Hikma Collective Podcast: Season 3

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;41;28
Erica Machulak
So this concept of generative questions is something that we use and talk about a lot in our own work at Hikma. And it's a way of entering a conversation with a new or existing partner and honoring the knowledge and experience that's in the room. You can use them to get to know people that you'd like to work with or to make sure that your existing collaborations continue to stay on track as you try to create value in the world.

00;00;42;00 - 00;01;09;02
Erica Machulak
We try to model generative questions in the episodes that follow by showing active listening and leveraging our empathy and curiosity to move conversations forward.

00;01;09;04 - 00;01;42;13
Erica Machulak
So before we dive into these conversations with some of my dream mentors, I want to share a few generative questions that you can ask in your next meeting with a partner or a collaborator to move your work forward together. Generative questions are rooted in the assumption that we and our collaborators bring complementary strengths to the table. They are designed to identify existing needs, challenges and opportunities, and to surface potential connections that may not otherwise be visible or intuitive.

00;01;42;16 - 00;02;10;08
Erica Machulak
So in this episode, before we dive in to these conversations, I want to share three questions that are non-exhaustive but indicate the different types of knowledge that we can access to demonstrate respect, discover intersections, and quickly identify logistical considerations. So whether you are planning a new project at work, trying to launch a new research initiative, building some kind of community engaged project.

00;02;10;10 - 00;02;38;22
Erica Machulak
These questions will be useful to you in getting everyone on the same page and starting your project with the right tone. Questions are: first, what are your current priorities? And this question, I think, is really important because it's about figuring out where people are in the moment and what they're trying to achieve so that you can gear the thing that you're building together toward the things that are most important to them.

00;02;38;24 - 00;03;40;05
Erica Machulak
Second question is what have you already tried? Sometimes we hear this language of coming to a new relationship with a blank slate, but there is never a blank slate. And so asking folks what they're already doing to address these needs, challenges and opportunities is inherently an acknowledgment that there are strengths there already and that you respect the fact that there is existing knowledge and existing efforts that you can build upon, instead of trying to come in and be the hero. The third question, and this is huge, is what is your timeline? This question might seem straightforward, but it's often one that people forget to ask as you're trying to build the rhythm of a project and figure out these cyclical relationships that will endure over a long time. Asking logistical questions about how you're going to get the thing done is a way to show respect for people's time, as well as genuine initiative to move the next steps forward.

00;03;40;08 - 00;04;05;09
Erica Machulak
So while these questions are straightforward, they signal underlying values, knowledges and practical insights that will build your trust and save you time. So whatever the thing is that you are trying to create and put out in the world these days, I hope those questions are useful to you and I hope that you find community in the ways that we have with the speakers this season.

00;04;05;16 - 00;04;13;13
Erica Machulak
We look forward to sharing these conversations and we hope you will continue to join us. Thanks for listening.

00;04;13;16 - 00;04;39;22
Erica Machulak
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. The production this episode was led by Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Simangele Mabena, Eufemia Baldassarre, Ai Mizuta, Nicole Markland and Dashara Green. Matthew Tomkinson composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma artist in residence.

00;04;39;24 - 00;05;09;24
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate BC, Tech Nation, the Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canada Digital Adoption Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;05;09;26 - 00;05;31;03
Erica Machulak
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

00;00;00;00 - 00;01;07;26
Erica Machulak
Madeleine Shaw is one of these change makers who's able to move and shake things regardless of sector. She is a serial entrepreneur who I first met when she was giving a keynote at the University of British Columbia Entrepreneurship Program, and she was talking about her work as co-founder of Aisle, where they make sustainable period products. And somebody in the audience asked her this question. They said, How do you justify making period products that are so expensive when you have this social mission? And she said, period products should be free, not cheap. And she went on to have these great insights about our collective responsibility to look after the world. So today in The Hikma collective podcast, I had the honor of chatting with Madeleine about her many initiatives and her approach to her work. I'm Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Thanks for joining.

00;01;07;28 - 00;01;11;00
Erica Machulak
Thank you for being here with us, Madeleine. Tell us about yourself.

00;01;12;28 - 00;01;37;25
Madeleine Shaw
Sure. Thank you, Erica. So my name is Madeleine Shaw, I use she/her pronouns, and I am situated on the Unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh peoples in what's colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. And I'm a social entrepreneur. I often define myself as an eco feminist entrepreneur to be a little more specific in my flavor of social.

00;01;37;27 - 00;02;15;16
Madeleine Shaw
And I have founded now a few different impact driven for-profit and non-profit entities that all have social change at their heart. So basically, I see my practice as someone who builds kind of the vehicles or kind of scaffolding around a social change agenda to bring it into the world. And I am also a writer and the author of a book called The Greater Good Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World, and that's me.

00;02;15;18 - 00;02;39;28
Erica Machulak
Thank you. It's wonderful to have you. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. So tell me, Madeline, what are you building now? What are you working on these days?

00;02;27;00 - 00;03;33;10
Madeleine Shaw
Yeah, thanks for that question, Erica. And so, well, helping out at Aisle, which is something that I still do. So Aisle, formally known as Luna Pads is a company that I'm best known as a co-founder, and I am currently and have been for a few years, the director of Partnership and Impact. And so it's about nurturing relationships and what we're trying to do right now is, is create conditions for there to be large scale institutional change. And so, for example, governments, employers, post-secondary institutions, purchasing and otherwise providing reusable menstrual care products for their constituents and that is as part of that, I'm working on relationships with government and different people, like really trying to do this at scale because the.. anyways, it's a it's a whole, the kind of mainstream marketplace now for reusable menstrual care products has become kind of co-opted by mainstream capitalist interests.

00;03;33;11 - 00;04;22;09
Madeleine Shaw
And so I'm trying to go around that and also enact change at a far broader scale at this institutional kind of scale. So anyway, so that's how I spend most of my time, and that's exciting. And I'm also working on developing a shared co-working space that is family friendly called Nest Works. And so that's another project that I've been involved with, I founded a few years ago now - born out of the experience of Susanne, my business partner at Aisle, and I having brought our children to work with us when they were young because there was no access to childcare, which is a persistent problem as we know, and just really questioning this strict dichotomy of work and life that then we are sort of struggling to balance all the time.

00;04;22;09 - 00;04;42;21
Madeleine Shaw
It's like, how about how would we approach it differently and use the language of integration rather than balance? It's like we only need to balance people things that are separate or far apart, right? So if they're integrated, then there's no need because it's inherently, it's the same thing, right? So anyways, that's a project that I work on as well.

00;04;42;21 - 00;05;08;28
Madeleine Shaw
And then I also, bits and pieces like I do speaking gigs related to my book, The Greater Good. And I also, oh, I don't know, I'm, I'm a mom and I am raising co-parenting a 17 year old daughter who's amazing and just really being mindful of the fact that, you know, she's about to graduate from high school and may not even be living with us a year from now, like, I don't know.

00;05;08;28 - 00;05;48;00
Madeleine Shaw
And so I'm really kind of reprioritizing my role as a mother to spend time with her because she's who knows, right. And those are those are my things

00;05;24;28 - 00;05;31;30
Erica Machulak
Those are a lot of things, Madeline. And when did you first become a social entrepreneur? When did that start?

00;05;32;70 - 00;06;17;02
Madeleine Shaw
Well, interestingly, it started before I even put those two words together, you know, as a little phrase, because I don't think the term social entrepreneurship was coined until who was it? Who did it? Anyways, it's in the book. I was a social entrepreneur right out of the gate. Because, you know, if you take those two words separately, social and entrepreneur, social comes first, right? And that to me is a very important thing, not just grammatically, but in terms of significance. It's like you are pursuing the practice, the practice of entrepreneurship is the how and the social is the why, right?

00;06;17;02 - 00;07;25;00
Madeleine Shaw
So you're not showing up going, Oh, I'm an entrepreneur who wants to do have social impact. You're showing up saying, I'm a social change agent and I'm deploying the tools of entrepreneurship to achieve social change ends. And in my case, that was super, super true because I became a feminist activist as a university student. And that's really, that was my first sort of calling to leadership and just feeling like I really became who I was in, as a young university student feminist, and and then becoming a social entrepreneur later, naturally the feminism was kind of the underpinning of it. The eco part of feminism came a little bit later, and but then, you know, so I was basically an activist who decided to use the tools business to achieve my, my goals.

00;07;10;75 - 00;07;14;80
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. And what was your first social enterprise?

00;07;15;00 - 00;07;52;06
Madeleine Shaw
Well, it was called Everywhere Designs, and it was a kind of local slow fashion business. And I had a retail boutique for about three years downtown in Vancouver, and I had a manufacturing business. And as part of that, I was making lunar pads and the lunar undies. And so those products were part of a suite of other things that I was making. I was making cloth shopping bags. Imagine that in the early 1990s, which incidentally, I tried to sell to Whole Foods at the time was called Capers, and they turned me down.

00;07;52;08 - 00;08;15;14
Madeleine Shaw
They didn't think that people would be interested when they could have plastic bags, even in natural products - like, really? Anyway, beside the point. So Everywhere Designs was my first company and then I didn't decided I didn't want to be in the retail business and I was trying to do too many things all at once. And so I wanted to focus on lunar pads and the period underwear in 1999.

00;08;15;14 - 00;08;42;22
Madeleine Shaw
So I closed my store and fortunately at that time I met my business partner, Suzanne Siemens, at a community leadership program in Vancouver, and we got together and incorporated a new company dedicated to promoting the reusable menstrual products.

00;08;33;70 - 00;08;43;93
Erica Machulak
I have so many questions I want to ask you, but one that I definitely want to get to is: tell us about your book, The Greater Good. What is it about?

00;08;42;22 - 00;09;15;19
Madeleine Shaw
Yeah, thank you for that. So the full title of the book is The Greater Good Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World. So just to break that down a little bit, the greater good is basically seeking to achieve collective benefit over individual success. And so it's not a you know, this isn't good to great, you know, is what I'm saying in terms of business books, it's it is a business book and it's about start in the sense that you're starting ventures, but they don't have to be for-profit.

00;09;15;19 - 00;09;46;25
Madeleine Shaw
They could be non-profit. They could even be a project. They don't need to have a legal structure, in my opinion. And nothing is sort of too quote unquote small. I think a lot of people believe that their their ventures or their ideas need to be, quote unquote, scalable in this world. And I completely dispute that, especially when we look at radiant impact, which is more what I'm about, where you're looking at a far more multifaceted definition of impact and success.

00;09;46;28 - 00;10;12;18
Madeleine Shaw
So the greater good is something, is collective benefit. Social entrepreneurship I often define that from the word the French word entrepreneurship meaning to undertake. So all you're doing is simply taking action. Social being shorthand for social environmental impact. Everyday people is another interesting part of the title. You know, who are everyday people? Like that's kind of a you know, obviously it's a book title, so it needs to be relatively short.

00;10;12;18 - 00;10;45;04
Madeleine Shaw
But everyday people is essentially code for anyone who is not white cis het Male and trying to do something with technology because it feels like that is the dominant paradigm for in the media, for who entrepreneurs are, is that they're trying to achieve these like disruptive, scalable, tech based ventures and they're raising all the money and then they're scaling and they're, you know, 24/7 and they're doing all this frenzied hustle, you know, whatever.

00;10;45;06 - 00;11;16;16
Madeleine Shaw
And then they're making a big exit and they made all this money and they, you know, they've got all the toys and they won. And in my world, as a social entrepreneur, like the people I've seen are mostly women and non-binary individuals. They are people of color, they are indigenous people. They are people of, you know, elders, that are people of diverse abilities there who are pursuing ventures based on the kind of social change that they want to see in the world.

00;11;16;16 - 00;11;46;13
Madeleine Shaw
And that is rooted in their own experience typically. And so whether someone has experienced a traumatic event or they've seen because they felt marginalized, have been marginalized in a certain setting, or they were seeking to solve a problem that was not being identified as being important enough in a mainstream kind of way and just and are taking action or are undertaking, to that entrepreneur word, something.

00;11;46;13 - 00;12;57;28
Madeleine Shaw
And so I really wanted to write my book, to speak to those people, to encourage them to find themselves and to broaden this paradigm of entrepreneur beyond the stereotype I just articulated a second ago and encourage them to find themselves in that paradigm, to reinvent the paradigm, to take it on as its own. So in order to write the book, not only I include of my own story and ventures and examples and so on, but I also canvased about 100 other social entrepreneurs and drew on their stories because I wanted to be able to, like I'm just one person and I belong to a very specific, you know, white settler woman over 50, you know, Anglophone, Western, all of Global North, blah, blah, blah, able bodied, etc.. So I wanted to get stories for folks who didn't look like me, thing number one, but also were pursuing ventures very different from my own, to help other people find themselves in those stories. And even if they didn't find themselves in mine in particular. So the book is a lot of stories really.

00;12;57;28 - 00;13;35;00
Madeleine Shaw
And and yes, there's tips and, you know, here's your business model canvas, and here is why money matters and those types of things are there, too. But I really I wanted to speak to the inner journey of social entrepreneurship and really to come from a place of encouragement as opposed to advice and give people a sense of being part of a movement and to encourage them to build relationship and seek connection with others in their community, to co-create solutions to make the world a better place. That's the change the world person

00;13;35;60 - 00;13;54;10
Erica Machulak
Yeah. Well, and it, it completely comes through in the way that you talk about community and relationships to I, I mean as you know, and I'll give a quick shout out to entrepreneurship at UBC when they through that conference at which you were the keynote speaker, which was the first time that I heard you speak and you talked about the greater good.

00;13;54;13 - 00;14;47;26
Erica Machulak
And then they mentioned at the end of your talk that they were doing a pop-up book signing. And Sophia and I had been watching virtually, and I sprinted to the building to be able to to meet you and get your book. And even your your inscription in the book just said, Let's do this. And I was like, That's so that's so nice, I'm being invited into this, into this community and into this thing that this movement that you're participating in and cultivating. It's really, that was very exciting to me. Your business has been very successful. Your businesses, your work has been extremely successful in a world where not everyone shares your values. How do you build collaborative, productive collaborative relationships with people or organizations that don't share the same values as you?

00;14;47;29 - 00;15;16;09
Madeleine Shaw
It's super interesting. Yeah, because I'm see, I'm really challenged with that right now. There are a couple of universities in particular that I'd very like, local universities, that I would like to cultivate a relationship with. And it's interesting because they talk a huge game about sustainability and gender equity and academic equity and all these things. And but when they're presented with a solution to address that with a local partner, they are completely inept at even getting anyone to return emails. Like it's, it's kind of amazing. And so I see it as or I often frame it as someone just isn't there yet. And so then your role sort of becomes as a teacher and that you're, you know, you can see something they can't see and so you need to show it to them.

00;15;39;08 - 00;16;01;17
Madeleine Shaw
And yeah, so it's it's just different. It's very different from like the energy of pitching. I'm like, I'm going to pitch you this idea. It's like I'm going to I'm going to share an idea with you about how to make the world a better place together and understand like, and not everybody is where you are or sees what you see.

00;16;01;19 - 00;16;20;13
Madeleine Shaw
Like if I say, you know, I'm really interested in menstrual equity, and some people would be like, what? Like what is that? And so I need to start from that place of like beginner's mind. And even with products, it's like somebody is like, what? I have to wash them. Like, I would never say, Oh, duh of course you have to wash them.

00;16;20;13 - 00;16;49;21
Madeleine Shaw
It's like, that's where they are. That's what they know. We are all unlearning something and learning something else. And I'm one of those people too, right? I'm just it's about different things. And so I think bringing empathy and compassion and very much right brained thinking into it, where you're appealing to someone emotionally as opposed to the left brain, like this is what the numbers say, and bombarding people with statistics and telling them how bad a certain thing is or whatever.

00;16;49;21 - 00;17;22;13
Madeleine Shaw
And I never, I don't communicate with people that way. I usually just share story with, try and personalize it. It's like, what do you think it's like for a grade nine student who's got a math test and starts a period in the hallway? Like, how? What about that? Have you been that person? Might that person be your daughter? Might that, like, you know try and engage people that way and and help them find empathy?

00;17;22;16 - 00;17;50;18
Madeleine Shaw
Because people, they can't resist emotion. Nobody can do that. And it's the thing that's memorable. It's the thing that will always, it's where people really make decisions for them.

00;17;34;13 - 00;14;47;26
Erica Machulak
Yeah, totally. Even in a world where the presumption is that everything is based on numbers and metrics, you're totally right.

00;17;44;00 - 00;17;48;40
Madeleine Shaw
Yeah. Just the facts, man. It's like, look where the facts have gotten us.

00;17;50;20 - 00;17;54;90
Erica Machulak
And how does that translate to communicating with investors and finding the right investors?

00;18;58;53 - 00;18;55;15
Madeleine Shaw
Oh, that's another thing. Yeah. I mean. That is a place where I think people are still very stuck. Like even just the notion of investment and and making a return on that investment and how that is measured financially and in other ways not. It is measured sometimes in impact as well as financial metrics, but I think sometimes there's just a lack of nuance. Like I was in a meeting with an investor not too too long ago, a couple of years ago, and he was so excited about Aisle, and he was saying, you know, you do so much good in the world and you're a B Corp and you do this and you're in the LCA. And then but gosh, your margins are pretty skinny.

00;18;55;17 - 00;19;23;15
Madeleine Shaw
And I just thought to myself, well, do you not see a relationship between those two things? Like how do you think like do you think it doesn't cost money to be a B Corp or to be a living wage employer or to conduct life cycle analysis or factory visits or audits or whatever you want to do to make sure or test your products to make sure they don't contain toxic chemicals or whatever, like we do all those things and they all cost money.

00;19;23;17 - 00;19;46;28
Madeleine Shaw
And that means that our margins skinny. And he's basically saying you got to work on your margin, but you do so much good in the world. And I'm like, how do you, you know. So anyways I just I was in stunned silence and I reflected back to him. I'm like, there's a relationship between those two things. And that's like this this dream that I think a lot of investors have, that they still want the money, but they want it to be clean money.

00;19;46;28 - 00;20;05;01
Madeleine Shaw
They want it to be, they want to feel good about it, but they still want the money. And I, I really I dispute that. And I think we need to adjust our expectations, if you will, around you know, it's like I want my 10x return, but I also want it to be fossil fuel free and, you know, all those things.

00;20;05;01 - 00;20;28;00
Madeleine Shaw
And it's like, I don't see that. I think that we need to be willing to make concessions or reframe just our idea of what a meaningful return is. And I've heard somebody say not long ago that they wanted to reframe the metric of ROI or return on investment as return on inspiration, which I thought was nice and which is sort of like radiance.

00;20;28;00 - 00;20;47;00
Madeleine Shaw
And but for some people that's just way too fuzzy, like they can't wrap their minds around it. And that takes me back to that role of teacher. You know, people keep saying they want to innovate and so many ideas and yet they take they have these sacred cows around, I need this x return and it has to work this way.

00;20;47;00 - 00;21;14;23
Madeleine Shaw
And the bottom line is X and the margins Y and whatever. And it's like if you really want to think about things differently, then try and take like allow for the broadening of that lens.

00;20;58;45 - 00;21;06;87
Erica Machulak
So what about Nest works? Will you tell us more about your process of growing that?

00;21;07;50 - 00;21;14;23
Madeleine Shaw
Well, Networks has been a slow burn because we were having I mean, it was always like a side of the side of my desk sort of thing.

00;21;14;23 - 00;21;44;01
Madeleine Shaw
But we have a very, very strong board of directors who are all interested in this idea of of family friendly, shared coworking space. So in other words, it's co-working space that has family friendly amenities like childminding and dedicated nursing rooms of just that type of thing. So if you're a working parent of a small child, you can literally bring your child to work with you is the vision and and building community around that that we call revilliaging.

00;21;44;03 - 00;22;19;21
Madeleine Shaw
And so I've been working on that idea. I sort of fell in love with that idea and said yes to it in around 2016. And we were having pop ups until COVID came and then COVID did COVID, and now we're looking to start our pop ups again in the Lower Mainland. And it's been challenging, but I'm hopeful. Like, I think, you know, childcare regulations are a little bit outdated, I think, and it's made it hard for us to be able to offer what we want to offer.

00;22;19;21 - 00;23;07;23
Madeleine Shaw
And again, it's a vision thing. Like if you can tell that you're the way the world has been designed is presumed like this nuclear family where the mom would be home with the kids and the dad would be downtown in an office building. And it's like neither of those things are true anymore. So how do we design to actually meet this very different gig economy thing where a lot of parents don't want to put their kids in full time daycare, they don't need that. They need flexibility. And so I think flexible is the new balance in a lot of ways and that we need to design with that in mind and allow people, and also the way people live, like a lot of people in Vancouver live in very small spaces, right?

00;23;07;24 - 00;23;33;19
Madeleine Shaw
They don't necessarily have like a physical space where they can do work from home easily and have family time and stuff like that. So anyways, we're hoping to resurrect our pop ups in 2023 and hopefully open a permanent location sometime once we can raise money and yeah, I'm excited about it, but I'm not like pushing it, you know what I mean?

00;23;33;19 - 00;23;52;12
Madeleine Shaw
Like, as with the rest of my sort of philosophy, it's like I've only got so many hours in a day I, I'm trusting that this idea will show up. Like even somebody wrote me from Kelowna the other day, and they're like, Hey, you know, we want to do this in Kelowna. And I just sent them the business plan.

00;23;52;14 - 00;25;14;09
Madeleine Shaw
Like, I'm like, Go for it. Go ahead, do it. Like, if it's not me, that kind of makes it easier. I just want somebody to, you know, to do this. And so that's another funny fallacy in our in our world of like, I need to share my ideas. I need to control this thing and it, you know, whatever, and somebody is going to steal it from me and like, just give it away. Like, just go, go do it because the world needs it. And so that's much more representative of how I look at things like, you know, why wouldn't why wouldn't I, knowing this actually individual person was a big part of it. And she was working in partnership with local First Nations and whatever. I'm just like just go. Just have it.

00;24;35;25 - 00;24;52;37
Erica Machulak
What advice would you give to a person who is motivated to drive some kind of social change and is thinking about starting a business? What's the very first step besides buying your book? Of course.

00;24;52;60 - 00;25;14;09
Madeleine Shaw
Yeah. The book is really written for that type of person. If you haven't already done some form of documentation around why you want to do what you want to do, I would start there and and that can look like a lot of different things.

00;25;14;09 - 00;25;44;16
Madeleine Shaw
I mean, some people would make a drawing or a collage. It can be a conversation with another person. It could be a voice memo or it could be a short video, it could be kind of anything. But just to kind of externalize, begin the process of externalizing your ideas. I think in terms of presentation decks myself is something I'll make on my computer sometimes just to sort of like get all the pieces because it's usually not just one succinct.

00;25;44;17 - 00;26;16;28
Madeleine Shaw
Like, here's the thing, it's exactly what I'm going to do. It's like there's usually a bunch of different feelings or experiences that have led to the genesis of this idea. And so trying to find what those things might be. What are the stories that have led up to this? Because crafting your story is as important as whatever financial plans and operational plans and whatever else that you're going to do to actually make this happen, because the story is going to guide everything.

00;26;16;28 - 00;27;24;17
Madeleine Shaw
And within that story, there is probably some kind of a feeling or an emotion, some form of transformation. Like the Hero's Journey is a great reference point of understanding. Like what is the challenge that, you know, you faced, you saw a problem, you did something, whatever, that, that very basic narrative is something that the more in touch you can be and the clearer that you can be around what that is and find a way of telling that story visually or orally or whatever in the written word. That is, that will serve as kind of your your touchpoint through your entire journey as an entrepreneur, because you will always be asked that and you will always, like, let's put it this way, if you were sitting, let's say you met someone at a meeting or a coffee shop or whatever, and they're like, Yeah, I'm working on this social impact venture. Nobody wants to know what your financial plan is. Nobody wants to know what your operational plan is. People want to know why. People want to know how.

00;27;24;17 - 00;27;45;23
Madeleine Shaw
What is the change that you seek to create and that. So that's why I say that, because all the other things that can come like you or someone else can do it, whatever. But that story needs to come from you. And that feeling and I break this down a lot in the book. There's a lot that I have to say about crafting this and finding the emotional touchpoints and so on.

00;27;45;23 - 00;28;08;02
Madeleine Shaw
And creating a space for someone to respond to it and find themselves in your story. Because that like, honestly, it's how you how you're going to get people to work with you. It's how you're going to find investors. It's how are you going to find customers? Like all of it goes back to that feeling and people wanting to be part of that story with you.

00;28;08;05 - 00;28;26;90
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. On the flip side of that, if you are an organization, say a business that already exists, that is thinking about trying to turn itself toward social good, what would you recommend is the first step for the leader of an organization that wants to rethink how it's doing things?

00;28;28;80 - 00;28;08;02
Madeleine Shaw
Well, it depends on what they're doing. Like it like if it's, let's say, a mining company that's I don't know where you're building weapons or I don't know whatever, doing something that's really super extractive, obviously you need to, or unsustainable, you need to stop or change those practices.

00;28;47;26 - 00;29;28;18
Madeleine Shaw
And I don't know, like in some cases that would be very extreme. But I would say to the leader of a company who let's say, you know, they're they're going about their business and and what their business is achieving is is neither it's neutral like it's neither beneficial nor extractive. It's just going about its business. I would look to becoming certified as a B corp actually as the best way because it it, so B-Corps are for-profit entities that are have undertaken very rigorous assessment in terms of like all of their social and environmental impacts of all of their operations.

00;29;28;21 - 00;30;18;21
Madeleine Shaw
And there's sort of a test or B-Corp readiness assessment that you can take as to sort of dip your toe in. But I would say if the leader of a for-profit company is serious about wanting their their business to be as socially, environmentally impactful as possible, is that is the number one best way to do it because it's rigorous, and it also brings you into a network of about 5000 other businesses globally who are as concerned and as interested in and as willing to walk the talk as you are. Because it really shows that, it's the difference. Some people are talking and other people are walking and B-Corps or walking the talk.

00;30;14;92 - 00;30;16;58
Erica Machulak
And Aisle is a B-Corp right?

00;30;17;20 - 00;30;48;20
Madeleine Shaw
Been a B-Corp since 2012. Thank you very much. Yes.

00;30;21;13 - 00;30;27;58
Erica Machulak
And what was the most, is there anything about the process that you learned about Aisle through becoming a B-Corp?

00;30;27;95 - 00;30;48;20
Madeleine Shaw
I would say, if anything, for us, becoming a B-Corp just formalized what was already true. Like we had Aisle. We've always been ahead of our time in terms of doing these things and caring about sustainability and caring about our, you know, human social impact and so on.

00;30;48;20 - 00;31;24;29
Madeleine Shaw
And so it basically codified and quantified what we were already doing. So if anything, it showed me that we were already sort of ahead of the curve and that that we're not alone. Like there are other people who care just as much as we do and are willing to put the work into it. So it felt really good, not just to be able to become a B-Corp, but to be sort of brought into the fold, if you will, of other companies who are really leading in terms of creating new standards or ways to be sustainable and that type of thing.

00;31;24;29 - 00;31;33;04
Erica Machulak
Really interesting. Well, thank you so much for your time, Madeleine. It's been a total pleasure to chat with you. We appreciate it.

00;31;33;34 - 00;31;24;29
Madeleine Shaw
Me too, Erica. You are awesome and I just I wish you every success in your work and life and in what you're doing. I think it's amazing and I'm very honored to be part of that. Thank you.

00;31;46;24 - 00;32;18;05
Erica Machulak
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. The production this episode was led by Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Simangele Mabena, Eufemia Baldassarre, Ai Mizuta, Nicole Markland and Dashara Green. Matthew Tomkinson composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma artist in residence.

00;32;18;08 - 00;32;47;08
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate BC, Tech Nation, the Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canada Digital Adoption Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;32;47;08 - 00;33;10;16
Erica Machulak
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose land you're on.

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;42;01
Erica Machulak
What does it mean to be a rebel with a cause? And what does it look like when we do entrepreneurship in community and with accountability for the choices we make? I'm Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. You are listening to the Hikma Collective podcast, where in this episode we are talking with Brittany Brathwaite, who is an amazing creative serial social entrepreneur and also a scholar.

00;00;42;04 - 00;01;09;18
Erica Machulak
She's a great answerer of both of these questions and more. I learned so much in this conversation and we really hope that you enjoy it. Thank you for listening.

00;01;09;20 - 00;01;36;15
Erica Machulak
Welcome, Brittany. Thanks for joining us. Tell us about yourself.

00;01;14;10 - 00;01;36;15
Brittany Brathwaite
I'm Brittany. I'm a reproductive justice activist, entrepreneur and community accountable scholar, originally from Brooklyn, New York. But now I'm in Harlem. I love Brooklyn, though. Can't wait to go back. And I'm a current PhD student at the graduate Center studying critical social personality psychology and probably, I think this is my third year.

00;01;36;15 - 00;02;10;28
Brittany Brathwaite
I don't know. I've been on Zoom, in Zoom University, for like two and a half years now, so it's kind of hard to keep track of that. But I am the co-founder of three really beautiful ventures in the world, one is a feminist apparel, and I was like, we're more than apparel, apparel brand called Homegirl HQ. It was formerly called the Homegirl Box and we curate items that are created by women owned and non-binary owned businesses.

00;02;11;01 - 00;02;29;25
Brittany Brathwaite
That's what we've done in the past. But all of our work really centers the life and legacy of revolutionary women of color. And so that was like one of the, that's my most physical product of a business. Like that's the one that I see in other people's houses. And I'm like, Oh, I made that. And I and I've been doing that since 2016.

00;02;29;25 - 00;03;00;08
Brittany Brathwaite
And so that's been really fun. And it's I, most people think that we're like an activist non-profit, though, since we're so like, our values are so front forward. So people are like, and I'm like, no, we really just make shirts and boxes, but I love you think that. And because of who we are, I think that the place where my values really shine through and even in the manufacture, I didn't know anything about, like how things are manufactured and how to make choices around like where to buy products from.

00;03;00;08 - 00;03;18;20
Brittany Brathwaite
I only sourced in the U.S. And I'm really like, you know how much it cost to mail something and try to support the United States Postal Service, but they lose your stuff all the time. And so it's like all of these like where your values come into actions, like sending something in the mail, you know? And so that was like that was my one of my first ventures.

00;03;18;22 - 00;03;28;25
Brittany Brathwaite
And then, and it's also a worker own cooperative. And so while there are only two Homegirl workers now we're incorporated as a worker cooperative.

00;03;32;74 - 00;03;32;33
Erica Machulak
And what does that mean? What does a worker cooperatives look like?

00;03;18;22 - 00;04;18;18
Brittany Brathwaite
So a cooperative, a cooperative model is part of a larger sort of like ideology of cooperative economics in the sense that there is sharing around profit, around decision making. And so anyone who comes to work at Homegirl HQ owns Homegirl HQ, and so they have the ability to have actual you know, it's not like buying stock but you have equity in a company that you work for and that people have decision making power. And so it's not like, you know, I mean, you have most of the time you have decision making power in some form of your job, but you don't kind of get to you don't get to make decisions about the organizational budget or like who you work with and in a worker owned co-operative model you do.

00;04;18;20 - 00;04;38;20
Brittany Brathwaite
And so it's a it's never easy because when you have multiple people making decisions, it takes a lot of time and it like, you know, it's not like, oh yes, we're going to do this thing or I'm going to jump on the call with this person or we're going to invest this in this. You know, I want to make stocks. And my business partner's like we're going to make stocks in three years Brittany.

00;04;38;20 - 00;04;58;02
Brittany Brathwaite
And I'm like, ohh. But I have 50% of the vote here. So that makes sense. And so we actually come to agreement around like what our next thing is going to be. And then my other organization Rebellious Root is also a worker owned cooperative. And so they're, to start off where we originally had five members.

00;04;58;05 - 00;05;35;10
Brittany Brathwaite
Now we have three active members and we are a facilitation co-op. And so we facilitate for organizations, we do strategic planning, company retreats. We do a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice work, we call it JEDI work. And we have a lot of fun doing that. And then we also put on a retreat for youth workers. The US doesn't really have a youth worker force, so like you'll never hear like a basketball coach and a teacher and a sex educator and I don't know, someone who teaches kids gardening feel like they all belong to the same group.

00;05;35;10 - 00;06;06;15
Brittany Brathwaite
But in other countries, that is a thing like people identify as youth workers. And as long as they work and develop young people, they see themselves as part of the same sort of cohort. And so we're working to put folks together here in the US who have that a mindset about how we think about youth development, not as separate things, but as like one, you know, one group of people who are charged with developing young people and what might it look like to have the same kind of like manifesto and working and engaging with young people?

00;06;06;18 - 00;06;24;71
Erica Machulak
That's interesting. So when you think about youth workers and trying to create sort of a critical mass or a magnet or an organizational framework, is it kind of like reframing the most, foregrounding a certain dimension of what they do to reimagine a community of practice? Is that what it is?

00;06;24;92 - 00;06;32;16
Brittany Brathwaite
Yeah. So it's a community practice. So folks can feel like they are in like a learning community and a community practice together.

00;06;32;16 - 00;06;52;14
Brittany Brathwaite
So like a basketball coach and an after school teacher find themselves in the same place. Obviously at different times. But they are both people who see young people out of school time, right? And so they're responsible for things like sometimes meals and like feeding young people. And there could be more sharing of their strategies and how they support young people.

00;06;52;14 - 00;07;11;22
Brittany Brathwaite
But these are such, these are so divided. And we noticed, like while they are trainings for a lot of people, like managers have a training, you can go to the management center. Or you go to some, if you're a social worker, you can get continuing education units, but there is no training for youth workers specifically like here's how to be a youth worker.

00;07;11;29 - 00;07;35;07
Brittany Brathwaite
Like is like, here's how to be a basketball coach, but not here's how to work with young people in this way, unless you're formally educated in and you go to education or teacher route. And so we wanted to provide a space for folks to really get that and get that together in community. And so that's our youth worker force retreat model and we're working on building out sort of a program so that we can have that.

00;07;35;13 - 00;07;56;17
Brittany Brathwaite
And we pulled from places like Canada, the U.K., lots of folks already have those materials. It's not new and we're not inventing it, but we're also doing it in the U.S. in the context of the U.S. and our specific policies that are so different for young people here than they are in other places. And so that's that's like our main work at Rebellious Route.

00;07;56;17 - 00;08;24;14
Brittany Brathwaite
And then I have Kimbritive, which is a company that works on sexual wellness for black women, specifically. And we are currently working on a digital learning platform for black women as a virtual companion to talk about everything from birth control to self-managed reproductive health care, the whole spectrum. And that was my first ever business.

00;08;24;14 - 00;08;50;22
Brittany Brathwaite
I started that like 2015. I was like the first, I was in grad school, very poor, and working on that. And so yeah, lots of things going on. And then and then I consult in other ways all the time for other people.

00;08;39;86 - 00;08;42;35
Erica Machulak
Can I ask how you define rebellion?

00;08;43;14 - 00;09;25;25
Brittany Brathwaite
Yeah, I think it's. That's a good question. What's what is rebellion without using another word that's like rebellion. For me it's, it's a sort of willingness to break the rules for the purpose of creating something completely different that will change, like, the world, our society, or ourselves as we know it, for the better. And so it's yeah, it's a it's a risk taking. And something must be like not always broken open, but sometimes, I mean, with Rebellious Route we think about, like plants growing in places they're not supposed to grow or blooming in places they're not supposed to bloom, but they do, right.

00;09;25;26 - 00;09;44;16
Brittany Brathwaite
And they like one of my favorite flowers is the bird of paradise. And a very interesting like you can't miss it when you see it, but like when they grow and like people talk about like a rose who grow up on concrete. But when when birds of paradise grow, their roots are so strong that they can break like anything that's on top of it.

00;09;44;16 - 00;10;05;22
Brittany Brathwaite
And so I really think about that's the kind of rebelliousness that I try to harness when I'm doing work or when I'm living in general.

00;09;54;55 - 00;10;34;28
Erica Machulak
Hmm, I love that. It's such a nice counterbalance to this language of disruption and that you hear in the tech startup world so much of the time where it's, you know, let's break things. And there seems to be this idea that you're, you know, innovation means disrupting things just for the sake of of breaking stuff and seeing what happens. And trying to spin things out as quickly as possible. But it really feels like the way that you think about growth and the way that you think about building contributions in the world is more I mean, as you say, community based and responsive and really thoughtful in terms of the values that you bring to the work.

00;10;35;01 - 00;10;54;07
Brittany Brathwaite
Yeah, Yeah. I don't think we should just be breaking. Like every time I look at somebody like pitch application or thesis, they always talk about like, we want rule breakers and we want people that like break stuff. And I'm like, sure. But like, I also I operate from the place that I, you know, I don't break things without consequence.

00;10;54;07 - 00;11;11;00
Brittany Brathwaite
I think that that kind of sort of it's a very liberal notion to be like, oh, just break it and we'll see what happens. And I'm like, who is that afforded to. Like who can just break stuff and they'll be and they'll be okay. And so like, I also operate under that understanding that, you know, folks break things all the time.

00;11;11;00 - 00;11;37;77
Brittany Brathwaite
And then they some people that receive serious punishment and some people are celebrated for that. And so yeah, I have I think I move with the lens of that. And like and for what reason, like if it's not connected to a purpose or value and sometimes you don't need to break stuff, sometimes I mean, innovation isn't always breaking it, sometimes it's just looking at it another way or turning it around or, you know, like fixing it a little bit. Like we don't need to break everything.

00;11;38;20 - 00;11;48;35
Erica Machulak
Yeah, that's a really nice way to put it. So can you tell us a little bit more about the story of Kinbritive and why you built it and how it's changed over time?

00;11;48;62 - 00;12;09;04
Brittany Brathwaite
Oh yeah, it's such a story. So Kimbritive, so me and my best friend Kimberly and so Kimbritive has our names in it. And some people, like people have known this for years and they were like one day when they see it, like they're like, Oh, I get these weird messages on LinkedIn in the middle of the night like, Oh my God, it's you and Kim's names together.

00;12;09;04 - 00;12;35;19
Brittany Brathwaite
It's like, Wow, yikes. So we we both were we worked together when we were, we met in college, we went to Syracuse university and we ran a club essentially that was focused on sex education for black and Latino students. And when we started running that club, we had no budget because it's not like something like, we weren't putting on a concert so they weren't giving us any money.

00;12;35;22 - 00;12;58;00
Brittany Brathwaite
And so we had to learn how to. I think that's like where I got some of my entrepreneurship skills, like when people are talking about being lean I'm like ever in a student group for 14 thousand undergraduates with $0. No. So we figured out how to, like, create events and spaces and things like that with no money and no budget and no anything.

00;12;58;02 - 00;13;20;24
Brittany Brathwaite
And we really, it was really important for us to do that work at that time, when we entered college, HIV and AIDS was one of the leading causes of death for black women in the United States. And so our work was fun, but also urgent and necessary. And so we did everything. And talk about breaking the rules. Like we invited test the New York State Testing Center to campus to do HIV testing.

00;13;20;24 - 00;13;36;27
Brittany Brathwaite
But we didn't ask anybody. We kind of just like rented the rooms like. And looking back and like that probably like broke like 18 like rules of what you were supposed to do. But we were like, we can get testing here. We're just going to bring them. We're going to bring them here, and they're going to do it on behalf of sex symbols.

00;13;37;00 - 00;14;00;10
Brittany Brathwaite
And so we started working together in that capacity. And then we both graduated and went on to grad school and Kim was working on her MPH and I was working on, I think the first part of my MSW. And we really, we also had jobs. I was organizing, I was community organizer for six years and Kim was also doing like health education or adolescent health education.

00;14;00;17 - 00;14;23;12
Brittany Brathwaite
And we were very unfulfilled in the ways that we were doing the work we were doing, specifically around having done this work in college. And we had added our own spin to it. And it just wasn't that way or playing out that way in our work. And so we got together, we made one workshop, we presented at a conference, we got invited to do it at another conference and we didn't have an organization.

00;14;23;12 - 00;14;42;21
Brittany Brathwaite
We were like, Oh, I work here. And she was like, I work there. And we just do this workshop together. And they were like, Why? We don't know? And so we decided to name ourselves. I was actually working in Guyana at the time, so I was in South America. We were on G-chat, she was in New York, and we were like going back and forth.

00;14;42;21 - 00;15;07;24
Brittany Brathwaite
And we landed on Kimbritive, mostly because everything that we had done up to that point had been collaborative. Like I didn't see work without her. She didn't see work without me. Our stories were meshed. Our individual stories were meshed in the work. I was led to sex education from my own experience of being deprived of sex education as a young person and having to sort of find out what the consequences were in a very harsh way.

00;15;07;24 - 00;15;32;21
Brittany Brathwaite
And so we both were driven to that work and decided to give ourselves a name. And then after that, we became like a real thing, I guess, in the world. We got ourselves a little, our first website. It was so interesting, but it was like, I mean, it was great for the time. And then looking back it was like, Look at us when we were just beginning, when we had 1000 words, too much copy on the website, you know, very academic-y.

00;15;32;23 - 00;16;01;12
Brittany Brathwaite
But we we really wanted to put forth the sort of the sex education we did not have as young black girls growing up in Brooklyn, New York. And so we were leading workshops around the city. We were doing I mean, COVID has us pivot to virtual workshops, but we were really tried to get the sex education that we saw that was LGBTQ inclusive, that was had a racial justice analysis, that had all these pieces in it out there in the world.

00;16;01;15 - 00;16;19;16
Brittany Brathwaite
And what was really hard is when you don't have the policy that matches the thing that you're trying to do. So as long as the United States doesn't have a comprehensive sex education policy or even here in New York state where I live, doesn't have a comprehensive sex education policy. The work you're trying to do is like, you piece it together and whoever wants it gets it.

00;16;19;16 - 00;16;48;15
Brittany Brathwaite
But it's not like a high demand situation. And since we were a business, it wasn't like we were pulling in like large grants. And we were also competing with larger organizations like your Planned Parenthood Federation of America, right. And and we were also noticing at the same time that our peers, even though we wanted them to, you know, we wanted to grow another generation of folks that had the information about their bodies and their health that our peers still didn't have that information.

00;16;48;18 - 00;17;10;09
Brittany Brathwaite
And so we started developing workshops for adult women and we started doing those workshops. And those were really good. And then we hit a space where we were giving people lots of access to resources and information. And then the health care piece came in and it was like, so where do we go to the doctor? We were like, We don't know. We don't have this part, right.

00;17;10;11 - 00;18;20;19
Brittany Brathwaite
And so we we we started to look into sort of, there's this entire field of health tech or women's health tech or femtech that is meeting the needs of lots of folks. And I think about like great organizations like Maven and Tia Clinic and lots of folks that are doing that. And at the same time, black and brown folks are still struggling to like, we haven't eliminated the health disparities that are really clear and huge in our own communities with like, you know, a maternal death, maternal mortality rate for black women that's 2 to 4 times that of white women in the U.S. right. And so we, and that's just like one. There's like, every single like reproductive health or sexual health issue, black women fare worse with every single issue that exists. And so we are like thinking about how do we build in a space that is definitely addressing a need in one way and missing an entire population another, especially as many of non-profits focused on black women and girls, are actively pushing against regressive policies.

00;18;20;19 - 00;18;46;20
Brittany Brathwaite
So much of the money is going into addressing the necessary structural changes on the policy level. And that's where my life was, because I'm an organizer. But now I'm like, well, in the meantime, how do I build a product or build something that helps that? And if it forces, sometimes tech does push policy, we see that happen all the time, like turn, policies drop out of nowhere because tech says it has to.

00;18;46;22 - 00;19;07;28
Brittany Brathwaite
And so how do we sort of build, and this is all experimentation, I don't know what the solution is yet. But like how do we build in that market given, and there's not, and you know, there's not there's there are folks building in it right now, but there's not it's not like a flooded group of everyone's at the table because people are trying different ways, a lot of them being policy and legislative.

00;19;08;00 - 00;19;28;28
Brittany Brathwaite
And I've done that work. It was very cool. I'm doing something different now and I'm and I'm interested in innovating in a different way because if June tells you anything about, like what the policy landscape is for reproductive health and rights in this country, then you know, there's something else that we have to try and so that's that's sort of an evolution.

00;19;28;28 - 00;19;45;90
Brittany Brathwaite
So Kimbritive is in the space where we're thinking about how do we put sort of a product or tool in the market that folks can use to really be autonomous and supported in their sexual reproductive health. Black women specifically, feel seen, heard, and celebrated when it comes to their sexual reproductive health care.

00;19;46;19 - 00;19;54;12
Erica Machulak
Hmm. So what advice do you have for businesses that want to want to build in more humanity? What's, where do you think they should start?

00;19;56;43 - 00;20;23;02
Brittany Brathwaite
Um, where should they start? The job description. I think when we, I feel like my rule, I don't share job descriptions that don't have salaries at all. I don't. Or I'll follow up if someone's like hey share a job I'll follow up and be like what's the salary it's not listed. They're like, I don't know. I'm like, okay, well, when you figure out the salary, like, share it.

00;20;23;05 - 00;20;47;17
Brittany Brathwaite
I think we're in a space where we we've seen what it looks like for folks to be unemployed at huge levels, for folks to for working parents and moms to leave the workforce, folks who work in the wage economy, I mean in the gig economy, in a wage economy, and how that changes and shifts how people are able to make a livelihood and sustain their families.

00;20;47;19 - 00;21;10;05
Brittany Brathwaite
And so the job description feels like a good entry point for me that tells me exactly who you are, about your values without ever having to list them. And so, like I look at how people talk about time off, I look at how people talk about their benefits, how they talk about healthcare, knowing that health care expenses put a lot of families close to poverty or in poverty.

00;21;10;07 - 00;21;30;29
Brittany Brathwaite
And even if you have a high paying salary but no health care, then you're not really doing anything. If you have paid family leave, any of those things. Like I think how you are, and again, like I'm not at a place to hire yet, but that's something I'm always thinking about when I'm ready to do it. And like, you know, even for contractors, I think a lot about that.

00;21;31;01 - 00;21;46;09
Brittany Brathwaite
They don't get benefits or things like that, but like, how do we do this in a way that feels fair and just. And so I think that, yeah, it starts in a job description so you can list your values and be all bubbly and shit but like if you don't, if your values don't translate to your actual like company sort of structure.

00;21;46;09 - 00;22;12;22
Brittany Brathwaite
And time off is a really big thing. If you don't think that folks can, you know, be productive and, you know, take two, three, four weeks of vacation or something like that, then I think there's the chance to check in with your values around productivity and things like that. I think onboarding - how you welcome folks into your organization and how much time you take to plan for people to come.

00;22;12;25 - 00;22;27;23
Brittany Brathwaite
I don't think you would ever have a dinner party and then just like be in the backyard and be like, let yourself in all the way from the backyard and then like have them go away and be like, water will be here in an hour, but you can take a fee. Like, you wouldn't do that. So why would you do that for your staff?

00;22;27;25 - 00;22;46;09
Brittany Brathwaite
You should never onboard folks like that. No one wants to come into an organization and feel like you didn't want them there to begin with. And so I think that that kind of like warm sort of landing for folks. I'm a little like, you know, when people are like, oh, we're all family. I think that's kind of weird. Cause it's like we're actually not we're all different.

00;22;46;12 - 00;23;03;25
Brittany Brathwaite
We're we're we're very different. But I do think creating sort of equity and parity from the very start, like, you know, I don't, salary negotiation I don't really believe in. And some of us have to negotiate our livelihood every single day with our right to exist on this planet. Me as a black woman, I have do that every single day.

00;23;03;27 - 00;23;21;06
Brittany Brathwaite
I don't ever want to go to a job where they're like you should have negotiated. I'm like, I negotiate to be here. So I don't want to ever think about that. If you just say with the salary is and make it fair and livable and of the job experience. And you say that across the board for your team, then I don't think that we should have to have those conversations.

00;23;21;09 - 00;23;51;00
Brittany Brathwaite
And I think that companies, yeah, when they're explicit by their values, not just like list them but talk about, go in and operationalize how you live them. Like what is the thing that you do to live them. I know once in the work, when I was first starting out with a Homegirl box and we were making tote bags for one of our, we were celebrating the life and legacy of black feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde, and it was the first tote bag we had ever made.

00;23;51;00 - 00;24;14;11
Brittany Brathwaite
And I was very like, Oh, this is cool. So we had the designer and we got the graphics and we got all the stuff and it was time to produce the tote bag and we were just starting. We had no money Erica. We had we were so broke. We didn't have like money that we have now in the bank, but we really wanted to create this tote bag anyway.

00;24;14;11 - 00;24;39;23
Brittany Brathwaite
We were looking at vendors, and it was strange cause like some of them were like ten to create them or whatever. And our supplier called back and was like, Well, do you want it to like be produced like with prison labor or should we go like this kind of labor? And I was like, prison labor? Prison labor? She said well they produce them.

00;24;39;25 - 00;24;57;21
Brittany Brathwaite
Lead with that. But like, you know, $6 a tote or something like that. And I was like, Wow, that's a lot of money. And then I was like, Oh, well, maybe I've always just had a tote bag produced in a prison that I didn't know about, of course, like, that's why I could get this high volume. But it was a question around like,

00;24;57;23 - 00;25;43;10
Brittany Brathwaite
To say like we donate to bail funds and we do this other stuff. And when it came down to the production of our tote bag like what are we going to do? And obviously we we had to fix the budget, we had to let go of some stuff. We had our dreams sort of boxed in. It couldn't be that thing if we wanted this tote bag, but that wasn't living into our values, which of course meant we had to make sacrifices, but also we couldn't be like, you know, no prisons, prisons aren't feminist. And then like tote bags produced in a prison. So those were like, you know, I think actually talking about how you operate, operationalize the values that you list, because that feels like a thing that everybody wants to do or does.

00;25;43;10 - 00;26;06;19
Brittany Brathwaite
Like, here are our values. How do you live then? How are you showing your team? I think like I'm like, I'm really into this question because I love it. But like, I think I think also like a lot of organizations externally show how they live their values and everyone is like, Oh yeah, Tomms you get one shoe and you send one to Africa or whatever, but like that's how you externally live your values.

00;26;06;19 - 00;26;25;01
Brittany Brathwaite
How do you live your values inside? Because that matters for your team. And I work with lots of teams that do really good work and the world loves them and they really hate where they work because the values that they offer and the things that they offer to the people, their clients, is great on the outside, on the inside is like a hellfire.

00;26;25;03 - 00;26;53;30
Brittany Brathwaite
Like, you know, they like it just doesn't it doesn't make sense. And so, yeah, that's what I would offer for a company. And I think that's the hardest work to do, the internal stuff. And if you're like me and your aim was not to build a company and like not have people work there, that feels like, Oh, I don't, I didn't plan for that. I just want to work on my idea. But also like that's what the world is asking of you. So I kinda got to do it.

00;26;54;03 - 00;27;00;17
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. What is the problem that you're in love with? If you had to pick one.

00;27;01;78 - 00;27;25;17
Brittany Brathwaite
What is the problem that I'm in love with. I have so many problems. I mean, my work is really in interrupting health and equity and, like, that's that's the like, you know, why are there different health outcomes for different folks and how do we go about changing that?

00;27;25;20 - 00;27;51;22
Brittany Brathwaite
And also like bringing it to the like not normalizing deep health inequity. Because I think that there's like a normalization of that. And like that stems from like my life. Both of my parents died when they were very young, they were both 30 years old, of chronic health conditions that I believe today someone would have questioned their care, their treatment, their diagnosis.

00;27;51;25 - 00;28;13;20
Brittany Brathwaite
And it was almost unquestioned. Like no one in my family talks about it. It was like, oh, well, you know, cancer was different back then. I was like, Yeah, but not that different. Some people live beyond 30 and I do think, you know, facets of their class, the fact that they were black, they were young, they had a you know, my mom was not, I was one years old when she died.

00;28;13;20 - 00;28;50;18
Brittany Brathwaite
She had a one year old child. I felt like there needed to be more questioning around that, like this was an injustice that deserved to be like - and this happens every single day to people - that deserves to be like on the front page of the newspaper or on the TV screen. Like, why is this happening? You know? But I think that she's probably in somebody like, you know, Maternity Mortality Review Board report after, you know, she she died within the context what considered a maternal mortality sort of death at this point even though it wasn't directly related to her giving birth. And her name just like probably sits there right 30 years ago.

00;28;50;21 - 00;29;15;00
Brittany Brathwaite
And so I feel very unsettled by that. And I think that that's a question that we need to be like actively asking questions around preventable death and and not just like the science side of it or the biomedical side of it, but sort of the social conditions and cultural conditions that lead to those things and that make it normalized.

00;29;15;00 - 00;30;10;11
Brittany Brathwaite
And like an everyday happenstance sort of situation. And so that that's sort of what my work I think it's the gate like this is not normal, that there there's like a historical sort of arc that has this happened to certain people in certain places in certain ways. And we need to do something to disrupt that and change that because there, it will only continue to replay in the future, literally will continue to be shaped by that if we don't ask those questions.

00;29;46;54 - 00;29;50;09
Erica Machulak
That's really well put. And I'm sorry for your loss, Brittany.

00;29;50;15 - 00;29;51;119
Brittany Brathwaite
Oh Thank you.

00;29;52;71 - 00;29;55;10
Erica Machulak
So is there anything we can do to support your work?

00;29;56;74 - 00;30;07;27
Brittany Brathwaite
Anything you could do to support my work? I mean, I would love for people to just, you know, check it out in all of its places. And I can list all of those.

00;30;07;27 - 00;30;22;02
Erica Machulak
We will include we will include all of those in the show notes.

00;30;22;02 - 00;30;31;27
Brittany Brathwaite
Yeah, I love it. It's a long list. Yeah. People just to check out things. You can buy things at the Homegirl Box or Homegirl HQ. Kimbritive has a cool newsletter and Rebellious Route stay tuned for updates on, or reach out to us for, you know like if you have a youth worker thing that you want to do, we're here for that.

00;30;32;00 - 00;30;36;87
Erica Machulak
That's great. Thank you. Brittany, This was really a pleasure. Just so lovely to have you.

00;30;37;40 - 00;30;40;25
Brittany Brathwaite
Thank you. I really enjoyed being here.

00;30;58;15 - 00;31;25;02
Erica Machulak
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. The production this episode was led by Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Simangele Mabena, Eufemia Baldassarre, Ai Mizuta, Nicole Markland and Dashara Green. Matthew Tomkinson composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma artist in residence. This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate BC, Tech Nation, the Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canada Digital Adoption Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

00;31;25;04 - 00;31;51;70
Erica Machulak
You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people. We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose land you're on.

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;40;09
Erica Machulak
Welcome back to the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma, and I am delighted to bring you highlights from our Hikma Office Hours conversation with Camille Callison. I first met Camille in the University of British Columbia Emergency room, where she generously agreed to follow through with an interview with me after breaking her wrist. I was writing an article for the National Endowment for the Humanities about her truth and reconciliation work long before Hikma was a sparkle in my eye.

00;00;40;11 - 00;01;10;26
Erica Machulak
Camille is someone who has definitely upped my level of literacy in talking about decolonization and reconciliation work. By the way, for those of you for whom those concepts are relatively new, we will include links in the show notes. But high level, since the summer of 2021, hundreds of mass graves have been identified at Canadian Indian residential schools, and these sites likely represent only a fraction of the thousands of indigenous people who were killed.

00;01;10;29 - 00;01;42;23
Erica Machulak
Callison has been working to change the system since long before this new media attention. Ever since leading the release of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations Truth and Reconciliation Report and Recommendations in 2017, she has worked with libraries and universities across North America to unravel the colonial biases embedded in their practices. So what you'll hear today are highlights from our conversation in fall 2021 about Indigenous ways of knowing and how we collaborate and partner effectively to drive change.

00;01;42;26 - 00;01;49;01
Erica Machulak
Hope you enjoy.

00;01;49;03 - 00;02;23;16
Erica Machulak
We talk about Hikma Office Hours, this is a new series that we've started offering, to create conversations with changemakers about how ideas take shape, travel and thrive. That's the tagline that we use. And so every month or so, we invite a speaker who has unique knowledge to come talk about their work. And we often talk about this in our growing learning community as the act of creating space for different kinds of conversations and different kinds of knowledge to come together.

00;02;23;16 - 00;03;09;38
Erica Machulak
But the focus today is really on spaces that aren't ours to create. And I know of no one who has thought more deeply and more specifically about how we bring different kinds of knowledge together than Camille Callison. And so really extremely grateful to have her here. Camille has done incredible work to think through how librarians and archivists and how the rest of us, modeling on on the work that she has done, can talk about Indigenous ways of knowing and build collaboration respectfully. And I find that the way that she has gone about that work is incredibly inspiring.

00;03;11;16 - 00;03;30;28
Camille Callison
Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you so much. I, you'll hear me say this throughout the conversation, but madhu, which is thank you in Tahltan, so madhucho, huge thank you to Hikma and to Erica and Nicole, for having me here and for hosting this conversation.

00;03;31;01 - 00;04;11;05
Camille Callison
I'm really honored to be living and working on Stl'atl'imc, which is Sacred Stolen Land, and we were fortunate enough to see some teachings about that, and I'm honored to receive them. And I think that part of being a good guest is trying to live up to those teachings every day and, in the way that we walk. So I think that that's one of the first and foremost things, is that many Indigenous people, including Tahltan people, 85% of our of our nations members live off of our traditional territories.

00;04;11;05 - 00;04;39;01
Camille Callison
And so where we live and where we walk and do our work is always of importance to us to do that in a good way. I think today we were, we're meeting today at a quite unusual time, especially for us in the Lower mainland. And I'm actually surprised and pleased at the number of people that have joined us on a monday morning.

00;04;39;01 - 00;05;10;06
Camille Callison
I wasn't sure if anyone would actually join and I saw a few people. So it's nice to see quite a few familiar faces and new faces here today. And I just want to welcome you to come today to talk about traditional knowledge and how we can work with it in a respectful and meaningful way with the traditional owners of that knowledge in a way that reflects their worldview.

00;05;10;08 - 00;05;44;18
Camille Callison
And without giving into some of pan-atheist or globalist type world view when it comes to Indigenous knowledge. So I think that that's one of the things that is so difficult not to do. So part of that is because of the way that colonial and nations have organized themselves on many different nations lands and in in the communities and the province that I'm from, which is British Columbia.

00;05;44;20 - 00;06;34;16
Camille Callison
There's 204 distinct First Nations, and there's almost 600, and that's just First nations that's not included in Meitei communities or anywhere, hamlets. And I think that that's really important to remember that those numbers are actually much larger than that of what those communities are, depending on how they organize themselves traditionally and with within today's society. And that's also to remember that there is many communities who are still fighting for for acknowledgment because they were, whether they were off very picking, or they were off hunting or in their summer lands, they were not included.

00;06;34;16 - 00;06;39;91
Camille Callison
So we know that there's those as well, too, even just within the Canadian context.

00;06;41;33 - 00;07;15;41
Erica Machulak
So I guess, Camille, you've touched on this a bit, but I have a very baseline question for you, which is one that I have been grappling with since I got here and still don't have an answer to, and that is, what is your definition of indigenous ways of knowing? We hear this term a lot, but I think many of us who are trying to engage in this conversation don't know where to start. And and the follow up question to that is how do you recommend that folks go about building respectful collaborations? So those are my two questions for you.

00;07;16;00 - 00;07;57;24
Camille Callison
I would say Indigenous ways of knowing is like everything, it's everything in the world. It's our relationship with the Creator, or in my language [.....] I hope I said that right. And then it would be our connection to our land, to our water, to our mountains, to all of the creatures that live within that, with each other. That would be our ways of knowing - how do we relate with each other, who to marry, who are allowed to marry. So for us, with a Tahltan mom, that we were only allowed to marry the opposite clan.

00;07;57;24 - 00;09;09;26
Camille Callison
And there was a lot of reasons for that. And we see that with people married too close. Sometimes their children pay the price for that. And so we, there's, it's basically Indigenous knowledge and our ways of knowing relate to everything, how we are, our connection, our relationship with everything around us, no matter what it is. And I think that that's really important to remember that some people, I think one of the biggest mistakes, or I wouldn't say mistakes, but probably challenges, that happens is that for many they try to separate out ways of knowing into libraries, archives, museums, mainstream type of things. And for us there is no separation. Everything's interconnected, it's interrelated. And so it's that interconnectedness that really defines Indigenous ways of knowing. So it's not just how do we live in a good way, how do we conduct ourselves in a good way, how do we treat each other with respect and not saying that anybody is perfect at that, but that there's an attempt to at least do that.

00;09;09;26 - 00;09;41;11
Camille Callison
And if there isn't, if there is harm done, then we are supposed to acknowledge that and try to either create reconciliation and reconstitution, which is more than just saying I'm sorry, but that we try to restore that person back to their former, to where they would have been formerly, or even above that. So there's a lot of things that are much more nuanced in our communities as far as those relationships with each other go.

00;09;41;14 - 00;10;03;01
Camille Callison
But our relationships with everything is really about the ways of knowing. And so remembering that it's like a big web, a spider's web, if you will, that everything is interconnected. So if there's one thread that's broken and you'll see a spider do this, they go very quickly and fix that so that everything holds back together. So it is about that.

00;10;03;01 - 00;10;29;23
Camille Callison
It's about those ways of knowing are sometimes written. Sometimes they're contained in art or they're contained in my earrings by Fred Moyer, or the dress that I'm wearing by my other cousin [...], and that's just from my community. And I made sure to wear my Tahltan clothing and that kind of thing, which isn't regalia.

00;10;29;23 - 00;10;58;12
Camille Callison
It's actually everyday wear. And I think that that's the thing. So we do have very sacred things that we wear as regalia, which would be a button blanket. We don't wear that every day. But we do wear who we are on a regular basis every day. And I think that's, for me, that's really important because then people know, okay, she comes from Clan of the Tahltan Nation and we work every day to uphold our clan and to make them proud of us.

00;10;58;13 - 00;11;27;08
Camille Callison
And that's not always the case. We're all human. We're not going to, we're going to make mistakes. But when we do, we need to own them as well, too. And I think that that's really important as well. And that's kind of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has attempted to do in a way, is to be able to say, look we're telling the truth now about what happened in residential schools, that children as young as three, even younger than three in some cases.

00;11;27;08 - 00;12;01;18
Camille Callison
But for me, three is very important because that was my uncle's age when he was taken to one, were taken and reeducated and and the intent was to kill the Indian in the child and to take away their language and those kinship connections. And I think that that's so important that we acknowledge that that truth happened. But then also to to work on the reconciliation. As we can tell from the discovery of unmarked graves, that communities and people who have gone to residential school have always said that we're there.

00;12;01;20 - 00;12;32;06
Camille Callison
And that shock happening, that that truth is not always either been told or it hasn't been believed when it was told. And part of it is that that wasn't believed. And so I think it's been told a lot by residential school survivors, very brave residential school survivors who I, I lift my hands up to every day because that had to be the most painful thing for them to recount their time in residential schools.

00;12;32;08 - 00;12;56;12
Camille Callison
And I think we are starting to get better at telling the truth. But now how are we doing reconciliation? And that is really about why the relationships are so important. And so getting to your second part of that question about the relationships and how do we go about establishing that. Well, I always talk to people and I say, you know, when you met a new friend, how did that happen?

00;12;56;14 - 00;13;22;14
Camille Callison
When you met your significant other? How did that happen? And it is about taking that initial step to be able to meet each other and then building a respectful relationship on it. I think about some of that as the relationship with, is is somewhat like a marriage, because a marriage isn't like, we have our relatives. You can't choose your family.

00;13;22;14 - 00;13;46;25
Camille Callison
You just need to be in relationship with them. And sometimes people aren't. But you do choose who you decide to have as a significant other. So it is kind of like building that. How do you get to know them? You understand them, you spend time with them. That's the biggest thing. Spend time with them to know who they are, to talk to them, to find out where what they want, what's their worldview.

00;13;46;25 - 00;14;11;08
Camille Callison
If you don't spend time with them and talk to them and share with them, and let them share with you, how are you going to build that relationship? So in answer to that, I would say that the smallest part of that answer that I could condense it down to is spending time. I think that that's so important to do that and to ask other people what they want.

00;14;11;10 - 00;14;34;02
Camille Callison
So very often we get people who come into communities and think they know what we want, and oh we want to do this one and we want to do that. And then talk in our language, which is I've been guilty of that as well, too. So as a librarian, I sometimes talk in acronyms and big words about about the work that we do.

00;14;34;02 - 00;14;59;20
Camille Callison
And it's really important to speak in a language that a person can understand. And I think that that's part of us as cultural heritage professionals. We have to remember that other people are like in kindergarten as far as our technology goes. So you wouldn't go up to a person who is four or five years old and start talking to them in huge, in big words, and language that they can understand.

00;14;59;20 - 00;15;24;15
Camille Callison
And these huge concepts that are much above them. Please don't do that to our community too. But don't pretend that they don't know it, because I would say that there is very few people in our communities that don't grow up cutting their teeth off knowing what rights and title are. And because, I always say that to people like when I was young, they'd be like, Oh, you have a lot of knowledge about rights and title.

00;15;24;15 - 00;15;50;11
Camille Callison
And I'm like, Well, it's basically what we cut our teeth on in our community. We hear it all our life because that's something that we're grown to protect and to be able to do. That doesn't matter if we've grown up in our community or not. We know about it and I think that that's important too. So I think there's a balance and that's created within that relationship and knowing what people know, helping them with what they don't know, you learning from them.

00;15;50;14 - 00;16;10;27
Camille Callison
There's always a reciprocal exchange. And I can guarantee if you spend time with community, you'll learn more than you're giving. So I think that that's a really valuable thing. And so the first thing that you would do is to spend time with people and to be open to their ways of knowing.

00;16;11;00 - 00;16;16;55
Erica Machulak
Thank you, Camille. That's really helpful. Nicole, can I invite you to read a question from the chat?

00;16;17;60 - 00;16;31;01
Nicole Markland
Sure. Kasha asked a really good question: I'm curious about your take on what the distinction is between Indigenization and decolonization. That's a hard question.

00;16;31;48 - 00;17;15;14
Camille Callison
Well, I think that that is a good question. And thank you for that deep thinking. And now I definitely have to answer because that's my clan member. I just have to laugh about that because it's our our Tahltan women are definitely very committed to preserving our ways of knowing and our language and who we are. And I appreciate being challenged on that question. So I think that Indigenization and decolonization are somewhat similar in some ways, but I also think that it's also can be problematic.

00;17;15;17 - 00;17;44;25
Camille Callison
And so Indigenization is much different, obviously, than decolonization, but there has to be decolonizing before we can actually Indigenize. So that's where the similarity would be, is in the fact that we we still need to do that work and that some of those processes are going to be the same except for decolonization. And then when you Indigenize, it's going to be actually looking at the same things, but in another way.

00;17;44;28 - 00;18;18;28
Camille Callison
So when we're talking about decolonization, decolonizing structures and processes and how we do our work, we're looking at ways that we can change that have been kind of accepted ways of doing business. And I mean, I basically I work in academia, so most of the things that I think about are in academia. But even if we're looking at public spaces like public libraries or archives that are open to the public, we need to decolonize some of those.

00;18;18;28 - 00;18;45;22
Camille Callison
And I think part of the decolonizing process is that we are are working hard to be able to. So if, I would use one example, and that is we need to train people from a multiplicity of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints and to work in many different languages. We need to train those people. And part of that is that decolonizing process.

00;18;45;24 - 00;19;10;18
Camille Callison
And, and then that leads back to who are we accepting into our programs, into our master's programs, into our educational programs to be able to do that? And how are we making that accessible to them? So, for example, if people come from a marginalized or underprivileged background, how are we actually attempting to make that education available for them if they want to take it?

00;19;10;21 - 00;19;33;19
Camille Callison
So we're actually starting, we need to start at the beginning. How who do we recruit? Who do we recruit from. High schools to say, Hey, you can do this? You know, there was people that I know that came in and I went to university later in life, that that didn't know that they could ever achieve what they've achieved, because no one told them that when they were in high school.

00;19;33;19 - 00;19;52;24
Camille Callison
So I think it starts at the beginning of many of the ways that we do things. So whether it's getting people into the programs. If we don't have them in the programs and they haven't done their education, then how can we hire them into places that are in libraries, archives, museums? So how do we do that? How do we even get them interested in that?

00;19;52;26 - 00;20;24;19
Camille Callison
I always say in this profession, in the cultural memory profession is that it's not even known. I didn't even know that I could become a librarian until Dr. Jean Joseph from the Wet'suwet'en Nation was the founding library at [...] library and I ended up being voluntold to do a fundraiser for the library for their collections. And so it really was at that point that I met her when my elder sister sent me, was too busy to do it.

00;20;24;19 - 00;20;46;13
Camille Callison
And I ended up helping with this fundraiser. I met her and she appreciated my skills, hired me as a student worker, and I still was really firm about going into anthropology, but it changed my life. And years later I did go into being, to this profession. But that's a difference of one person to make in someone's life.

00;20;46;13 - 00;21;12;22
Camille Callison
And I look at that and I think, well, that is the decolonizing process that we're actually encouraging people to come into it. And it's those people that come into our profession in academia that are going to Indigenize it. And so with that, I carried a responsibility for the people who believed in me and supported me into this field to be able to start to Indigenize that profession.

00;21;12;25 - 00;21;47;25
Camille Callison
And part of it with the indigenizing is to create ways of embedding it into things like the curriculum. How often do you go into a library or an archive and see someone who looks like you there? And I think that's important. How are we serving the community that we actually are part of? Whether it's Indigenous communities or Asian communities or South Asian communities or Black communities, Hispanic communities, wherever we are, we need to serve that community and we need to pull up the people.

00;21;48;02 - 00;22;42;64
Camille Callison
And to me, that's the big part about colonization. In cultural memory professions, there is a big status quo, and it's often well-meaning people who think they know what other people want. And I'm not saying that they don't want that. They may want that. It's just that you need to ask them if that's what they want. So that's part of that deolonizing process. So there is a big difference between decolonizing and Indigenization because what the decolonizing needs to happen on all fronts for all peoples, but Indigenizing is really specific to Indigenous ways of knowing. And so I think that there's really quite a big difference. But I think one is a process that needs to happen before the other happens within, specifically within the academy. So I hope I answered that sufficiently.

00;22;44;90 - 00;22;46;15
Erica Machulak
Thank you. I really great question. Appreciate it.

00;22;46;87 - 00;23;07;24
Nicole Markland
I think we have just one more question in the chat. If we still have time, Daphne asks, Is there something Camille would recommend as something intentional that members of our professional associations could do or stop doing to encourage respectful relationships with indigenous communities?

00;23;08;18 - 00;23;34;12
Camille Callison
Well, you know, one of the things that I keep on thinking about is that I wonder if one of the things that I would say that is so important for people is to listen to, to listen to us when we're speaking. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of Indigenous librarians and archivists over the years and there will continue to be that have laid out good paths forward.

00;23;34;14 - 00;24;04;25
Camille Callison
And one of the things that I think is so disheartening for many people is that sometimes people aren't listening. So we keep on saying the same things over and over again. And I'll give an example of this, is that we do have a First Nations group program which recommends different books and that kind of thing. And then I noticed in the Dalhousie lecture that I had asked Dr. Jean Joseph to come back and do that somebody asked for book list.

00;24;04;28 - 00;24;32;11
Camille Callison
And I thought to myself, So you're asking one of our esteemed elders who is who is above any of the rest of us in the work that she's done, being the title librarian for [....] case and ensuring that oral histories are embedded into into the court as as legal evidence, and you're asking her to give you a book list when you have Google.

00;24;32;13 - 00;24;54;22
Camille Callison
And to me, that was just unbelievably offensive. I was really upset. Not at the person, but at the lack of understanding that many of these things have already been done. So I would say you're exhausting Indigenous librarians and archivist by asking the same questions over and over again when you already have the resources. And we've provided them.

00;24;54;25 - 00;25;28;23
Camille Callison
One of the biggest things with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee report, was that I was always asked the same questions over and over again. And part of that report was to answer those questions. I to give people a direction forward. There will be upcoming the Truth and Reconciliation Task Force, but the report and recommendations are going to come out shortly from that, and I think that that's really important for the archive community from the Senate Committee on Archives.

00;25;28;23 - 00;25;53;15
Camille Callison
But I think honestly it's to listen to Indigenous people when they've told you and just not keep on asking them over and over again and create relationships with them that are ongoing. So what I mean by that and I'm not saying this to offend anyone, I'm trying to gently nudge people to kind of do this work themselves as that, I had a relationship with a significant other.

00;25;53;17 - 00;26;10;24
Camille Callison
And I only talked to them when I needed something from them. That's not really much of a relationship, and probably that wouldn't last for very long, I'm guessing, you know, Hey, honey, give me some money every month or so would not probably work out very well. But I don't have time for you. I don't have time to have dinner with you.

00;26;10;24 - 00;26;25;08
Camille Callison
And I, you know, I'm sorry, but I'm busy. I don't have time to do this. I'm so busy right now. I don't have time for and the rest of the month. But when it came to pay day, I really wanted to get some money from you. That's not going to happen. So it has to be an ongoing, meaningful relationship.

00;26;25;08 - 00;26;43;18
Camille Callison
Not an extractive relationship, a reciprocal relationship. And, you know, every community that I go to wants something different. I don't know what they are. I could never tell you what they are as an Indigenous person, because I don't have a relationship with that local community. Now, I know that many of you are already doing that work or else you wouldn't be on here.

00;26;43;21 - 00;27;06;29
Camille Callison
So this message is really I'm preaching to the choir right now, and I know that. But I think that it's really important to keep on saying, is saying be this because I feel like it's not still not being done where there's this ongoing relationship with each other, where we actually talk to each other. And I think that that's so important.

00;27;07;01 - 00;27;29;27
Camille Callison
And, you know, sometimes you're gonna go to communities and they won't know what they want because they don't really know what you do. And so when they understand, and I think I am I'm an example of this, I, I didn't understand what people didn't know when I went to and I've worked with some communities. And so instead I was talking at this level and I should have been talking at this level, and I've been guilty of that.

00;27;29;27 - 00;27;54;15
Camille Callison
And I definitely have had many regrets for doing that because it was so easy to me, but it wasn't that easy to them. And so remembering that, remembering that in the relationship that we're coming from a privileged place of knowledge within this profession that they don't always have. So I think that that would be kind of part of where we're coming from is just how do we talk to Indigenous communities.

00;27;54;16 - 00;28;21;06
Camille Callison
And for each community it's going to be different. And then not assuming that they're not doing that work in every community I've ever gone to, every community, they're doing something to preserve their traditional knowledge, whether it's they're on cassette tapes, and they need to be digitized to more newer technology. They need to be migrated to that. If they're recording the stories of the elders, if they're working with language.

00;28;21;06 - 00;28;42;21
Camille Callison
I mean, I've seen little language storybooks that are photocopied on the band office. We used to photocopy our dictionary at the band office to give to people. It's kind of one of those things that people are doing, but they're doing with the best that they can with the resources that they have. So it might not look like what we do in libraries, but they're still doing something.

00;28;42;21 - 00;29;02;25
Camille Callison
So find out what that is and then help them with that. Give them that technology that they need. Hey, you know what? We can afford to send these out to a printing press for you or whatever, but every community is doing something. We are very aware that if we do not preserve our knowledge that it won't, that we won't have it.

00;29;02;28 - 00;29;21;28
Camille Callison
And so we are doing that. But it's about helping them where they're at. And I don't know what each community has because I would have to go and do an environmental scan of what they have, and I wouldn't even say that to them. I would just say, I need to see what you have you're doing, because we use different language in academia.

00;29;22;00 - 00;29;44;14
Camille Callison
So I think that that's important to do as well, to just to talk to people and don't assume that they're not doing something, but assume that what they're doing, you might be able to build, you might be able to lift them, lift their voices, don't lift yours. I see at conferences all the time, people getting up and talking about their work, and I'm like, Where is the Indigenous person standing there beside you?

00;29;44;14 - 00;30;03;09
Camille Callison
Because I know that they have just as much, if not more to do with that work than you did. Why aren't you flying them to that, well now we're in COVID, but before that why aren't you flying them to that conference. They need to be part of that. And it's always about money. But I can tell you, people can find money for what they want to find money for.

00;30;03;11 - 00;30;42;14
Camille Callison
So I encourage you to treat them as equal partners or respected partners and to always elevate their voice so that they have the final say so, in whatever that project that you're working on with them is, if they say, No, we can't do that, please stop doing it. I think that that's so important that we have to allow them to to have that final word about their own knowledge and their own language in their own community, because if you're in a relationship and you're doing something to hurt somebody else and they ask you to stop and you don't stop, you're not going to be in that relationship for very much longer either.

00;30;42;14 - 00;31;09;00
Camille Callison
So I think taking relationships that you have with with people that you admire and respect and that their love that's got to be what it's all about. You know, I think there's a whole there's a whole different kind of set of values if you look at it in that way, in a respectful relationship. And many communities have relationships defined already.

00;31;09;00 - 00;31;32;00
Camille Callison
So looking at how they define those relationships and those clan relationships and who can say what and that kind of thing is really important as well too. So I think that those things are, it can get complicated, but it's about communication and it's about respect for each other and listening to each other that can make a big difference moving forward.

00;31;32;01 - 00;31;44;90
Camille Callison
So I know that was a long answer to a short question, but I really appreciate the question and I thank you for it, because I think it's so important for us to create those respectful relationships.

00;31;45;83 - 00;31;47;90
Erica Machulak
Thank you. Camille.

00;31;48;01 - 00;32;05;68
Camille Callison
I'd like to say thank you if possible. So I just want to say madhucho to everyone for listening. And thank you for taking your time, time away from your work and for your attention today. I really appreciate all of you. Thank you so much. Madhu.

00;32;08;05 - 00;32;27;92
Erica Machulak
And once again, two years later, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Camille and everyone who joined the event. And I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge Shirley Hardiman, who gave a fantastic land acknowledgment that we didn't record. So thank you very much for listening now, and for those of you who listened back then.

00;32;32;56 - 00;32;57;70
Erica Machulak
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. The production this episode was led by Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Simangele Mabena, Eufemia Baldassarre, Ai Mizuta, Nicole Markland and Dashara Green. Matthew Tomkinson composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma artist in residence.

00;32;58;28 - 00;33;28;26
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate BC, Tech Nation, the Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canada Digital Adoption Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;33;28;29 - 00;33;52;27
Unknown
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;40;18
Erica Machulak
In conversations about social justice and social change these days, we talk a lot about listening. How to be a good listener, how to ask the right questions. What I love about this episode, where I'm chatting with Dr. Dwandalyn Reece, who is curator of music and performing arts at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture, is that we talk about listening through the lens of the history of music and social justice.

00;00;40;20 - 00;01;07;21
Erica Machulak
Dwan shares great insights about what it means to be a good mentor and a good mentee, and I'm delighted to share this conversation with you. You're listening to the Hikma Collective podcast, and I'm Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. Thank you for joining us.

00;01;07;23 - 00;01;10;77
Erica Machulak
Well, hi. It's really nice to see you. How are you doing?

00;01;11;05 - 00;01;13;15
Dwandalyn Reece
I'm doing well. How are you?

00;01;13;18 - 00;02;06;23
Erica Machulak
I'm good. I'll give you a little bit of the background on our last conversation, just to refresh you on where we left off. So back in October, you very kindly sat down with me in your offices at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And we talked a lot about your career journey and the book that you're writing and what we're trying to achieve at Hikma in terms of building a learning community that at the time I called a watering hole for the Mavericks, of which I cheekily think you are maybe one. And so I was so excited when you agreed to be on our podcast, because I think your perspective on how ideas flow across contexts is really fascinating, and I just appreciate you being here today.

00;02;06;26 - 00;02;09;88
Dwandalyn Reece
Well, I'm happy to be here. Continue the conversation.

00;02;10;00 - 00;02;23;43
Erica Machulak
Yeah, same. So I know that one of the things on your plate right now is that you have your book coming out, Musical Crossroads Stories Behind the Objects of African American Music. You tell us a little bit more about your book?

00;02;23;88 - 00;03;02;06
Dwandalyn Reece
Sure. The museum has its own publication program. We've put out several books since the opening of the museum. And I was asked, we have this photography series: double exposure. So there's usually photographs on a certain theme, and we do these small books. I was approached about doing something on music and I was very keen to do that, but I was also thinking, What could I do that's a little different? In putting something together. Because to me, the stories are the most important thing.

00;03;02;08 - 00;03;36;22
Dwandalyn Reece
The magic with the objects is really engaging with them, carrying, you know, pulling out the stories behind them, who made them, who use them, How has their meaning changed over time? All kinds of things. And so I wanted it to be a little something more robust. And so I asked if instead of just doing photographs, could we do a book on music about the objects of music, which is my passion as a curator and my passion for my my love of music and how they dig deep into it.

00;03;36;24 - 00;04;04;13
Dwandalyn Reece
So it took about seven years to not totally write, you know, you have your day to day responsibilities and everything else going on. So you find a little time here and a little time there. But it was really an opportunity to kind of talk about what makes me passionate about museum work and what makes me passionate about music.

00;04;04;15 - 00;04;33;21
Dwandalyn Reece
I love music. I'm a singer. You know, that's just one level of it, though, because it's been an entree for me to the rest of the world - about learning about myself, about learning about society, culture, history, politics, you name it. And so that lens, it is the reason for me why music is a universal language, because it it teaches us anything we want to be taught.

00;04;33;24 - 00;05;07;04
Dwandalyn Reece
And that richness that, that that, that just energy from looking at an object and thinking about it in multiple ways really excites me. And I want it to excite other people and also talk about using objects for music research, material culture as we call it, is common in history, Archeology, using objects in museum studies, to use objects to talk about other stories in history.

00;05;07;06 - 00;06;21;07
Dwandalyn Reece
But there really hasn't been a material culture of music per se. The easiest thing when you work with music, you can work with scores, you can work with correspondence or images, but they're usually to illustrate something. They're not the object, the focal, the primary source in and of itself. And so the goal of that was to get people excited about objects, but also to see a new way to think about music, to think about music in an expansive way beyond the performer and audience, music as a culture of community building, music as a culture of protest, of identity formation, of uplift, all kinds of things that when you really think about it, a musical story is more than just a record. It's a semblage. I see these multiple circles just circling around and intersecting all over the place. How music activates in community. So they're they're turned out to be multiple goals, so to speak.

00;06;13;00 - 00;06;30;43
Erica Machulak
It sounds like a really rich and complex project. Can you give us an example of one of the objects that you talked about and the story behind it?

00;06;21;09 - 00;06;25;04
Dwandalyn Reece
Oh, sure.

00;06;25;07 - 00;07;08;28
Dwandalyn Reece
Let me pull something out. There's so many. There's so many. I hate to. I'm trying to pick the right one. Oh, okay. Here's here's one. There is Nina Simone - great singer, 1963 or 64. She recorded a song called Mississippi Goddam. And it was a response after the burning of the 16th Street Baptist Church and her anger and fury about, having to write that song.

00;07;08;28 - 00;07;43;09
Dwandalyn Reece
And at that time, you know, when she performed it on The Tonight Show, it's really the lyrics and the music are quite diametrically opposed. It sounds like this jaunty vaudeville tune, you know. And then she had this searing language, you know, Mississippi Goddam, you know, No more segregation. Take it slow. No, we're not going to do that. So that that pointed language and we have a promo copy of the 45.

00;07;43;09 - 00;08;07;03
Dwandalyn Reece
And so you can talk about the promo copies that oh, yes, this belong to Nina Simone and people would be fascinated with it. When we start to look at the story behind it and what we juxtapose this one with were some glass shards that a woman, Joan Macallan, collected from the 16th Street Baptist Church after the bombing.

00;08;07;05 - 00;08;45;17
Dwandalyn Reece
So we juxtapose those two things to really talk about not only Nina Simone, but her voice as a singer, a female singer, really pointed language in 1963, really totally unheard of, to have such searing comments about the state of the world. But to be performed on a mainstream stage, so to speak. And so how these objects, how that disparate 45 connects to these shards of glass, which are in our segregation exhibit.

00;08;45;20 - 00;09;17;22
Dwandalyn Reece
So they're totally separate but really totally connected. So we get behind the stories about that. So it's, there are multiple stories about Nina, the civil rights movement, music, composition, the Critical Moment, a woman collecting shards, an activist herself. She was a white woman who, with the freedom rides. So you see how the stories can just kind of, there's a chain that just goes further and further out - that that's what excites me.

00;09;17;23 - 00;09;22;30
Dwandalyn Reece
So that that's one particular story that we like to talk about.

00;09;22;85 - 00;09;27;32
Erica Machulak
Would you tell us a little bit more about your story and how you how you got to where you are?

00;09;28;85 - 00;10;20;04
Dwandalyn Reece
Sure. I think there were a couple serendipitous moments about how I forged my career, what I really ended up doing. I had always been interested in music and I'd always been interested in history, American history. I, in college, I took a course there was trying to decide what I was going to do American studies and music, which I wanted to major in, and I ended up doing both. But I took a course with two professors called: Vienna Music Mirror of Society, and in classical music you learn about the composers, the great works, the theory behind it, the musicology and everything like that.

00;10;20;06 - 00;10;52;06
Dwandalyn Reece
But in this course we looked at Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert and Mozart from a social and cultural context, and the communities in the world in which they served. And that was eye opening to me, because I hadn't seen that done with classical music. There seems to be more of a natural affinity to do that with American music. But there was, there's something, there was something exciting about that that just really opened a door for me.

00;10;52;06 - 00;11;22;18
Dwandalyn Reece
And I got really, really jazz, so to speak, about the class and having that kind of lens because it helped me as a singer to learn so much more about what was going on at the time or what was going on personally in their lives, the conditions they had and all of that stuff. It just brought another lens to the music itself and just really enriched my experience with it.

00;11;22;20 - 00;11;56;08
Dwandalyn Reece
And I went straight to graduate school after I graduated, went to the University of Michigan. Still interested in American culture and pursuing music. I, what I learned at the time, I got a little disenchanted with all this great learning. I have a love of learning and all these great discussions and theories and how it stays within the academy, how there are scholars just speaking to one another.

00;11;56;10 - 00;12;37;21
Dwandalyn Reece
And I've always had a kind of a democratic outlook that I think stuff needs to be shared with people. And I remember just kind of feeling that that little twinge inside my first couple of years of graduate school, but as luck would have it Michigan had a museum practice program, and on a lark I applied. You know, I thought museums, they serve general audiences and maybe this would be a creative way to do work and to reach as many people as possible and not on a hierarchy that you have to be a scholar to understand it.

00;12;37;22 - 00;12;59;29
Dwandalyn Reece
How can I take this thinking, this knowledge, this excitement, and and make it accessible to general audiences? And that's where the real change - not that there's not real change in other areas - but that's where you can see some kind of - it's not immediate feedback, slow feedback, and that the more people learn, the more aware they are.

00;13;00;04 - 00;13;26;26
Dwandalyn Reece
So that was where it really came together for me. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do in museums. I just I just kind of went with my passions and what really rang true to me and my career took, you know, music was always, music and theater and the arts, were always the first love, the driving thing.

00;13;26;26 - 00;13;55;21
Dwandalyn Reece
I did an internship here at the Smithsonian.One at the Portrait Gallery and Education Department. And then one at the American History Museum, working with my mentor, John Hassey, who's a curator emeritus now from American History, and had the honor to work with the Duke Ellington collection when it was first acquired and just going through boxes and just. Tt was a magical experience for me.

00;13;55;23 - 00;14;24;06
Dwandalyn Reece
There's something I find really telling in an object. I can stand in the place and just try to imagine the history or the people that have been touched by it and what it was like then and what I'm supposed to think about it. And I also found objects as a way to, because interpreting in the way that I like to interpret them is very inclusive.

00;14;24;08 - 00;14;43;28
Dwandalyn Reece
You know, there's no one privileged story. I think when we talk about the arts sometimes we're always talking about the great auteurs and the great artist and, you know, it's just by happenstance that we know about the people we know about because they're the most written about, you know. There are talented people. Music operates in all sections of society.

00;14;44;00 - 00;15;08;19
Dwandalyn Reece
And, you know, the important thing in our museum is talking about music. It's not a hall of fame. It's really looking at the role of music and the African American experience. And those are two very, very different things. And I'm leaning toward the whole experience. The the full experience that we can have with music and the stories that it tells.

00;15;08;21 - 00;16;10;25
Dwandalyn Reece
So once again, it kind of fit my democratic impulse again. I'm inclusive and representative and telling the stories that don't get to be told and also telling them in creative ways that reach people, that can reach people without them knowing that they're being reached. Little subterfuge, too. Mm hmm. How do you hit people over the head with something or get them to think about something differently? And I think exhibits and music can do that quite a bit.

00;15;43;15 - 00;16;05;71
Erica Machulak
I agree. And I. I'm curious to hear more about one of the threads you pulled there, which is this idea of getting feedback on whether the things that you're doing are working and how they're being received. Could you say a little bit more about the feedback that you get working in a museum and and how you know, whether the things that you're doing are reaching the people you want to reach

00;16;06;03 - 00;16;45;22
Dwandalyn Reece
That is an age old question in the humanities, how do you know what you're doing has an impact? And it's more than just a numbers game. I think the best thing, when I talk about feedback, you know, so much of this job is also interpersonal relationships and dealing with people and their stories and treating them as they're real and and sacred, so to speak. And I'd have to say the the best part is, is is meeting people and working with people and being partners with them.

00;16;49;20 - 00;17;20;05
Dwandalyn Reece
Everybody wants to be heard. They have a story to tell. And how I tell if I'm getting it right is if I have a conversation with someone and, you know, it might be the smallest thing to me, it might be a mention in a digital interactive in one part of the exhibition. But how gratified people feel to be recognized and heard and placed into the larger dialog.

00;17;20;07 - 00;17;51;09
Dwandalyn Reece
I know sometimes by the conversations I hear, you know, when you deal with a museum exhibit, you spend all this time designing it, curating it, writing all the label text. And, you know, the average visitor may not read everything or get everything, but in the time I spend in the tour and the gallery, I listen. I listen to the conversations among people, among family members.

00;17;51;11 - 00;18;18;02
Dwandalyn Reece
I take pride in their excitement. I take pride in someone telling something, you know, do you know the mothership. Let me tell you all about this. There are times where people can zero in and just, what I'm trying to get across. So much of our storytelling, I want people to think about music when they think about regional differences.

00;18;18;02 - 00;18;51;21
Dwandalyn Reece
I want them to think about racism and how that really impacted the large scale of things - community building, religion, spirituality, all of those things are just more, you know they're all part of what music is about. What that one song with that one piece, whatever you might be listening to. And so that's very intentional in the storytelling. And you know, when someone gets even just a thread of that, I'm gratified.

00;18;51;23 - 00;19;07;70
Dwandalyn Reece
I'm wholly gratified because I wrote something or said something that resonated with them. And that's all I need to feel like I'm making a difference.

00;19;08;80 - 00;19;10;50
Erica Machulak
And do you feel heard?

00;19;13;03 - 00;19;52;20
Dwandalyn Reece
Quite honestly, I think I struggle to be heard. I am more gratified at this point in my career that I am and more comfortable about pushing dominant narratives, because I think that I've learned, particularly in this job, that there are other voices similar to mine, and there is not space to acknowledge them because there are certain narratives that have to be pushed forward to to achieve a certain goal.

00;19;52;20 - 00;20;23;14
Dwandalyn Reece
I'll give you an example. One of the, when we talk about African-American music or black music, a lot of it is just talked in terms of resistance, the resistance narrative of protest and social protest. That's very important, but it's not in and all of what everyone thinks and does with their musical careers or lives. And so, you know, in some, in one section, it's a take off of a song.

00;20;23;17 - 00;20;53;27
Dwandalyn Reece
Oh, I'm messing it up right now. What it means to be free. Something like that was written by Billy Taylor. But I think about freedom in a much more expansive way, that is not about the civil rights movement or the abolition of slavery. The truest freedom, you know, any one of us might want is to be ourselves in any way possible and not be judged or pigeonholed into having to be some way.

00;20;54;00 - 00;21;26;05
Dwandalyn Reece
Now, you know why there's certain imperatives - Because there's a long history of systemic racism, systemic oppression of people of color, homophobia, all of those kinds of things. But in the in the final end, I think we want to be ourselves. Snd being ourselves, it's our choice who we want to be. And I don't think our our likes or our loves of our music, or who we like.

00;21;26;05 - 00;21;51;23
Dwandalyn Reece
And I struggle with this as a child. It shouldn't be dictated to us. And so I'm all about that freedom of expression and that it it's all worthwhile. And so part of that, the book ended up actually serving multiple missions for me and getting my voice out. And in addition to talking about the objects themselves.

00;21;51;90 - 00;21;55;85
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. And do you have a favorite song?

00;21;57;11 - 00;22;07;02
Dwandalyn Reece
Oh, bad question. Bad question. I have lots of favorite songs.

00;22;07;05 - 00;22;19;61
Dwandalyn Reece
That's a really hard question, because then you're asking me, or I might feel like you're asking me, you know, what's your favorite genre? And I'm not going to say that either.

00;22;20;05 - 00;22;24;02
Erica Machulak
Why is it such a hard question? What's the, tell us about the challenge.

00;22;32;19 - 00;22;37;16
Dwandalyn Reece
One song speaking for everything that you are. And it's not the challenge with me. It's more the projection.

00;22;37;18 - 00;23;10;04
Dwandalyn Reece
There's this book I read last year, Nina Edshein, the base of sound. I've got it on my bookshelf. But this is something I struggled with as a child because I. I didn't have a voice that sounded black. And I was criticized and made fun about that or about my musical choices. And that's more about someone else than it is about me.

00;23;10;04 - 00;23;43;23
Dwandalyn Reece
But it still has an impact. And so I kind of get a little, not uptight, but, you know, trying to pick one thing. And assuming somebody is going to let that one song speak for everything that I love. And I don't know if there is one song that could, there's certain songs I like a turn of phrase or a harmonic progression, a sound of a of a voice, you know, certain voices.

00;23;43;23 - 00;24;16;07
Dwandalyn Reece
I think right now I'm excited about watching the Roberta Flack documentary, Killing Me Softly is one of my favorite songs, but also how her voice is so distinct and draws me in. There are a lot of I have a strong affinity for vocalists. Female vocalists. Mm hmm. Ella Fitzgerald. Joan Baez. Janis Ian and Ethel Waters off course, my dissertation topic.

00;24;16;09 - 00;24;30;33
Dwandalyn Reece
So but lots of the Eva Cassidy, Deanne Warwick. I like singer songwriter types but and they're different songs are different things.

00;24;30;40 - 00;24;40;13
Erica Machulak
Totally. So who are the audiences for your book? Who do you feel that you're speaking to?

00;24;40;15 - 00;25;16;24
Dwandalyn Reece
I'm speaking to, I'm speaking to the general reader who loves music, who loves African-American culture. I'm also speaking to the serious researcher or the lay researcher who.. collectors, you know. Anyway, we all save something for some reason or another. Why are we saving it? And what does it tell us? You know, it's an exercise in that I'm speaking to musicologists and ethnomusicologist about their own scholarship.

00;25;16;27 - 00;25;43;08
Dwandalyn Reece
What new avenues does working with material culture open? What questions could we ask? How can we open the floodgates of having different voices inform the research we've already done? I believe that the material culture really lends itself well to that. So it's kind of convincing that community too, because there hasn't been a lot of work in that area.

00;25;43;11 - 00;26;15;18
Dwandalyn Reece
So for me, it's like anything I write, I want it to be for multiple audiences. I want them to see them, to get passionate about it, to see how it might relate to their own life, their own collections, whether it's music or not, to think about their own things that they treasure and why they treasure them. Educators I also think about, particularly K-through-12 education, and using music to teach other topics.

00;26;15;20 - 00;26;29;66
Dwandalyn Reece
I think this is an excellent way to reach children and high schoolers, junior high schoolers. So I have a broad audience I'm hoping will take pleasure in the story.

00;26;30;20 - 00;26;35;15
Erica Machulak
And how do you strike a balance writing for all of those different audiences at once?

00;26;36;20 - 00;27;15;10
Dwandalyn Reece
It's challenge. But t's a challenge I like, and I see myself doing that with everything I've done working in the public sector, so to speak, is how to distill some of these sometimes erudite theoretical ideas, but to an essence that it's in plain language. And I think there's an art to that. It's not always easy. I think the book is structured - I do all the main essays, and that's kind of the the half the theoretical framing a little bit. And then there are a lot of stories and profiles.

00;27;15;10 - 00;27;49;08
Dwandalyn Reece
And I had a team of my colleagues who helped with writing a lot of those. But it is a balance and language use and choice. All of that is is it is a balance in everything we do, particularly for the museum, because we're reaching so many audiences and you have to speak to so many people at one time through one text or one blog or when one label.

00;27;49;11 - 00;28;24;27
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. In Canada, they they have this term that's really common. Most federal grants have a module or a section that applicants have to fill out. It's called the Knowledge Mobilization section. And so knowledge mobilization is emerging as this term to refer to the work that scholars do to make their research accessible and useful. And I wonder for you, are there examples of scholars doing that that you can point to that you thought were really effective.

00;28;24;27 - 00;28;50;24
Dwandalyn Reece
For me, and when I talk to people, if you're going to do public facing work, I want you to do it for the right reasons, because you want to engage with the public, not because you want to publicize yourself. I believe and I get I have a lot of students who come and talk to me that I can quite honestly say that what I did was intentional.

00;28;50;24 - 00;29;26;16
Dwandalyn Reece
I wanted to work with public audiences. It wasn't a fallback. It wasn't alt-academic. I, I thrive on engaging with public audiences, and it deserves no less than that. Do you want to be in this field? It's not an alternative to do the same thing you might do as a university professor. You really have to have an orientation and intention to do with, working in community.

00;29;26;16 - 00;29;53;17
Dwandalyn Reece
I mean, as scholars, you work by yourselves, you teach your classes, you write your grants. You're kind of an independent producer. In the public sector, you have obligations to other people besides yourself. Not only your colleagues or to your funders, but to the people you actually work there and what you're doing has real life consequences to them. It can change lives and it does change lives.

00;29;53;20 - 00;30;18;04
Dwandalyn Reece
And if you don't value that and see that as the impetus for doing your kind of work, I think you're better placed elsewhere. It's not about publicity. It's not about making a name for yourself. It's about an intention of seeing your scholarship out there, not for the glorification of you as a scholar, but for the good of the community.

00;30;18;06 - 00;30;24;29
Erica Machulak
And do you think that every scholar within the Academy should be doing public facing work?

00;30;26;20 - 00;31;05;22
Dwandalyn Reece
I do. I think universities are parts of their community. I think the efficacy and the resources they pour into professors that, as community service they should not only serve their students, but also outside their community. And that's where you're going to see, you know, you just get a small fraction when you're working within the classroom. And, in fact, it's quite prudent, you know, knowing graduate education, as we know today and the number of tenure track jobs.

00;31;05;24 - 00;31;27;29
Dwandalyn Reece
It's a way to prepare students to apply their work in other ways. And it's a way to make their work useful. It's a no brainer to me. But it's it's it's a difficult road to hoe because it really needs to come from the top down. You know, tenure track, tenure dossiers and all of that kind of stuff.

00;31;28;00 - 00;31;53;22
Dwandalyn Reece
They don't reward public facing work on the same level as they do writing a monograph or writing a journal article or teaching a class. And so there's there's a strong, steep learning curve not only to professors and, you know, their academic societies I'm a part of and talking about public facing work but to really elevated it not see it as lesser than.

00;31;53;25 - 00;31;56;75
Dwandalyn Reece
And that's my other soapbox. I have lots of soapboxes.

00;31;59;05 - 00;32;16;06
Erica Machulak
We're here to talk about any and all soapboxes that you would like to talk about. One of the challenges that we see come up, because at Hikma, a lot of what we do on the consulting side is working with scholars who would like to do that public facing work and are trying to, they're seeking funding for it.

00;32;16;06 - 00;32;43;19
Erica Machulak
They're seeking strategies for it. They want someone in the room to help them facilitate dialogs with their community partners in a way that helps them get on the same page. And one of the things that really comes through in the different folks that we work with is that not everybody has the same instincts. Not everybody has the same intuitive skills to build those relationships and and do that work.

00;32;43;22 - 00;32;59;12
Erica Machulak
Do you have any ideas for how to balance that, how to how to make it possible for scholars who don't have the instincts or the experience and partnership development to to do that work responsibly?

00;32;59;15 - 00;33;31;27
Dwandalyn Reece
Well, a lot of this training, I mean, I think it's instincts, intuitiveness, you know, you're you're more inclined for certain professions. There are a couple of things that I think about. One is, you know, programs do not give experiences where you can get that kind of instinct. I think the best thing I did, what was great about my museum practice program, it was all learning by doing.

00;33;32;00 - 00;34;05;23
Dwandalyn Reece
It wasn't. Yeah, we had reading, we had classes, but we were doing all the way through the program. And I can't tell you enough how actually being out there and listening and observing and trying to understand how things work and where people come from, how valuable to me that has been as a knowledge base and developing my own skills and perfecting my own skills.

00;34;05;26 - 00;34;35;15
Dwandalyn Reece
And you have to have that level of you, also have to have a level of self-awareness about your placement, particularly working with communities in relation to them, and be very clear about who you are and what you're bringing and what blinders you may be bringing or attitudes, but also to look at where they are and what they're bringing and and where the commonality stands.

00;34;35;17 - 00;35;07;17
Dwandalyn Reece
There's a lot of emotional intelligence to this work to do it right and to not come on as as someone who's taking over or speaking for someone else or appropriating someone else's culture and I think a lot of that is in the preparation. You know, if I had my druthers, there would be programs, graduate programs that built some of these kind of skills, that you could probably use in the academy or outside the academy.

00;35;07;19 - 00;35;56;00
Dwandalyn Reece
But I think a successful person, whatever route you choose, needs to have that level of self-awareness, and self flexibility to see where you're positioned in the greater scheme of things. But there's there's nothing better but listening and understanding and understanding your vantage point versus someone else's and not coming off as an expert know it all. One of the things I think is true about music and I like is that I may be a curator or I may have a Ph.D., I may have all these things, but there's someone out there who knows more than I do.

00;35;56;03 - 00;36;19;25
Dwandalyn Reece
And quite a lot of people who know more than I do. And I am always willing to learn. I'm open to that all the time, and I don't present myself as knowing everything. I know what I know. I can put together things. I can interpret things. Mm hmm. That I will learn from every person that I encounter.

00;36;19;28 - 00;36;34;60
Erica Machulak
You mentioned a number of times the importance of being a good listener, which I find especially interesting coming from someone who listens to music in so many dimensions. What are the qualities of a good listener?

00;36;41;70 - 00;36;53;12
Dwandalyn Reece
Not talking so much. I in it sounds, tongue in cheek, but you don't have to be the expert in the room.

00;36;53;15 - 00;37;26;16
Dwandalyn Reece
I don't like to hear myself talk ad nauseam. I. I draw people, I try to draw people out and hear what they're saying. You also listening. You listen for what you don't hear. Mm hmm. And what you don't hear or see. A listener also asks good probing questions or leading questions. A listener knows where to stop or maybe redirect.

00;37;26;18 - 00;37;52;13
Dwandalyn Reece
Someone may not want to talk about something, but you also listen for the things that keep coming up. And perhaps there's something you want to listen there. And you listen to really, I don't know. This thought just crossed my mind last week. I was just writing something. But you listen beyond what you can hear.

00;37;52;15 - 00;38;23;09
Dwandalyn Reece
I've been playing around with that. Because listening beyond what you can hear is actually going beyond what is actually being uttered at that moment. And to me, that's like delving deep with an object. It's going. It's learning beyond that one encounter. It is going back and doing your reading. It's going back and doing your research or talking to other people in the community.

00;38;23;11 - 00;38;54;40
Dwandalyn Reece
There's there's more to it than just that one exchange. And that's how, sometimes we can run the risk of being arrogant enough our own self-importance of what we're doing. But if you haven't done your homework and you don't go do your homework when someone has directed you to, then you're really, you're really not all in. And you're not on board with really having a fair and equal exchange with somebody. So I feel that very strongly.

00;38;49;12 - 00;39;12;75
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. So what I'm hearing you tell me if this is fair, is that a piece of it is being able to step back, ask the right questions, let conversation go where it needs to go. And a piece of it is committing upfront to the follow through.

00;39;13;70 - 00;39;19;20
Dwandalyn Reece
Absolutely. And it's not, none of this is transactional.

00;39;19;22 - 00;40;06;17
Dwandalyn Reece
These are, you know they may turn out to be transactional, but these are relationship building exercises, encounters. When working with people, we're dealing with their stories. When collecting their objects, I never see it as a transaction. I never want to see it as a transaction. You know, sometimes I may never talk to that person again, but it is a lived experience that I carry with me in the next exchange or in my mental notebook about what it meant to work with this person, to work alongside this person, to tell this story, and to go over this important history or to this common interest.

00;40;06;19 - 00;40;13;17
Erica Machulak
Well, thank you so much Dwan, it's been a privilege to have you. And I really appreciate your time.

00;40;15;00 - 00;40;18;17
Dwandalyn Reece
Well, thanks for letting me do this. This was fun.

00;40;22;00 - 00;40;48;07
Erica Machulak
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. The production this episode was led by Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Simangele Mabena, Eufemia Baldassarre, Ai Mizuta, Nicole Markland and Dashara Green. Matthew Tomkinson composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma artist in residence.

00;40;48;09 - 00;41;18;08
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate BC, Tech Nation, the Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canada Digital Adoption Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;41;18;10 - 00;41;41;25
Erica Machulak
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;35;13
Erica Machulak
What does being a scholar mean to you? This is a question that we've been thinking through with our research partners at the University of British Columbia. And in this episode, we're going to share our ongoing conversations with them about this question and others relating to the emerging experience of PhDs. An experience that captures a lot of themes about the future of work, and in particular, what we mean when we talk about communities of practice.

00;00;35;16 - 00;00;59;25
Erica Machulak
As you'll hear, we're thinking about scholarship not necessarily specific to a discipline or a department, but as a process, a practice and a form of labor. These are questions that are massively important to Hikma, where we're thinking about what it means to build a community of practice. So with that, I'm Erica Machulak, the founder of Hikma, and you're listening to the Hikma Collective Podcast.

00;00;59;28 - 00;01;07;09
Erica Machulak
Thank you for joining us.

00;01;07;12 - 00;01;24;18
Erica Machulak
Welcome back to the Hikma Collective Podcast, I'm delighted to be here with our research partners at the University of British Columbia. And I'll leave it to them to say a little bit about themselves. But Jillianne Code, can I ask you to tell us a little bit about what this project is and why we're all here?

00;01;25;23 - 00;01;26;18
Jillianne Code
Sure. Thank you, Erica.

00;01;26;21 - 00;02;12;01
Jillianne Code
Absolutely delighted to be here and to be partnering with you on this work. My name is Dr. Jillianne Code, and I'm an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. And we came together to really explore more what it means to have a Ph.D., what it means to be a scholar. But beyond that, where people with PhDs or with doctoral degrees end up outside of the academy, why they chose that direction and really to consider professional agency and what that means in the context outside of the academy space.

00;02;12;03 - 00;02;33;11
Erica Machulak
Nice Andy Webb, will you tell us a little bit about how you came to be involved in the project?

00;02;17;03 - 00;02;38;11
Andrea Webb
Hi, my name is Andrea Webb and I am an associate professor of teaching in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. And my real interest in this is how we engage in teaching and learning in higher education. And that's the focus of both my research and my participation in this project.

00;02;39;17 - 00;02;40;80
Erica Machulak
Kieran Ford. How about you?

00;02;42;27 - 00;02;52;80
Kieran Ford
Hi, my name's Kieran Ford. I'm a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at UBC. I'm a research assistant on this project and Dr. Code is my mentor and advisor.

00;02;53;30 - 00;02;56;11
Erica Machulak
Nice. Thank you, Kieran. And how about you Zahira?

00;02;58;27 - 00;03;23;16
Zahira Tasabehji
Hi I'm Zahira, I'm a current MA student, first year student, with under the supervision of Dr. Code as well. And I. I'm doing my MA in media and technology studies education. Yeah, I guess for me, it's thinking about what it means to be a scholar and where I see myself within the academy and whether I consider, you know, pursuing a PhD in the future.

00;03;23;19 - 00;03;46;19
Zahira Tasabehji
It's it's really important to understand the opportunities that lie, you know, at the, at the other end and whether I am able to see myself within that realm in the first place. I think this work is really will shed some light on that. And whether on my own personal experience of what it means for me to pursue those kind of opportunities in the future.

00;03;46;21 - 00;04;00;16
Erica Machulak
I love that Zahira, and you beat me to the punch. So I want to ask each of you, while we're here, to answer that question. So Zahira went first. How about you, Andy? Complete this sentence: Being a scholar to me means...

00;04;01;03 - 00;04;20;16
Andrea Webb
Being a scholar to me means applying in a, rigorous, a thoughtful, an appropriate method and methodology to questions and curiosities.

00;04;20;19 - 00;05;01;16
Andrea Webb
I think that being a scholar is actually a very broad pursuit and is actually taken up by lots of people. But the universities have often, or higher education has often, made a cachet around around their own work. But I think that lots of people engage in intelligent, rigorous, intellectual pursuits outside of the academy. And to me, being a scholar means bringing that training to bear on questions and curiosities that individuals have, regardless of the area of interest.

00;05;01;18 - 00;05;03;16
Erica Machulak
I love it. How about you, Jillianne?

00;05;05;21 - 00;02;12;01
Jillianne Code
It's a really great question and a great statement. I think it depends on which mood you're in on how you answer that question. But at the essence, for me, being a scholar means that questions and curiosities like like Andy said. But for me, it's I take that one step further.

00;05;33;16 - 00;06;21;03
Jillianne Code
One step adjacent to that is that that inspired curiosities to really think about questions that I have about the world. But applying a rigor to investigate those questions, but more importantly, to tell a story at the end of it, and how no matter how what data you've collected, how you've collected that data there, there is a story to tell, and it's likely a very compelling story, even if there is no, you know, it's non-significant in whatever statistical way you're thinking about it, it's still a story. And so I, I see myself as as a storyteller, essentially.

00;06;23;03 - 00;06;26;21
Erica Machulak
Nice. Kieran, how about you?

00;06;23;03 - 00;06;42;21
Kieran Ford
Yeah, being a scholar is a it's a tricky one. It's always good to say something is a spectrum that we have a pretty broad appeal to play with. So I like the spectrum idea. I'm like, as a scholar, as a student, I guess I would be a junior scholar.

00;06;42;21 - 00;07;12;07
Kieran Ford
So I guess I'm thinking of the privilege that I've been afforded to be a scholar, and that is to sort of be in the academy where I can play gracefully with ideas. Where I have the time, the luxury of the time, a lot of it uninterrupted, a lot of it undirected, to to explore things that interest me and things that might afford purpose and to me in my life and meaning in my life.

00;07;12;10 - 00;07;30;28
Erica Machulak
Nice. So Kieren, as the Ph.D. candidate, as the one who's been going through it while we've been working on this for a number of years now, what are some of the takeaways from the research that we've done so far that feel most relevant to you?

00;07;12;10 - 00;08;01;28
Kieran Ford
Um, the, the need for community. So the blog post that I wrote for Hikma spoke around the issue of community, I think, which was highlighted very clearly early in my PhD when COVID happened and my cohorts disappeared. I had a group of people, my sort of community that I studied with, that I had classes with in a particular room in a particular setting.

00;08;01;28 - 00;08;26;29
Kieran Ford
And I met these people and we had a forum, we had a sort of traditional physical place where these things happened. And when that physical place was replaced by by what we're doing here, where we all got put into our little boxes, things changed, and some of some of my my cohort I haven't seen since. And and it was it was quite a struggle.

00;08;26;29 - 00;08;52;21
Kieran Ford
So what I've taken away from what we've been looking at is that need for community and the need to to feel connected to not just your subject, but to feel connected with others, because it's definitely something you can't do alone. I think there's a saying that, you know, everyone can be miserable by themselves. But to appreciate happiness you have to have company or something like that.

00;08;52;21 - 00;09;15;22
Kieran Ford
I think to be a scholar is not a solitary exercise, certainly when we're writing a lot of the time. But everything that leads to the writing is part of community. And so it's like the community funnels into that and, and then, yeah, the community is, is the funnel that that distills and guides and puts a point in what we're trying to do.

00;09;15;24 - 00;09;20;03
Erica Machulak
Nice. What is this study all about? Andy

00;09;21;15 - 00;09;46;03
Andrea Webb
Well, I can talk a little bit about how we have engaged in the study. Essentially, based on our interest in looking at how people have moved beyond the Academy and what what their interests are. We sort of pursued two separate avenues. I think that there is a real interest in looking at recent graduates.

00;09;46;03 - 00;10;25;06
Andrea Webb
And there is some, some studies have been done around that. Jillianne took this idea of professional agency, and how people think about their activity, and did a large scale numerical study with them and has some amazing, really interesting results in terms of how people understand themselves as being powerful agents in their own progress. And on the other side, I interviewed a small group of individuals on what their post graduation career path was.

00;10;25;06 - 00;10;38;85
Andrea Webb
And so following with appreciative interviews, we asked people, What are some of the things that went well in your post degree process? What are the things that helped you as you engaged in that process?

00;10;40;66 - 00;10;45;15
Erica Machulak
Nice. So, Andy, what is an appreciative interview?

00;10;45;71 - 00;10;59;15
Andrea Webb
An appreciative interview is essentially a narrative type of interview where they told me a story of when things went well, rather than focus on a stitch and bitch kind of situation.

00;10;59;18 - 00;11;19;55
Andrea Webb
Or rather than focus on an unfortunate series of events that have led them to leave the academy, we tried to focus on what were some of the positive takeaways. What are the opportunities? What are some of the things that went well that we could build upon in order to learn something about how to support people going forward.

00;11;22;03 - 00;10;43;77
Erica Machulak
Within the social sciences and humanities we're so well trained to critique and to find the holes. It's nice to put that perspective not only on the storytelling of of what has happened in our lives once we once we left the academy, but to think about how research can generate positive things. Jillianne, How would you respond to that?

00;11;45;32 - 00;12;05;01
Jillianne Code
I think Andy did a great job and I think it also speaks to the way in which we approached this project with a distinct mixed methodology because we really felt very strongly that there was no one method that was going to tell the whole story.

00;12;05;08 - 00;12;35;12
Jillianne Code
Having lived through much of these, these experiences, positive, negative and everything in between ourselves. How we came together to to tell these stories was really important. And I think at the essence of it was that, you know, there's some shocking stats out of the UK, you know, saying that only 50% of social sciences and 45% of arts and humanities PhD holders are in academic roles.

00;12;35;14 - 00;13;02;10
Jillianne Code
And and so what about everyone else? You know? And so there was we really felt that there was a significant need to educate and empower PhDs and postdocs about their, how to how to develop their professional agency. And so for from my side of the project, and we talk about, you know, her side and my side, and Andy is very qualitative and I'm somewhat somewhat more quantitative.

00;13;02;10 - 00;13;31;05
Jillianne Code
And so, which was a perfect pairing in my mind, you know, really just having this focus around professional agency and how people make choices and act on their own, on those choices. And as adults, how you know, how you, the meaning that you make out of your career was was really, really important. And Kieran is exactly right. You know what the data is telling us.

00;13;31;05 - 00;13;57;12
Jillianne Code
I know you're probably going to ask about the data specifically a little bit later. But even as we theoretically linked and understood that with professional agency, we need a community of practice. And so so those two elements really did come together. And I think we can say in both data sets with the with the qualitative and the quantitative that that really did come through.

00;13;57;15 - 00;14;04;47
Erica Machulak
Nice. Okay, let's break it down a little bit. Jillianne, what does agency mean in this context?

00;14;06;58 - 00;14;35;17
Jillianne Code
That's a great question. And agency.. There's many definitions of agency and they usually surround the idea of one's ability or will and skill to act in certain in, given the constraints around them. And so, you know, so the capability that individuals have to make choices and act on those choices in a way that makes a difference in their lives.

00;14;35;17 - 00;15;06;06
Jillianne Code
And that and that difference in their in their life is really important. From the, when we're looking at it from the professional agency side, with respect to the recent grads postdocs, we're thinking about, I think what comes into play, is the meaning that individuals have out of their their current, their current roles, the current roles that that that they're in, that they find themselves, that they may find themselves in.

00;15;06;06 - 00;15;42;15
Jillianne Code
That's right. Or that they chose. And so those two very, those two intentionality are very, very different. And I think coming into this project, we're thinking about professional agency. When we're training or training or educating and we're welcoming people into graduate programs. What has happened over the many, many years is that we are telling these people, our grads, that, us included, that the only way for you is to be a professor, a teaching professor, a research stream professor.

00;15;42;15 - 00;16;14;27
Jillianne Code
But in the professoriate in some way. And that, we know, both and you and I feel, I guess being younger scholars, you know, I don't know if we can call ourselves that, but hey, that that does a huge disservice because there are so many, there's there's just so much there. And so what we really wanted to do was get a lay of the land and really find out if if that's, you know, in actual fact.

00;16;14;29 - 00;16;26;07
Jillianne Code
So how much or how little agency people really felt that that they had in or that they have in the snapshot that we were able to capture.

00;16;27;47 - 00;16;33;86
Erica Machulak
So in the context of this technical work, how do we define agency?

00;16;34;61 - 00;17;30;22
Jillianne Code
So in the process, within this context, we can really define agency as, a recent, a Ph.D. graduate, or recent doctoral holder, somebody in the workforce, even, that is able to actively negotiate their identity within the context of the availability or perceived lack thereof of opportunity. And in how you how you actively engage or disengage in that process and how you utilize the community around you to find value in your, in what you're pursuing.

00;17;30;24 - 00;18;01;03
Erica Machulak
Nice, thanks Jillianne. The reason I'm asking for these technical definitions is, one of the things that really inspires me about the work of this project is talking about agency and community and communities of practice - these things that we tend to talk about in these really lofty, abstract ways - as actual, tangible things that we can think about and use to build better systems, to build better experiences, to build better communities.

00;18;01;03 - 00;18;21;17
Erica Machulak
And by breaking down those terms into an information that we can work with and real understandings of the roles that these things play in our lives, I think we have a real shot at building better ones. So, Andy, to that end, can I ask you technically, what is a community of practice?

00;18;22;43 - 00;18;39;02
Andrea Webb
So within the Academy there are lots of different definitions in terms of how people take out communities of practice, and that really is a term that has been used in the higher education literature for the last 20 or 30 years.

00;18;39;04 - 00;19;13;15
Andrea Webb
And a community of practice is often a group of people who come together to support each other as they engage in learning. So the practice being the learning, the community being the group of people. I think that that has become increasingly more complicated but also interesting as we have started to see the Academy become more diverse, more interested in interdisciplinary and cross disciplinary conversations.

00;19;13;18 - 00;19;48;26
Andrea Webb
So it's not so much about having a single community that we, that we work with, and that we investigate. But within this research, I think that it's become really, I have become really encouraged, by this idea that people have a constellation of communities that they are working with, and that we have a group of people over here that are supporting their disciplinary learning, and we have a group of people over here that are supporting their personal and professional career kind of learning and growth.

00;19;48;26 - 00;20;19;27
Andrea Webb
And then we may have our personal groups. So there are groups outside the academy that we are engaged in thinking with. And some people have talked about artistic pursuits that are part of that particular community. And so while originally it was, you know, a group of scholars or interested parties getting together to work on a particular problem, I think now we're starting to see in the academy that there are multiple different groups of people that we engage with.

00;20;19;27 - 00;20;45;23
Andrea Webb
And so no longer is it about A community of practice. But I think we have to talk about multiple communities. And I'm using this idea of a constellation, because I also think that we have different arm's length engagement with some of those communities. So some communities we are deeply embedded with and these become the foundation and the rock that we are connected to and how we we hold on to ourselves as part of this process.

00;20;45;23 - 00;21;05;22
Andrea Webb
Because I think the, you know, as we go through grad school, you do sometimes feel like you're going through a transformative experience, and some of it you keep in some of it you have to let go of. But we also do have our fingers in lots of different communities. And I think about people like Kieran and Zahira who are going through this process.

00;21;05;24 - 00;21;31;22
Andrea Webb
And not only do they have the community they came in with, but they're finding their way with other communities being, part of research projects like this and determining whether that's something you want to stay connected with going forward or, you know, just tipping your toe away and taking a taster of something and then moving on to other projects going forward.

00;21;31;25 - 00;21;38;70
Erica Machulak
And so if we're talking about constellations of communities, then what do we mean by practice?

00;21;31;25 - 00;22;01;15
Andrea Webb
So. Well, practice is something we do to to develop competence, right? And so I think that practice also has to do with - now we're going to get all over the map - but practice has to do with this idea of how we develop a craft or a skill.

00;22;01;18 - 00;22;37;26
Andrea Webb
And so if we are in the process of developing this skill of scholarship and academic research or inquiry, then these are the people that are supporting us in that practice. And I think that we have the practice makes perfect definition of practice, but we also have the practice as in our craft. And I think that this is where, you know, we have to talk about what we do in higher education as not being something that we have perfected.

00;22;38;03 - 00;23;00;28
Andrea Webb
But something that we continue to work at, be that the intellectual pursuits and, and science that you are engaging in. Or if it is the critique of manuscripts, I think that there are always different ways to be thinking about these things. So practice to me has two definitions.

00;23;01;03 - 00;23;18;05
Erica Machulak
OK. I'll allow it. Two definitions. I'll take it. One of then one of the challenges, or opportunities with what we call in Canada knowledge mobilization that has different terms all over the world public scholarship, knowledge, translation, making research ideas accessible.

00;23;18;08 - 00;23;47;17
Erica Machulak
One of the key pieces is figuring out who who you want to work with, who you're speaking to, and how to distill those ideas into the pieces that are going to be most interesting, compelling and useful to the people that you're talking to. And for me, one of the connections between that and the way that we're talking about agency and communities of practice, is learning how to pull out different dimensions of the work that you're doing to make it translate across contexts.

00;23;47;20 - 00;24;15;21
Erica Machulak
And that's as much about process as it is about outcomes. We're here talking about a study that is still very much evolving. The analysis is still continuing. We're thinking through how we're going to make this useful to the world with this podcast being one step. But if you're thinking about everyone here, if you're thinking about yourselves as scholars who are in a group of people right now that I'm Andy, tell me, does this group count as a community of practice?

00;24;15;23 - 00;24;53;02
Andrea Webb
Of course. Okay. Yes, I think so, because, you know, I know that as part of that process, we have met as a group a number of times to talk about the evolution and the iteration of our findings, but also talking through who would be interested in this. And so the outcomes are a distinct product of our community talking about this. I know that Kieran and I have met a number of times to go through the interviews and talk about what are some of the pieces that are emerging and what are we looking for and what are we hearing in the data.

00;24;53;04 - 00;25;15;08
Andrea Webb
And then he's also been meeting with Jillianne and Zahira to talk about the research or the data that they're looking at as well. And so to me, this is the perfect example of a community of practice, because we have a group of people who bring very different skill sets but are also learning from each other. And no community is flat.

00;25;15;09 - 00;25;41;00
Andrea Webb
All communities have these different levels of experience and practice and knowledge, but all of them come to a place together where they are contributing. And I think that that is is hugely powerful when we start talking, about especially research with community partners, with organizations. And coming back to your idea of knowledge mobilization, who is going to benefit from this?

00;25;41;02 - 00;26;01;03
Andrea Webb
I think it's really easy when we start looking at research, say, around, you know, cancer research, it's really easy to see who is going to benefit from that kind of research. But when we talk about knowledge mobilization in the social sciences and humanities, we have to think really hard about who outside of the academy can benefit from that.

00;26;01;06 - 00;26;39;13
Andrea Webb
Because if we don't think about that, then it becomes an echo chamber inside the academy that that isn't really helping and supporting. But if we start to think about who can benefit from this, how can people outside the Academy benefit from this idea of agency and of communities? I think one of the best things is that they could start to perhaps see the university as a partner in their community where they may not have been partners before, or that we can start to look at other organizations to have as communities and partners with us.

00;26;39;16 - 00;27;10;14
Andrea Webb
And the more we are offering those as suggestions, especially to our graduate students, to our research graduates, to the people that we know that might be looking at a career change or transition, then we keep those networks, we keep those threads, right? And this amazing web starts to develop, of people connected to each other, not just because of where they work, but because they have really interesting interests that connect with each other.

00;27;10;17 - 00;27;31;96
Andrea Webb
And the more that we can look for where that knowledge is being generated and being shared, then I think we have opportunities to do so much more with it rather than have this echo chamber in a particular department or library or wherever it is that that information is being held.

00;27;33;17 - 00;27;39;14
Erica Machulak
Zahira, what is agency look like for you in this project?

00;27;39;17 - 00;28;08;21
Zahira Tasabehji
Oh, that's a hard question, but I think, I mean, agency in general. I didn't know much about it before and I kind of got to know through Jillianne because her whole work and now I'm working with her and I think it's for me, it's the idea that I am kind of like I need to be the person who controls my my course in a way.

00;28;08;24 - 00;28;38;29
Zahira Tasabehji
And through this project, thinking about, like, my academic journey and how I'm steering the course of my ship, basically, and where I want it to go. I need to take control of my actions. I need to put myself in positions where it allows me to be, you know, to take these opportunities are presented to me and not just like, you know, sit back and be like, oh, like I want it to go a certain way and be flexible in that process.

00;28;38;29 - 00;28;57;09
Zahira Tasabehji
And I think agency plays a big role in that because I need to be an agent in my own learning journey and I need to put myself in those positions that allow me to grow and learn with other people, not just kind of have this intention and just stick to it.

00;28;58;29 - 00;29;04;09
Erica Machulak
Nice. Jillianne, tell us about this survey. How many people responded?

00;29;04;12 - 00;29;35;02
Jillianne Code
Great question. We had a total of 76 respondents, and that's the number, the complete number of individuals who finished the survey from start to finish. Which was really, really lovely to see because at the end of the survey, we actually had two open answered, open answer questions. And for any of you who've ever run a survey, people usually skip those and you're just like, Oh, okay, it's over. Hit submit.

00;29;35;02 - 00;30;05;15
Jillianne Code
But in, in our particular sample, all but one or two actually filled out those last, those last couple of questions. So me the quantitative researcher, able to do all of this grea,t all these great numbers with the Likert questions. We also had a lovely thematic analysis that we could do on the on the two qualitative questions.

00;30;05;18 - 00;30;09;35
Erica Machulak
So what were those open text questions, Jillianne?

00;30;10;08 - 00;30;34;00
Jillianne Code
The first open text question was: What does being a scholar mean to you? And the second question was, is there anything else that you would like to tell us? And that one is still under analysis at the moment because there is a lot that people really wanted to share, and so that that's ongoing.

00;30;34;00 - 00;31;12;20
Jillianne Code
Maybe that's podcast part two. But the the open ended question about what does a scholar mean to you was absolutely fascinating. Really paragraphs worth of information. And thematically there are some really, not surprising I suppose, answers to that question but really, really interesting responses and the general generally kind of clustered around three themes that that I labeled.

00;31;12;23 - 00;31;29;47
Jillianne Code
So there was challenges and struggles in academia. The pursuit of knowledge and intellectual curiosity. And the evolving perceptions of scholarship and the role of the academy. And so there's some really fascinating nuances to that.

00;31;30;65 - 00;31;37;75
Erica Machulak
With the responses to that question "What does being a scholar mean to you?" What was the thing that surprised you most?

00;31;38;73 - 00;31;29;47
Jillianne Code
Honestly, one of the things that did surprise me was a) that so many people answered that question from a methodological standpoint. But that there was this really significant number of people, really spoke to this whole evolving idea of scholarship.

00;32;00;05 - 00;32;28;69
Jillianne Code
I was actually really happy, you know, despite some of the of the tone of some of the responses, but that there was an evolving perception of that there, you know, that people were considering as being beyond the academy, that their identity as scholars was evolving and changing. And for me, that that was very optimistic.

00;32;29;28 - 00;32;38;17
Erica Machulak
So, Jillianne, based on the data that you've gathered so far, what's the next step for the quantitative part of the research?

00;32;38;19 - 00;33;19;22
Jillianne Code
Well, the next step is to really examine in more detail the role of some individual differences play in this whole idea of professional agency and the interaction between professional agency development and a community of practice. And so the elements of agency really involve aspects of intentionality, self-efficacy, the ability to self regulate, and in, in terms of reaching your goals.

00;33;19;22 - 00;34;14;11
Jillianne Code
And so one of the things that that we found in this particular population is that 26% of our respondents identified as having some kind of disability. We didn't ask them what disability they had or anything like that, but they identified as being disabled. And then we had 13% of our respondents identify as racialized. And so both of those identifying elements play a significant role in how we talk about professional agency development, of professional agency in a community of practice, and what this is beginning to tell me and I'm still, you know, wrestling with these ideas and thinking about, well, what is this telling me?

00;34;14;11 - 00;34;48;29
Jillianne Code
What is this telling us about the role of the the importance of a community in developing professional agency for individuals who have, who identify as racialized and, and/or have a disability. And I believe that what that that is much more important. It's important for everyone, but it's extremely important for these individuals. That's what that's what I think it's telling me.

00;34;49;01 - 00;35;06;85
Jillianne Code
But because we didn't ask that specific question, I don't want to overemphasize, but because it came out as in this population, in this sample, I think there is much more that we could investigate around that specifically.

00;35;07;40 - 00;35;34;60
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. If I'm understanding you correctly Jillianne, you asked these questions about how people identify how people identify in terms of race, in terms of ability. And you've gotten these high level answers that seem to be indicating that there's more there. But the next step is to peel back the later layers and ask more specific questions about the connections between those experiences, agency and community. Is that right?

00;35;34;90 - 00;35;55;62
Jillianne Code
Absolutely. That's exactly right. Is that we don't know. We can't say, you know, what exact role that that they do play. But there is a significant correlation. So there is a significant, some kind of relationship there that we do need to discover, do need to explore more.

00;35;56;35 - 00;36;04;94
Erica Machulak
Thanks Jilliannne, that's really, really interesting. Andy, would you please give us the shape of the qualitative side of the project? What did it look like?

00;36;05;46 - 00;36;26;24
Andrea Webb
No problem. I think that when when I sat down to put the protocol together for for the interviews, I really was using two driving questions: How do people who have moved beyond or outside the academy understand or enact this idea of professional agency?

00;36;26;26 - 00;36;56;23
Andrea Webb
And then how do they understand, navigate, or use the ideas of communities of practice? And so those were the driving questions that I was asking. The big picture questions. Each of the interviews was a little bit different, because I'm trying to do these narrative appreciative interviews, so I'm wanting to hear stories from the participants and again, focusing on what are the positives or what are the things that they were able to take away.

00;36;56;25 - 00;37;40;21
Andrea Webb
And then I used those two questions as sort of the guides, not sort of, as the guides for the findings. And when we started to talk about how people understand professional agency, it really comes down to this idea of feeling that they were directing their learning and then their life beyond the Academy. And how did they feel that they were making decisions or responding to external factors in a way that they felt that they were making those decisions, they were purposefully or consciously responding to to some of those factors.

00;37;40;24 - 00;38;20;07
Andrea Webb
And then when it comes to things like the communities it really was this idea of these overlapping constellations of communities and how it was that they themselves were choosing to engage sometimes for a short period of time, sometimes very purposefully, or sometimes finding a sustained engagement with this diverse group of communities. Be that an artistic community, an academic community, a softball league, all of those things fell within this idea of communities, of people that they were engaging with.

00;38;20;10 - 00;38;44;94
Andrea Webb
And so I thought a lot about who is the self that comes to these kind of situations, How have they used the skills, the dispositions, the things that they have learned as part of of their degree training in order to make these purposeful decisions and purposefully engage with people.

00;38;45;88 - 00;38;59;25
Erica Machulak
And so in these conversations with PhDs who had graduated and gone on to new and different pathways, what were some of the things that you learned?

00;38;59;28 - 00;39;33;21
Andrea Webb
I think there was two, two big things that I learned. First of all, when we say Beyond the Academy, it's a spectrum. It's not just rejecting the academy and moving away. Looking at the type of careers that people took on. There are people who are sort of para academics that often work for a university or college or higher education institution and facilitate other people's research, PhD processes, all those sorts of things.

00;39;33;24 - 00;40;01;03
Andrea Webb
And then there are people who are adjacent to the academy, often working with scholarly organizations and doing work that is also around knowledge generation and knowledge mobilization. And it's a much smaller group of people who actually reject and actively work outside of the academy in a way that is not tangentially related to to the type of work that they had before.

00;40;01;06 - 00;41;17;18
Andrea Webb
And so I think there's this spectrum of work, sort of moving away from the academy and that not everybody sort of actively rejects and turns away. And the other big piece was really around the place of identity and how people see themselves as being part of their agency. And I think about a number of the individuals I talked to and even my own experience coming back to graduate work much later in life, having had a career before or having other work before they returned to their Ph.D. and the element of time and personal development and self interest, I think that are a huge part of how it is that they navigate this process, because many of these people were saying, you know, it took me ten years to get my degree. I'm totally happy with that because I had all sorts of amazing experiences and now I know enough about myself and about the kind of work that's demanded in the academy to know that my personal happiness is more important than, as somebody put it, slogging away in a carrel.

00;41;17;20 - 00;41;27;62
Erica Machulak
So based on what you've been hearing in these early conversations in this work, is scholarship a job or an identity?

00;41;27;67 - 00;42;20;24
Andrea Webb
That is a fabulous question. I think that scholarship with a small 's', if we were to use that, is this idea of as I defined, you know, what is a scholar or who is a scholar? Scholarship is a disposition. It is an identity. It is an approach. It is how we choose to engage in this work. I think that, you know, the being an academic is often associated with inside the academy, but being a scholar can be somebody who is outside the academy. It was interesting, though, in one conversation with with one of the interviews, one of the interviews got caught up on the idea of me using that term.

00;42;20;27 - 00;42;49;11
Andrea Webb
You know, how do you see yourself as a scholar? Because they did not see themselves as a scholar. They saw themselves as an artist. And an artist, even though there are involved using methodologies, using inquiry, using research, that was not what they were engaged in, they were not doing scholarship, they were doing art. And so that element of self-determination or self-definition I think is also a key part.

00;42;49;11 - 00;43;17;13
Andrea Webb
And it goes back to this idea of what is your identity, How do you see yourself, which I think is a lovely dovetail with some of the things that Jillianne was finding in the survey, is that identity is a huge part of this and and that identity as a "scholar", in quotation marks or an academic or a learned person, is part of how people navigate this particular world.

00;43;17;15 - 00;43;28;31
Erica Machulak
Hmm. And so as you think about what you've learned so far and the next steps for for these findings, what are the next steps of this research?

00;43;28;95 - 00;43;42;23
Andrea Webb
The next steps for me, I think are, not as clear, because I do think that this is something that, those of us who have been through this process probably go, Yeah, okay, yeah, I see that.

00;43;42;26 - 00;44;10;25
Andrea Webb
And our own closeness to this particular time probably brings up some of those feelings. But many of our colleagues who may be, you know, 15 years into an academic career and are mentoring graduate students, may not be, may not remember those feelings quite as well, or maybe had, you know, a solo focus as they went straight from their undergraduate to their master's to their graduate degree.

00;44;10;28 - 00;44;39;13
Andrea Webb
So in some ways I see the purpose, or my own work as a next step, is to remind people of some of these experiences and reminding everybody that just because you have this degree or this, you know, you've gone through this process doesn't mean you're going to a singular place. Because I also then want graduate students to say, I don't have to be training towards this particular way.

00;44;39;13 - 00;45;01;14
Andrea Webb
I can train and I can use these skills in a lot of different ways. So I think, you know, there is an element of outreach with our colleagues and reminding them that, you know, not everybody who's going through this process is destined for an academic career, nor should they. You know, perhaps we need to have that conversation earlier on in the process.

00;45;01;16 - 00;45;25;29
Andrea Webb
But then also reminding, as Zahira said in in the interview so beautifully, she now has to be an agent of her own learning journey, right. That we can't just you know, as Kieran said, take the time, engage and be privileged in this moment and allow, you know, ourselves to wallow or to to soak in the academic experience.

00;45;26;06 - 00;46;02;00
Andrea Webb
But that part of that means that we have to be purposeful in where we're spending our time. And, you know, it's it's a beautiful privilege to be able to engage in the world of the mind during this terminal degree. However, I don't think that we can rest and become lotus eaters and sit there and spend too much time without thinking about how can I use this, how can I use this experience to expand or to further my own goals?

00;46;02;03 - 00;46;26;10
Andrea Webb
And perhaps, you know, we find goals in lots of different places because we've had these opportunities. And so it's that tension between spending time loving this world, but also remembering that we have to be able to use it at some point, that it is fleeting and and we'll have to engage in our next steps as part of our career process.

00;46;26;12 - 00;46;36;73
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm. Thank you all for taking the time for the interview and for for this work. It's really been a pleasure to partner with you as it evolves, and I'm looking forward to the next steps.

00;46;39;12 - 00;47;20;09
Erica Machulak
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, founder of Hikma. The production this episode was led by Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Simangele Mabena, Eufemia Baldassarre, Ai Mizuta, Nicole Markland and Dashara Green. Matthew Tomkinson composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma artist in residence. TThis podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate BC, Tech Nation, the Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canada Digital Adoption Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

00;47;20;11 - 00;48;03;02
Erica Machulak
You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.