. If we look at the phases and stages of a typical lifelong learner in Canada, where a person is likely to be surrounded by all sorts of teachers from early childhood through to early adulthood, what happens when an adult is no longer in formal education? When teachers, at least in the vocational sense, are no longer gifted as part and parcel of the formal learning experience.

Even in adulthood, the lifelong quest for that sacred transformative teacher continues. In fact, arguably, it becomes even more, important, as adulthood and its many experiences can prompt a more complicated and tension-laden relationship with hope. Adults can and do find incredible teachers in peers and faith communities, and work colleagues in their own children or family members, and even in subversive encounters with people with whom they don't agree. Some of my greatest teachings have come from contexts of conflict, and the people who represented a viewpoint I didn't like, and therefore who pushed me to think deeply about my own values and commitments.

But if we think about the role of a teacher, that transformative kind, as truly sacred, and as an arbiter of our connection to hope, then each individual can benefit from finding that teacher at every stage of a lifelong learning journey. Last winter, I found myself in a position where I needed that kind of sacred teacher. In every aspect of my life, I faced roadblocks and interruptions in the flow of where I wanted my path to lead. I was pregnant with twins and miscarried them several weeks apart. Shortly after that, I lost out on a dream job that I had been a finalist for. An election had happened in our closest neighboring country, the consequences of which have been devastating to so many friends in college.

And in that same chaotic span of months, I received numerous invitations to visit the U.S., to speak to their audiences about critical hope. This is the origin of my theory that hope is a hot topic when there is an interruption in its flow, when its well is running dry. In several cases, I was asked to visit exhausted staff and faculty who were leading diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and who were facing long lists of words that they had to eliminate or scrub from their website. Gender, climate justice, anti-racism, white privilege. A dear friend who led an Interfaith Center at a Florida university woke up one day to the complete elimination of his entire interfaith unit. No more funding, no more staff to do the vital work of facilitating difficult dialogues on campus.

and no more interfaith events that were vital to that campus's ability to navigate religious polarization. I spoke with racialized support staff and students who felt afraid for their personal safety due to ice raids. I spoke with professors who were feeling too depressed to teach their climate justice courses because of the growing restrictions on what they could say in their classrooms and the looming warnings from scientists which are being ignored by people in power. And while this is undoubtedly a dangerous moment for our friends and colleagues in American higher education, we are not exempt from similar shifts in Canadian higher ed. Currently in Canadian universities, community engagement offices are particularly vulnerable to cuts and closures.

Simon Fraser University abruptly closed the Van City Office of Community Engagement, ending decades-long relationships with marginalized communities in Vancouver's downtown on East Side. The University of British Columbia closed its knowledge exchange unit, which was leading essential knowledge mobilization initiatives and ensuring ethical engagement at the interface between

university and the communities being researched. Such cuts have sent ripples of worry across Canadian universities and colleges that similar closures could be on their way. So, last winter, in this moment that represented for me both personal and societal interruptions of the things I cared about. I questioned, who was I to show up

and speak to these audiences about hope when my own relationship with hope was so strained and distant? When grief and bitterness were more intimate companions to me than hope. I found myself on that quest for a teacher to help me navigate the strained relationship that I had with hope. I needed a muse, a mentor, a sacred teacher. It was clear I needed to look beyond human teachers and into the realm of nature. What can nature teach us about hope?

The late Rachel Carson celebrated American marine biologist, writer and conservationist, talked about the impact of nature on humanity. In her book, The Silent Spring, which helped launch the modern environmental movement, she wrote, Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as lifeless. And in keeping with the lecture's emphasis on the importance of community, Carson also noted, In nature, nothing exists alone.

You're listening to CBC Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CBC's On Cover and the Fifth Estate,

an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word. Leave me alone. The Mile Zero murders. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. UBC's Carrey Grain delivered the 2025 lecture on Hope and the Academy at the University of Prince Edward Island. Where to find critical hope in hard times. So as I often do when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I went for a walk with my dog in the wet mossy woods near Vancouver. And I found that teacher. It was water. We can learn a lot from how water responds when it is interrupted.

Water is an expert at finding the invitations, finding the ways around barriers or finding the places where it can grow deep or gain strength or nourish others. When I began to think about water as my teacher, I realized it doesn't only flow, it responds. Water teaches us how to move through interruption and crisis, how to stay active when the path ahead seems to disappear.

There are four particular behaviors that reveal its quiet genius. These are ways of being that might guide us, too, in our personal and collective work. Before I share those, I have a caveat of sorts. I'm aware that this is an extended and perhaps romanticized metaphor about water. I'm aware there are counterfactuals available,

and that I've heard a lot of them, trust me, and that like hope, water isn't always good. There are all types of water events and behavior. in a warming climate that threaten the most vulnerable global communities. Droughts, rising ocean levels, floods, and hurricanes growing in their ferocity each year. Water, like hope, can be dangerous when the nefarious aspects of human nature co-opt or exploit its gifts. But allow me to share four teachings of water in a way that casts a light of generosity on its behaviors, in a way that offers an affirmative vision for the future,

and possible strategies for responding to the dams and crises we face. The first teaching is that water finds another path. When water meets an obstacle, it doesn't become immobilized or turn back in defeat. It explores. It widens, splits, seeks out new terrain until it discovers a way through. And very often, the stream that splits into smaller waterways finds a way back to itself again downstream. It is endlessly adaptive, not because it wants to be, but because it has to be.

The current simply insists on finding a way forward. In higher education, this might look like a scholar whose program is defunded, finding new partners outside the institution. It might be students organizing potlucks or social media campaigns when their official communication channels are closed. A discontinued program might create smaller offshoot initiatives that keep conversations going. When systems or structures block the flow, the river reminds us there's always another route. It may be smaller, it may be slower, but it keeps moving.

What else does water do when its flow is interrupted? It pools in deep places and goes underground. When it cannot move forward, water gathers. It keeps expanding quietly in depth rather than breadth. From above, that pooling can look like. stillness, but below the surface as it builds in volume, life and the potential for movement is gathering strength. These subterranean water sources form systems of nourishment and resistance that sustain life in ways that cannot always be measured or seen from above. This is the work

of grassroots movements, of scholars and students gathering off the record, of care networks that sustain communities when formal structures collapse. It's the stubborn insistence on survival and subversion. It is raucous gatherings of musician activists and music lovers, of artists and art lovers. In my travels across campuses, I've seen this invisible hydrology at work in communities of practice that meet in kitchens,

in online chat threads, in borrowed spaces, all quietly and joyfully keeping hope alive. As funding cuts and ideological attacks disrupt the visible flow of community engagement work, communities are deepening in thought, in solidarity, and in courage. They are asking harder questions, building stronger networks, and preparing the ground for when the barriers eventually break. I have also observed some universities doing the opposite of this deepening. In a recent piece in the National Post,

Journalists Joseph Breen expose the mechanisms by which universities facing financial crisis are hiring consulting firms to help them corporatize and restructure the university. According to Breen, they do this by concentrating power at the top and by guiding universities to cut the very staff and programs that arguably comprise their core mission. These consulting firms are building universities into loftier ivory towers. But what can leaders learn if, in times of crisis, instead of taking guidance from consultants,

they take their teachings from water? What could public universities look like if, in this moment of interruption and crisis, rather than sending resources upward in centralized towers, they pool in deep places? What if we mimic this behavior of water and build stronger networks at the poorest peripheries with and within the communities

that public universities are meant to serve. This teaching of water reminds us that when we cannot yet change the world or push our way through the obstacles we face, we can still deepen our commitments to one another and the communities we care about. As a side note, last week I spoke with a student of hydrogeology about these metaphors, because I was curious if they were accurate

through the lens of biomimicry and from a scientific perspective. He noted that this underground metaphor was the only one that wasn't quite right. Not because water doesn't go underground, but because he said, water is always underground. Even if you see it above ground, most water lives underground or spends the majority of its time there. I smiled at him. And I said, now that is poetry. Maybe this teaching of water isn't just that water can move underground when it needs to, but that even in good times, so much of the important work of education and social movements

happens out of sight in the in-between places of community, art, deep reflection, and activism. Sometimes the most powerful learning happens in those underground streams where good trouble is given a life force. The third behavior of water that we can learn from is its capacity to persist. Water keeps showing up. There is an unattributed quote that says, rivers carve stone not by force, but by showing up day after day until the earth remembers. I'll say it one more time.

Rivers carved stone not by force, but by showing up day after day until the earth remembers. There's a lesson here on the power of showing up. If you look at the layers that are carved on canyon walls, sometimes you can see entire eras of water's presence etched into that stone. This is the essence of what I call relentless incrementalism. The idea that small acts repeated with care by a critical mass

can change the shape of things. Once in a great while, revolutions do happen. Radical change is sometimes achieved in a relatively short period of time. Now, these swift transformations are often perceived to be induced overnight, solely by charismatic public figures or key current events. Often, one name and one key moment come to personify a movement. But many names are forgotten, too. Countless moments of small committed action, iterative progress, and continuous renewal

don't necessarily live on in grand narratives of change. but such collective movements of people and communities over time create and create the conditions for radical transformation. The people who keep showing up day after day may not often see the impact of their presence, but in the long term, with enough people doing the work of relentless incrementalism, entire systems and landscapes can be quietly changed. This is the wisdom of water.

The fourth behavior of water has been inspired by the teachings of several indigenous scholars that I've read and indigenous knowledgekeepers who I've met. I cite them here, but I also encourage you to read them for yourself. The teaching is this. Water eventually converges as part of a larger watershed. After the interruptions and diversions, after the splitting and submerging, water converges and finds its way home. Across the vast arterial network of a watershed, streams and tributaries, each with their own histories, their own detours, return to one another in a common body of water.

They converge in estuaries, in deltas, in the open embrace of the sea. Convergence is not an accident. It is the inevitable rhythm of relationship. In their book, Downstream Reimagining Water, elder Dr. Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong offer an invitation that continues to move through me to reimagine ourselves beyond our skins as living parts of a larger watershed.

Both literally and metaphorically, each of us is fluid with our relational connections to something vaster than ourselves and our own bodies. This fourth teaching of water, as it relates to my own relationship to hope, is this. that somewhere beyond the turbulence of our current moment, beyond closures and cutbacks, these crises, we will find one another again.

Convergence is the future that persistence and presence makes possible. I think of the community engagement offices that have been shuttered across Canadian universities and of the Interface Centers, inclusion offices, and climate action initiatives that have abruptly disappeared from American campuses. I think of the irreplaceable relationships that they nurtured and the absolute necessity of their work.

The teaching of convergence tells us that this work, this collaboration, this community will flow again and gather in places of convergence. The late Arapaho scholar, Dr. Michael Marker, described such watery meeting places as alluvial floodplains, fertile zones of gathering where many currents meet. In these floodplains and deltas, he wrote, the most fertile soils in the world are formed. It is a beautiful and complicated metaphor.

Convergence zones are rarely comprised of clear water, and they are rarely calm. Convergence zones where waters meet are murky, silted, and dynamic. But it is here in that generative muddiness that new knowledge takes root. Dr. Marker saw this as a process of deep. colonial convergence and mixing, often turbulent, but always resulting in a richness of understanding and interconnection. This teaching distills the gift of education and mentorship. It moves like river water, carrying the silt and molecules of hundreds of upstream creeks, fed by innumerable ponds, lakes, and glaciers that we may never lay eyes upon, and whose watery edges we may

never touch. What we see as one river is a convergence of many. Each of these four behaviors of water teaches us something different about the navigation of hope in hard times. Hope is not a single feeling or a fixed destination. It is a practice of adaptation, of depth, of underground nourishment, of persistence, and ultimately of finding one another again, even in turbulent, even in the mud and the muck. The framework of critical hope reminds us that hope can never be disentangled from the complex relationships

and unequal societal structures that influence one's ability to imagine and manifest hopeful outcomes. And so, when our relationship to hope is strained and we feel damned by policy or politics or grief, we can return to water as our teacher and ask, what teaching of water is most helpful in this moment?

What teaching of water will help me navigate this crisis? In times like these, it can feel almost impossible to keep believing that small, committed actions matter. And yet, teachers, that sacred kind, know better. I have shared with you the lessons of sacred teachers, both the humankind and the water kind, and they offer us lessons to take forward in hard times. Presence and persistence can carve landscapes.

Good trouble is always pooling in deep places. And hope, paired with action and walking arm in arm with anger or grief or raucous joy, can be a fiercely pragmatic force for change. After Professor Kari Grain's lecture, there was a question and answer session with the audience. Thank you for that. I felt hopeful the entire time. Great. And I mean that in a really genuine way. But I'm thinking about, like at one point before you started these sort of four elements,

you said, you know, it's clear that water is also a threat, right? You talk about hurricanes, floods, and so forth. But I also think about as you were talking threats to water, right, which is so often about what humans are doing to water and water sources. And I think about data centers and AI. and all that kind of stuff, right? And so it's not really a question, but I wonder if you have some reflections

on how we hang on to this critical hope and water as a teacher or whatever our teachers are that are also under threat. Yeah. You asked if I have any reflections on it. I think my mind is running off in a thousand directions. But one of the things I'm thinking of is my friend, Dr. Rebecca Williams in Michigan, who she was the,

person I was referencing who felt so down about teaching her sustainability courses because of the realities that are being faced. And she contacted me because she read Critical Hope. And she said, hey, I decided to enact a practice of critical hope in my teaching. And I'm doing research on how my students respond to it because we're all feeling hopeless in the climate justice community. For the reasons you mentioned, the exploitation of water and I think the threats to water. And one of the key things that she did with her students is to hold space for the grief and the frustration and the anger of what humans are doing to the environment, but also to help them create something tangible, something small that is within their realm to actually take action on. So there's

interesting research, and I can't remember the author right now, but on the way to cultivate actual hope is often to take action, is to transmute our anger or our frustration into something, into an action. And so it's not always about whether that action has the outcome you're looking for, but often it's just to help someone get out of that space of despair. So yeah, I think there are things that we can do, but it's certainly like part of the reason that despair is so pervasive right now. This is connected to what Dr. Braithwaite just asked. I'm from the Pacific Northwest. Oh, hey. where there was numerous amounts of water of many kinds when I was younger.

But I'm wondering if you've, now there's drought in Oregon and BC. I'm wondering if you have begun adapting your water metaphor for the places of the world that are naturally very dry, the desert regions, whether it's high desert of America or the Middle East, and for those places that are now going drought. Yeah. Thank you. Actually, the seed of this talk happened when I was going down to Davis, California, to UC Davis. And I looked into the watershed of the, I always like to learn about the watershed of the area I'm going to now,

because I'm thinking about this metaphor all the time. And it's very much like arid desert up above, but their watershed is almost entirely these underground aquifers. And so that's where I got the idea of water going underground. Now, again, I've been told by a hydrodiology student that water's always underground, but I think that it is especially true in the case of Davis, California. But I think there's more work to be done on this metaphor. I think there's a less hopeful set of metaphors I could probably come up with around drought and some of the counterfactuals.

And I want to shout out to my colleague, Dr. Sam Rosha, who is a philosopher, and I gave him a run-through of this talk, and he was the one who told me to say the caveat about the counterfactuals, that there are things that water does that are harmful as well. Thank you, Kari. I really appreciate in the book how you tell stories and then how you bring stories like stories of different spiritual or educational practices together. and let them sit uncomfortably, which is one of your principles, I think, of foundations of critical hope. What about, like, when it comes as teachers who have this door to the community open,

when it comes to engaging and trying to draw people who disagree into what we see as a larger vision of the world, I'm just wondering, like, does that begin with kind of just doing something? Or does, like, is there a part within your framework that is the starting point for helping others see the bigger vision. So I think of like, you know, not everybody will share our understanding of environmental practice. You know, how do we draw people into a bigger sense of the moment, the crisis, when it comes to hope?

Like, how do we have helped them hope together? Thank you. There's a lot of, I don't know if you know, but there are probably three or four questions you asked in there. But I think that what you're getting at is like, what is the starting point for educators? Is that what you're kind of asking? Yes. Right. I had this really interesting conversation in Baltimore last month with a prof who said,

it's getting increasingly difficult to have conversations with my students because they're getting the wrong news. They're literally getting fake news, and they're bringing that. opinion as fact. And the question was insightful because he said, you know, I want to acknowledge that there are different ways of knowing the world, that there are different truths that we bring based on our religion or our backgrounds or whatever. But how do we keep ourselves from collapsing that into all knowledge is true and all knowledge is subjective? Because, you know, especially through a climate perspective, there's some pretty hard details there that are fairly straightforward. So I think one of the first steps, although this is not within anybody's power here, but is

providing true factual information to our students so that the opinions they're bringing are certainly going to be based on evidence. Another thing that I think about when I'm teaching and I have an encounter with a student, or even like in a talk where somebody brings a perspective I might not agree with. I try to remember, I have this visualization I do of kind of like breaking my heart open towards them instead of, because I instantly can feel like

defensive or something. And I try to remember like the way forward is to sort of break that heart open towards that person, so you can really try to create a pathway of communication with them. I know that that's not easy and it's not practical for everybody, but that's a strategy I use

to counter my own defensiveness sometimes. Yeah. Thank you, Kerry, for your talk. Very insightful. So what does water tells us about the traditional measure of intelligence? Yes, intelligence, thank you. In terms of crisis and uncertainty. For me, there's so much about water.

And again, speaking to the indigenous scholarship that talks about watersheds and thinking about ourselves in this larger interconnected ecosystem, right? And so I think that a lot of intelligence in maybe traditional Western ways of knowing have focused on the individual. And what water teaches me, I'll speak for myself, what water teaches me about it is this openness to being part of everything and to truly being interconnected. You know, when Elder Dorothy Christian came to my classroom and taught my students, she had us actually think about the watersheds that, we are connected to, literally, and then also metaphorically. So it is that interconnectedness piece that isn't always perceived as a part of intelligence in certain ways of knowing.

Hi, Gary. Thank you for that lecture. It was wonderful. My question is, have you tried connecting this water belief of yours to other nations and mythologies as well as, you know, like I come from India, and in India, water is, it's treated as a goddess, if you know, a river is treated as a goddess. And sometimes the behavior of water is seen as, you know, the goddess is at rage or stuff like that. And it teaches a lot, actually, in the local teachings and cultures.

There are a lot of things we connect as such with all the elements on earth, but specifically water is given a lot of importance. So have you ever tried to connect your, your, uh, your, ideologies or your work with international teachings about water as well. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that for me, this is sort of a nascent exploration. This has been like building on the work in my book, Critical Hope. And I'm hoping that this is the direction I want to move in

because I am aware that cultures around the world, that's why I mentioned cultures around the world have been seeing water as teacher and land as teacher for time immemorial. I think there's like a lot of richness to explore in that. And that's kind of like my intention is to move forward with that. Yeah, thank you. The 2025 Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy was delivered by UBC's Carrey Grain in Charlottetown.

Special thanks to UPEI's Sharon Myers and Anna McDonald. This program was produced by Mary Link. Technical production, Richie Bulger and Sam McNulty. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.