Jonas Pontusson

Jonas Pontusson
Professor of Comparative Politics
Biography:

Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva and a Visiting Scholar at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, for the academic year 2016-17. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Cornell University and Princeton University before moving to Geneva in 2010. He has written extensively on the politics of inequality in OECD countries. He is currently working on the distributive implications of macroeconomic growth models and, in parallel, preparing a research project on the consequences of inequality for government responsiveness to low- and middle-income citizens.

Jonas Pontusson presented a paper entitled “Inequality shocks and the politics of compensatory redistribution in the OECD world, 1990-2013” in a seminar organized by LIEPP on October 19th 2016. He also took part in LSE-Oxford-Sciences Po ‘Young Doctors’ Political Economy Workshop held on April 20th-21st 2017.

Learn more about Jonas's work:
unequaldemocracies.unige.ch unige.ch/jonas-pontusson/
On the relationship between economic and political inequality

How does inequality look like through the political lens? What are the true details behind Government bias toward certain sectors of the population, and what is to be done about it?

By conducting a survey in countries like Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, Jonas Pontusson, Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva, explains the intricacies of political inequality in developed countries, the importance of representation through political parties, and the role of these same parties in modern day politics and society.

We spoke with Prof. Jonas Pontusson in Geneva during the conference: Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilisation, organised by The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

The title of his presentation was:
On the Relationship Between Economic and Political Inequality: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go from Here?

Find out more about UNRISD here: http://www.unrisd.org

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Jonas Pontusson's Video here ◂

Jonas Pontusson: Hello, I am Jonas Pontusson. I am a professor at the University of Geneva and I work in Political Science.

Nerina: Thank you for joining me. You are at the conference about Overcoming Inequalities, what is the topic of your presentation?

Pontusson: I’m going to talk about advanced countries or rich countries, mostly North America and Europe, and I’m going to present research that I’m doing now or just started doing, which is about political dimensions of inequality and why governments are more responsive to some citizens than others. So I think in addition to economic equality, about which we know a lot, there is an important political dimension. Economic inequality, which is present in most countries, has important political implications; not only in terms of who participates, but who is prioritized or given more voice by political parties and by governments.

Nerina: What is political inequality?

Pontusson: So, I think political inequality, in an academic sense or in my area of research, means that if we look at what citizens want in terms of policy changes or political changes, we can measure, we can ask citizens what they want, and then we can look at what governments do, and we can ask ourselves the question: The support for policy change in some particular area among low income or working class voters, does it matter if 20% of them are in favor are in favor of these policy changes or if 80% of them are in favor of policy changes? So, can their preferences predict something about what governments do? And we can do the same for high income citizens.

The studies that we have, so far at least, tell us that whether high income citizens were a 20% support in policy change or a 80% support in policy change, has a big effect on whether we will see policy change in the next four, five, ten years. Whereas by contrast, if low income citizens support policy change, it doesn’t help us predict what happens, so we have some evisennce that political parties and governments are listening a lot more to affluent, well educated citizens that they are to low educated citizens, and then of course, we don’t exactly know why that is or how that works itself out.

That’s what I’m trying to study, and I’m trying to do is in a cross-national sense, trying to looks at different countries and ask whether this bias in the political process is bigger in some countries than in others, and maybe most importantly, I’m trying to see if this has changes, if it is the case that the voice of different kinds of citizens was more equal in, let’s say, the 1960s and 1970s than it is today.

Nerina: Which countries are you going to analyze and why?

Pontusson: A lot of people have already worked in the United States for this, and I’m not living in the United States, so I’m trying to talk to people in the United States, and there we know there’s a lot of unequal representation or unequal voice. We also know that in U.S., poor or low income citizens are much less likely to vote. So I’m way more interest in European countries, which is where I’m from, where the distribution of economic resources is more equal, and where it has increased a lot, and where differences in voter turnout or participation in elections are not so big. And yet in Sweden too we find that more affluent citizens, well educated, citizens, governments or politicians are more interested in what these people think and what they want. So Sweden is certainly one case I’m very interested in.

Switzerland is another case, with a very different political system. I live here, I work here, and the people who work with m on this research are mostly Swiss, so Switzerland is certainly going to be part of the mix. I’m interested in the U.K. and probably France and Germany, so those are the main countries. But we’re also doing a survey that will look at about fourteen, almost all West European countries, where we will ask people about what their policy preferences are, how important inequality is, are they aware of inequality as a rising topic. We are also going to ask them, and I think we will probably be the first survey to do so, about how they feel being represented and do they perceive these gaps of representation, and I think we know that at least the people who vote for populist parties probably do think that they are not very well represented in the political process.

Nerina: What aspects are you most interested in?

Pontusson: One of the big things that have changed, especially for left parties – social-democratic or labor parties -, is that people who are in there, who are candidates for public office, and especially at a national level – less obviously at the local level -, are now all university educated and they mostly come from white collar professions, and that didn’t use to be the case-

One for the things we are trying to do is to look at who are candidates for office and how that has changed over time and in different countries, and is it the case that candidates for public office who come from working class backgrounds or have been trade union members, which, at least in Sweden, used to be a very common path to public office, that you worked in trade union and then you became a politician at some point in your life. Whether those people are, to the extent that they’re still around, are they more responsive do they behave different in parliament and ask different questions or have different policy priorities, so we will do surveys of parliamentarians and some of those kinds of surveys already exist.

I think this has happened to many parties, but its change is more pronounced to traditional social democratic parties, and not only as the people who are politicians for them changed, but these parties, in their electoral campaigns, rely much more on media rather than on party activists or party members, and I think everybody would agree that a big gap has opened up between the working class constituents of these parties and their leadership and their kind of way of doing politics.

It seems fairly clear from the evidence we have that many working class voters have abandoned these parties. So my project is partly about what is happening to political systems and to democracies in general, but it is also very much about the crisis of mainstream left parties, and why they are having such difficulties maintain support of people who used to support them a lot and you would had some interest in the kinds of policies that these parties claim that they represent.

Nerina: You mentioned the media. What role do they play?

Pontusson: There is some research that says that social media and reliance on this more democratic form of media makes people only talk to people like themselves and at least in the U.S the evidence seems to suggest that this contributes to polarization in the sense that republicans only access media that has a republican intent or they only communicate with republicans, and democrats are the same.

I’m interested in segregation, and I think that media would be one aspect of segregation, as in obviously that people these days live in places that are more homogenously with-collar, upper-middle class or working class. In that sense I think that obviously left parties and progressive parties that want to do something about inequality cannot appeal to low income citizens; they also have to appeal to middle income and middle-class citizens, and I think that for those kinds of reasons – partly because perhaps it has to do with the media, but also more importantly having to do with where people live and where their children go to school -, building common interest, or framing redistributed policies as a common interest in many people, is probably harder today than it was before.

There is no doubt that elite men of a certain kind of media has, at least, until recently, meant that certain kinds of social issues and things having to do with inequality have not gotten the coverage that it should have gotten. To go back to what I was saying about left parties, I think that media makes these parties less relying on social networks and local activists to reach out, and therefore they are in some sense the leaders or the elites that run for office and are part of these parties; they are freer today to do so.

There are two things that have happened, and partly related to media. One is that middle-class and working class citizens are perhaps less interacting with each other, have moved the part on certain kinds of issues, especially when it comes to immigration and things like that.

The other thing has to do with the relationship between voters and politicians or candidates. There used to be party members that were the kind of connection between voters and politicians, and now parties have lost a lot of members – the British Labour Party obviously being an exception, and that I think is an important thing to note -, but in many countries there is more separation between politicians and citizens. Parties have become less important, and media consultancy has become much more important to the way these parties do politics.

Nerina: On one hand we have a democratization of them but on the other hand, they are still dominated by the elite, right? Why is this happening, and what does it mean for democracy?

Pontusson: I don’t have a single theory of this. I think that one of the things that happened was, obviously, the technological change, which was perhaps inevitable in respect to media. Another important thing that I haven’t mentioned yet is the decline of trade unions, and especially the decline of low income private sector trade unions.

Trade unions today, in some countries, have held up fairly well, especially in the public sector. Trade unions are more white collar today than they used to be, so there has been a decline in Unions, but this decline has not been the same in all sectors or all categories of workers.

You could attribute some of that decline to technological and structural changes that are beyond anybody’s control, most obviously the kind of manufacturing and the fact that private sector low wage work is increasingly in the service sector and smaller shops and places. That has a big effect, but I guess my argument would be that much of what has happened to trade unions has been a result of political decisions that were taken mostly by parties of the center right, but it’s striking to me that left parties, when they come back to power, have very rarely reversed those decisions or changed things in ways that incentive people or make it easier to organize trade unions.

I think that’s true of the Labour Party under Blair in the 1990’s; there were a lot of reforms that Thatcher had introduced that could had been changed and they were not, and it is also true of the Swedish social democrats, when they returned to power in 2014; they didn’t change the reforms that had been introduced specifically to reduce trade union power.

One reason why some of this stuff happened was because of austerity and slow economic growth and the perception – and this is a very important thing -, that a lot of the demands of low income citizens cost money. Most demands of affluent citizens have to do with regulation, the freedom of taking your child out of school and sending him to a private one, a lot of the demands of affluent citizens have to do with choice and regulations, and they can be accommodated in an austere economic environment in the way that the demands of low income citizens are more costly in some sense, and more difficult to square with in balance budget and the like.

That is something about the economic situation. I also think that up until recently, a lot of left parties and others thought that low income workers citizens had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t particularly interesting to appeal to them because they would vote for them anyway. The option were not good, a and many of them didn’t want to vote anyway, so if they stopped voting, it wouldn’t be a major problem and it was thought that these categories of citizens were a relatively small group of people who would probably, with their knowledge of economy and with these transformations, would probably continue to diminish, and therefore wouldn’t be very important for elections.

If we wanted to win the next election, it was much more important to win the support of these what political science calls ‘swing voters’, who could just as well vote for the liberals or some other parties to the center right.

So it was thought that one could ignore these people, and of course one of the big lessons of the rise of populism is that there are more people who feel unrepresented, who fit into these categories. There are more people and they now think – foolishly, perhaps -, that they have options, and I think a big question becomes, can left parties reorient themselves? And if they do, can they win those voters back again?

You know, it is often said about trust in a marriage that if you do things that lead your partner not to trust you, it is very difficult to regain that trust. So, can you put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Because I think, as you know, that they have done extremely badly in the last few elections and I think that, not so much for may academic research but for the more political and the more point of view, the big question for people like myself is, should we abandon these parties? Should we try to build other parties? Or is there still some possibility of revitalizing them? And that probably varies from country to country.

Nerina: Do we need the left parties or in general, what in your opinion, could you do? or should we do?

Pontusson: This is the nature of democracy. Elections do matter and it is a good thing that the democrats won control of the House of Representatives the day before yesterday. It has meaningful consequences; we cannot step back from that, I think. But obviously, and I think certainly this is the American case – I follow the elections fairly closely -, tge most important thing is probably the changes that re taking place at a more local level, but it is electoral politics.

Some of my friends say ‘forget about the electoral politics, this should all be about organizing social movement and communities, and trying to correct things at a local level’, and then there are other people who basically say ‘Well, we just have to live with the parties that we are stuck with, and elections do matter, so therefor we have to vote for these parties and we have to urge other people to do so as well’.

I guess progressive people need to find an intermediate position, and that position probably revolves around elections at the local or regional level in the United States, so that it’s not just national elections or local activism, but that there is politics at a series of levels between those two extremes. Most importantly, political parties are an important institution in electoral democracies, so we cannot abandon a party electoral approach.

Nerina: If you could change one thing tomorrow what would it be?

Pontusson: I would say one thing. This is not a thing we can do tomorrow. As you now, there is debate around basic income; I’m not sure what the basic income is the magic solution. I think that the political conversation, especially on the left, needs to change. I think we should talk. Opportunities matter, but we need to build the safety net.

We can afford this, whether it’s basic income or other schemes. I think we have drifted too much towards creating education and opportunities. Education is important, but it’s a long term thing and we need relatively quickly social policy reforms that address income gaps and address the income problems which low-wage workers and non-workers face today, and I think that’s probably, if I were running as a politician, I would talk about.

And then more long-term, encouraging unionization and restricting or increasing regulations on financial corporations. We need to do something very soon, in my opinion. We don’t have the luxury of thinking about reforms that will change the way democracies work 15 or 20 years from now; I think we do need to do things and those things in the first instance have to do with what I would call ‘compensatory redistribution’. That should be the focus.

Nerina: Why do we need to do this now? Why the urgency?

Pontusson: Because I think there will be no left parties left, and because I think a continuous increase in populist support will have very bad consequences for all of us.

Nerina: What is the most important thing you have learned and you would wish people know more about or think more about?

Pontusson: I think the most important thing that I have learned is that it is not just a level of inequality that matters, but the structural inequality is very important, and that if the poor become separated from the middle class, as has been happening, this undermines the basis for progressive politics. In some sense, I am less worried about the top income shares, the top 1%, but from a political point of view, I am much more worried about a growing gap between low-income citizens and workers, and the middle class. That gap is what the left has to worry about.

Nerina: What is your dream?

Pontusson: My dream is that we will ultimately – and I thought this would happen before I die but it won’t -, create a society that is more equal and more tolerant. Both of those things are important.

Nerina: What is life about?

Pontusson: Life is about being the best I can be in my work, “succeeding” or doing as well as I can, and doing better than some, so there is a kind of work competitiveness that motivates me. It’s also about trying to be socially and politically relevant, and finding ways in which one can speak outside of this academic community that I am part of.

And then finally, and most importantly, life is about my family and my wife and my children.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Pontusson: Thank you.

Nerina: Thank you everybody for listening and watching. Keep wondering and see you soon again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva and a Visiting Scholar at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, for the academic year 2016-17. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Cornell University and Princeton University before moving to Geneva in 2010. He has written extensively on the politics of inequality in OECD countries. He is currently working on the distributive implications of macroeconomic growth models and, in parallel, preparing a research project on the consequences of inequality for government responsiveness to low- and middle-income citizens.

Jonas Pontusson presented a paper entitled “Inequality shocks and the politics of compensatory redistribution in the OECD world, 1990-2013” in a seminar organized by LIEPP on October 19th 2016. He also took part in LSE-Oxford-Sciences Po ‘Young Doctors’ Political Economy Workshop held on April 20th-21st 2017.

Learn more about Jonas's work:
unequaldemocracies.unige.ch unige.ch/jonas-pontusson/

Mahesh Kumar

Mahesh Kumar
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering
Biography:

Dr. Kumar has received M.Tech degree in Solid State Materials from IIT Delhi and Ph.D degree in Engineering from IISc Bangalore. He worked at Central Research Laboratory of Bharat Electronics Ltd. (CRL-BEL) Bangalore as Scientist from 2005 to 2013.

During his stint at CRL-BEL, he has worked on industry-academia collaboration that involved CRL-BEL and Materials Research Centre, IISc Bangalore. He was involved in the development of GaN based blue LEDs, Quantum-well infrared photodetectors, Solar cells and III-V quantum dots based detectors. He also worked at University of Paderborn, Germany as visiting scientist under Bilateral Exchange Programme of INSA. He has received INSA Medal for Young Scientists-2014,the MRSI Medal-2016 by Materials Research Society of India, Young Achiever Award-2016 by Department of Atomic Energy and ISSS Young Scientist Award 2017 by the Institute for Smart Structures and Systems.

He has been awarded among top-10 outstanding reviewers for CrystEngComm (RSC) in 2016. He is founding Member and Chair of Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (2015-2019), Member of Global Young Academy (2017-2022) and IEEE Senior Member from 2016. He has been selected for the prestigious Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy Fellowship supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum. He has published more than 80 research articles.

Learn more about Mahesh's work:
http://home.iitj.ac.in/~mkumar/ globalyoungacademy.net/mahesh-kumar/
Sustainable Energy, Science, Education: working for a better future in India.

What separates developing and developed countries? What does it take to close that gap and eliminate all progress borders? Doctor Mahesh Kumar explains the scientific and research steps to take to bring developing countries into the future.

As Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Doctor Kumar is developing new ways to bring sustainable energy to the farthest communities, working on building awareness as much as on the applications of better and friendlier consumption methods for India and the world.

Doctor Kumar is also Chair of the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences, which works on building a network that interconnects fellow scientists with each other and with government authorities in order to bring attention to the scientific and educational potential growing in the country.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Mahesh Kumar's Video here ◂

Nerina: Thank you so much for joining me. Could you please introduce yourself?

Mahesh Kumar: I am Doctor Mahesh Kumar, Assistant Professor at Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. I am also Chair of the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences.

Nerina: What is your research focused on?

Mahesh: I am working on electronic material for energy-efficient devices, such as light-emitting diodes and sensors for environment monitoring.

Nerina: Why this topic? What is its relevance?

Mahesh: If we see in the future, energy will be the biggest problem, and we have a limited stock of our hydrocarbon fuels. So now we have to start to think on renewable energy sources, such as solar cell, hydro, and wind energy. Also, at the same time, we have to think on energy-efficient devices; we have to make some devices. By using this one, we can save the power.

Not only the power production is important, but at the same time, power consumption also has the same importance. If we see the last 20 years’ data, worldwide we have increased the electricity production almost double. And if we see in the developing countries, for example in India, we have increased our electricity production by five times.

But what about the consumption? At the same time, our requirements also increase. So today’s demand is that we have to make the devices that can save the power and can give the same output at a low power consumption.

Nerina: What are you working on right now?

Mahesh: Right now, I am working on light-emitting diodes by using the gallium nitride, and in 2014, Professor Nakamura and two more professors got the Nobel Prize on this. So, if we see the worldwide power consumption, around at 10 to 20% power consumption is only on the lightening, and by using these LEDs, we can save around 80 to 85% of the power. If we compared it with our ordinary bulb, the power consumption is very less, and the same light we will get by using the 8 or 10 watt LED, when an ordinary bulb will have to use the 100 watt. This one is because of the conversion; in light emitting diodes, conversion efficiency is very high compared to the ordinary bulb.

Nerina: What are the challenges here?

Mahesh: The biggest challenge is the awareness. If you compared with the conventional bulb, light-emitting diodes are a little bit expensive, because to make these devices, initially we have to spend a lot of money. We have to grow by molecular beam epitaxy, or MOCVD, and this equipment is costly; we have to set up a publication lab for gallium nitride technology. So, in this early cost of these devices, it’s hard, but if we see it in two years, we will get the same, this benefit by saving energy.

So we have to aware the society to use light-emitting diodes in comparison to conventional bulbs.

Nerina: How is the situation in India and how can your research contribute to improve it?

Mahesh: One project I’m currently working on is the Perovskite solar cells. The basic idea is that we can make flexible solar cells, and with these solar cells the efficiency is higher than with the silicon cells. But again, the issue is how to make the long life, because this efficiency degraded very fast. Here, we have to make these solar cells sustainable, so we can use them for a longer time. We have increased our resources in this one. We have increased our production, but still, the power production is not sufficient for the country.

If you see the solar light, we are getting the maximum. For example, in Pushkar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, we are getting the maximum solar light. And the rain or cloudy duration is very less. So here, we can use these solar cells, and we can convert maximum photo energy into electricity.

Another thing is that in Rajasthan, we have minimum water resources, so we cannot generate the power by using the water, by using the hydropower. So, we can use these solar cells and we can convert the photoenergy into electricity, and basically we can make the system sustainable.

Nerina: What does it mean for you to be a scientist in India?

Mahesh: We have big responsibilities. As a scientist, not only I have to see the wide, wide problems, but I also have to see our local issues. For example, in the Rajasthan, the power transportation from one city, from one place to another place, is difficult here. So we have to see if you can use, if you can generate in local village or town energy by using the solar cells, and if you can make the village sustainable, and at least in energy, if we can provide the same energy watt hey will consume there, that will be good.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Mahesh: Basically, I want a society in which everyone should get the same right. We should not differentiate based on the economy, based on any religion, so everyone, all kids should get the same facility here.

If you see the worldwide view, we are all working for the human. We are the same. Our cultures are different, but sometimes we are facing multiple issues. I cannot go to that country, or I cannot invite from the neighboring country, or some other country. I would remove the borders, because all people are the same. I will not discriminate based on religion, based on geography, or based on any other practice. All humans are the same for me.

Nerina: What types of research are more needed in India?

Mahesh: In India we have much talent. We need some type of networking, some very good rue policy, and we need some interconnection between the scientists, and also between the government and the scientists.

Nerina: And you are contributing to improve this through your work with the young academy, right?

Mahesh: Yes. Indian National Young Academy of Scientists started in 2014, so you can say this is a very young academy. The main object of this academy is that we have to make more networking among Indian scientists. We have to discuss our local issues, and then we have to come up with solutions, because if we are pressing the problem, we should think, discuss, and try to give the solution to society.

Another goal is to promote our science to society. We have to into the rural villages in remote areas, and we have to explain to the government people what we are doing. We have to conduct our next game, and we have to basically attract more students to our science.

Nerina: What are the main points you are trying to contribute to?

Mahesh: On the main issue, we are working on health, how to improve our health facilities. The second one is the energy; how to make a sustainable energy system. The third issue is education; how to provide high quality education to everyone. And fourth one is the food here. In few parts of our country we don’t have sufficient food; our government is working on this one and our academy as well.

We have to aware our society to these issues. We have to implement these policies in all areas of our countries.

Nerina: If you could change one thing, what would it be?

Mahesh: If we focus on these issues, then we can work from a developing to a developed country.

Basically, all these things will come from education, so one thing I want to change is our education system; every kid should get education. Second, I want to aware society of what is good and what is bad. For example, our government has stared so many campaigns; if we see, we have a big campaign in India, and all these kids are throwing whatever waste that they have in dust bins.

Nerina: Do you have a dream?

Mahesh: I’m working on applied research. Basically my dream is that I want to make a few products, so that by using them, society can benefit, and I want to take my country from developing to developed country. In the coming ten, fifteen years, I want to see my country as a developed country.

Nerina: What is life about?

Mahesh: What is life about? I can say life is only relation. We have to make more friendships. We have to treat people equally, and listen to people, and try to solve their problems. This is life, and we have to learn from the mistakes. We should not think, always, I will get the success; sometimes failure is also important. We should learn from mistakes and failures and, again, we have to try. We should give our best to achieve something, and we should not worry so much about the result.

Nerina: What inspires you?

Mahesh: Generally, I read the biography of scientists. And if you see, many great scientists came from very poor families, and then they contributed to society.

Nerina: And what is your background? What is your story?

Mahesh: I was born in a very small village, and I have struggled a lot for higher education, but thanks to our government there are many fellowships, and by getting those fellowships I came to this level. My father only passed until sixth grade, and my mother never went to school. And I did my double Master, and I did my PhD. My parents believed in me, and because of their grace, today I’m in this position.

Nerina: What would you tell your parents, or what would you tell your children? Like a message for your parents or a message for your children, or for both.

Mahesh: For my kids, I want to make them good human beings. And my parents, I want to thank them, they have believed in me. They don’t know what research I’m doing; they know I’m a professor, but they don’t know about my research. So, I would just like to thank them. They are not higher educated, but they believed in me, and they believe on my education. They gave me the highest education.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Mahesh: Thank you so much.

Nerina: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and thank you for sharing. Keep wondering, and see you soon again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Dr. Kumar has received M.Tech degree in Solid State Materials from IIT Delhi and Ph.D degree in Engineering from IISc Bangalore. He worked at Central Research Laboratory of Bharat Electronics Ltd. (CRL-BEL) Bangalore as Scientist from 2005 to 2013.

During his stint at CRL-BEL, he has worked on industry-academia collaboration that involved CRL-BEL and Materials Research Centre, IISc Bangalore. He was involved in the development of GaN based blue LEDs, Quantum-well infrared photodetectors, Solar cells and III-V quantum dots based detectors. He also worked at University of Paderborn, Germany as visiting scientist under Bilateral Exchange Programme of INSA. He has received INSA Medal for Young Scientists-2014,the MRSI Medal-2016 by Materials Research Society of India, Young Achiever Award-2016 by Department of Atomic Energy and ISSS Young Scientist Award 2017 by the Institute for Smart Structures and Systems.

He has been awarded among top-10 outstanding reviewers for CrystEngComm (RSC) in 2016. He is founding Member and Chair of Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (2015-2019), Member of Global Young Academy (2017-2022) and IEEE Senior Member from 2016. He has been selected for the prestigious Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy Fellowship supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum. He has published more than 80 research articles.

Learn more about Mahesh's work:
http://home.iitj.ac.in/~mkumar/ globalyoungacademy.net/mahesh-kumar/

Orakanoke Phanraksa

Orakanoke Phanraksa
Intellectual Property Laws and Policy
Biography:

Dr. Phanraksa received Ph.D. degree in laws from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2005. She is currently with the Technology Licensing Office, Technology Management Center at the National Science and Technology Development Agency, Pathumthani, Thailand, as a manager of the Intellectual Property Policy group.

She has involved a number of research projects, with a focus on intellectual property management and technology transfer such as the benefit sharing policy from intellectual property commercialization project; the interface between intellectual property and anti-trust laws project; and the access and benefit sharing for biodiversity in research and development institute in Thailand project.

She also serves as the working committee for the University-Business Incubation (UBI) Project and the Technology Licensing Office Promotion Project of the Higher Education Commission; and the Thai Patent Law Amendment of the Department of Intellectual Property, the Ministry of Commerce Thailand. Recently, she has engaged in a national research project with the National Science, Technology and Innovation Agency to develop a policy framework to promote the role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in research and development in Thailand.

A change-maker with a passion for people

When great ideas come to pass, researchers always find that there is an entire path to take that goes beyond discovery, and that is where Orakanoke Phanraksa and her team of Intellectual Property experts come in. Working with the National Science and Technology Development Agency in Thailand, Orakanoke is a member of the Intellectual Property Policy group, overseeing the creation of patents and the development of this field.

IP procedures are a major part of the scientific process, often overlooked until the time to file a patent comes. As co-chair of the Global Young Academy, Orakanoke works tirelessly to introduce Intellectual Property education to new professionals in the scientific field, opening new opportunities for both business and academy.

As a strong representative of the Asian scientific community in the GYA, Orakanoke aims to inject the values of her culture to the realm of interdisciplinary projects and increase the presence and value of IP concepts and applications in both researchers and Thai citizens.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Orakanoke Phanraksa's Video here ◂

Orakanoke Phanraksa: Good morning, Nerina.

Nerina: Thank you so much for joining me. Could you please introduce yourself?

My name is Orokanoke Phanraksa. I’m originally from Thailand. I work as an intellectual property lawyer at the National Science and Technology Development Agency; we call ourselves NSTDA. NSTDA is under the Ministry of Science and Technology in Thailand.

Nerina: What is your main work focus?

Orakanoke: Ok. So during the first, let’s say, five years, I’ve been providing intellectual property related advice to in-house researches, as well as to universities who received a funding from NSTDA. But later on, I had the chance to get involved with many national projects, including university test incubators, and university licensing office projects and that has allowed me to move further to work on IP related policy at a national level.

Nerina: Dealing with intellectual property, you move between research and business right?

Orakanoke: Look at it this way. At NSTDA, I’m working for the Technology Licensing Office; there, part of my job has been prosecuting the protection of research outcome at NSTDA, and later on, when we find potential customers or licensees, a contract will come back to my team to help review the contract in order to make sure that the research form the public sector could be properly licensed out to the private sector, and that’s how the research has been commercialized from NSTDA to the society.

Nerina: What are the challenges from a researchers’ perspective and from a business perspective?

Orakanoke: In the context of Thailand, this includes trade elements: the researchers, technology licensing officers and industry. Starting from the researchers themselves, it also involves the funding system, because in the beginning, if the funding doesn’t really focus on application, it’s really difficult for the middle person, like my office, to try to push the technology to the industry.

Also, oftentimes we’ve found out that the researchers are very proud of their babies; they believe that they could be used right up front, with the need sort of upscaling to make sure that it could be applicable at the industrial site. There’s a lot to do with the mindset and understanding from the researchers’ side.

As for the technology licensing officers, sometimes called licensing agents, in Thailand, it is kind of an emerging career. In other words, we don’t have many experts in Thailand, in particular when talking about intellectual property licensing, or international deals, as well, so the language could be a barrier, so that’s why at the moment, it’s being promoted as a career path and capacity for people in this field.

Moving to the third element, which is industry; because I work for the government, and therefore the government is trying to promote the transfer of technology to SME’s – small and medium enterprises -, not large scale, and therefore, there is a need in Thailand to catch up with what is ongoing.

They normally expect cheap or free technology from the government because they believe it is from the tax money, but nonetheless, we invest a lot in our research, and therefore, there’s a lot to do with educating our industry, and also the capability of the industry itself because, in order to use our research, it’s important for them to really learn, not just to buy out, like in the past, or get it for free without any charge. So that’s what I see happening.

Nerina: In your opinion, what are the steps or the changes that Thailand needs?

Orakanoke: At the moment, our current government is trying to promote the increasing numbers of patents filed by Thai nationals. There are three types of patents: patent invention, patent design, and petty patents. In Thailand, statistically, the design patent is the top one that many Thais have been flying, but in many developed countries, the file reports on the patent invention are more complicated, so when we look at the statistic of the Thai national filings, we find that we couldn’t really catch up with the foreigners who filed the patent inventions in Thailand. Because of that, our government is trying to explore better ways to motivate Thais, not just scientists, to find more protection on patent inventions.

I would say that for my office, which is under the Ministry of Science and Technology, we are finding this as a challenge because authority believes that we should be able to be a focal point to help build awareness of intellectual property rights, but at the same time, we also see that the Ministry of Commerce would help, and we work closely together to help build awareness.

But most importantly, there’s a lot to do with the research system in Thailand, because to come up with the great inventions, you need to come up with a systematic continuity of the funding because you cannot produce something within a year without a value. It may happen, but to find a bridge to technology requires lots of investment in R&D.

Nerina: If you had the power to change something tomorrow, what would it be?

Orakanoke: Regarding what my team and I have been working on, we have been insisting on trade elements. This is even with the proposal of our government. We’ve talked about intellectual property in the context of developing countries; I believe that human capital is the most important element, because it takes years for a licensing agent or a patent agent to become a professional, and therefore we insist in investment on human capital in this field. We would like our government to help promote the career path and capacity building of intellectual property professions in Thailand, and I would say that not just in Thailand, because we grow together. Thailand is part of the ten ASEAN countries in Southeast Asia so this is what my team in NSTDA has been working together with other colleagues in ASEAN.

So there is the element of human capital, but researchers are also important. When we talk about researchers or scientists in Thailand, we also include those who work in the academic environment, and when you talk about the academy environment, the main pillars are to teach, and clearly societal engagement, but also to do research.

How could they have sufficient time to do research in addition to an overwhelming teaching load? So with that in mind, we also would like to propose to our government to revisit the current curriculum, because when we talk with our colleagues from developed countries, they teach for about an hour for one subject. Why teach three hours for one subject? With that kind of time requirements, you also need extra time for preparation for your class, it is quite a challenge for the academicians to have enough time to do good research. That covers the insufficiencies of time for our researchers.

Now I have covered human capital, professionals and researchers. Next is the research funding. I’m aware that funding issues are everywhere, not just in developing countries, but to have a clear direction, and also to promote continuity is very important. It’s not just about changing the policy every year; it’s important to have a good national research plan, and also sufficient patent funding for the researchers.

Eventually, we see that the ecosystem is important, so education for Thais is also important. It’s not just about turning students into professionals, but Thai citizens, including the industry, need to be educated as well.

Nerina: And how did you get into this field of studies?

Orakanoke: Well, it was not my plan to become a lawyer. I originally wanted to be an artist; I love arts and painting, but it’s about the University process in Thailand, where you are allowed to choose five departments that you would like to go through. I chose Arts at the beginning, but then because of my family – my dad and my grandfather -, they were judges, so I was interested in following their path. On the one hand, I had been seeing that career since I was young, so I wanted to find something different, but on the other, I also see that it is such a respectful career, to be a judge.

I tried to go somewhere in between, to choose a legal path, but not exactly that which my dad is. I tried to contribute one way or another to work in the public agency and help provide advice to researchers, rather than being a businessman or a judge like my dad.

Nerina: As a lover of art and a lawyer, how do you combine these two passions?

Orakanoke: Being a lawyer is not completely separate from being an artist, because being an artist you also need to observe people, and a bit like a scientist, I study people and their backgrounds to make sure they get the best advice, but I also study who they are. As someone who wanted to be an artist, whenever I work with other scientists I look at them as persons. This has somehow taught me to learn to get to know people better.

Nerina: A very interesting perspective. How did your culture and your background help you on your journey?

Orakanoke: I would say that growing up in the Asian culture environment helped a lot because we are bonded together and we often remain together. This is a case of other people, as well. I’m the middle child, and when we went to school when we were young, it was my dad who gave us a ride every day; the traffic in Bangkok was really bad, so it could take you up to two hours one way, so when we got stuck in traffic I would do my homework in the car and ask my dad for questions or tutorials in the car, and that’s how I grew up.

That’s how things were with my family, and you can see that we spend time together, we have dinner together; it’s not forever, but I saw my parents raise three children up and that is how our culture plays into our children, into the people in Thailand, and I’m sure you’ve seen many Asians traveling overseas, but at the end of the day, they would love to come back to their home country, and this is the case for many Thai people.

Nerina: Is there something special that the world could learn from Thai culture?

Orakanoke: I would say that being considerate is the first thing because these days the world is so small. You connect to people and to be more considerate, to think about others is the way to be, because can you imagine if people became more considerate towards each other?

Nerina: You are an alumna of the Global Young Academy and you were a co-chair. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

Orakanoke: I’m not the champion co-chair, because it was not my intention to run for this position, it’s just only that I want to contribute to the scientific community, since it’s such a great community, as you may have observed. I also have to thank the GYA, because it has allowed me to meet many great people, not just at the same pier, but also at the higher ranking authority and this has allowed me to speak in front of a public, and normally I’m a quiet person.

It’s also allowed me to really learn and hear advice from our advance report members, who are so recognized at an international level. It’s given a great connection to key people in different continents, because for someone in Thailand, how could you reach out to people in Latin America, in Africa, in particular, if you talk about collaborations between Asia and Latin America? They’re so far away from each other, and the GYA allows me to reach out to friends in other continents, and in return, I’m not here to just gain. It’s important to me, and I believe I would advise other scientists or GYA members, to learn to return or give back to the GYA.

Whenever I travel, I try to see what else I could bring back to my desk here in Thailand, and also Asia, and that’s how I reach out to other connections and make sure that things work. That things that never existed before, I try to make them happen, just because I see that certain groups are out there, so why not make it happen in my own region?

Nerina: What is the most important lesson you have learnt?

Orakanoke: I enjoy seeing that it’s such a beautiful thing being with the GYA to learn, to be with different cultures, backgrounds, and disciplines, but the fact that to believe that you know people enough? It has never been enough. Because the rest might be aware that in working with Asians, Asians don’t speak out. We are quite shy, but as a matter of fact, it comes to the individual basis: people are different. Language-wise, even though you understand English, it comes to each individual person; you really learn to work with people.

Of course, working with a big community means there could be many disagreements, and you need to learn to work with people, so I have learned to be very diplomatic in order to make things work. That is how the leader or the co-chair needs to work things out because otherwise, you can’t really move things forward. So, I would say it has, by measure, taught me to learn to really be diplomatic, to really work with people from different disciplines and cultures.

Nerina: How do you see the role of researchers in driving change?

Orakanoke: To make a change, there are many levels. You don’t have to go big right at the beginning, because, for example, I see myself as a working ant, and you need to have a great group of working ants to make things happen. Also, priority and progress are important; you may want to solve many problems in the world, but it’s important to learn what is your first priority, what are you capable of because otherwise, you are achieving nothing.

Having worked with the GYA, I learned to share my experience with other junior GYA members, so I often ask them ‘what are you passionate about?’, because whenever you work from your heart, it tells you the direction to the next step. I always found myself wanting to do many things, but at one point, you find that you need to choose, and that is what tells you that you can make change bit by bit, but just pick the right project, and if you don’t find the right one, you have the right to change as well.

Nerina: How about you? What is next for you? What is your passion?

Orakanoke: My passion is still with human capital, because having worked with the GYA, I get involved with a group of young scientists, so I’ve been working with ASEAN’s Science Leadership Program in Asia; that is a scientific community, and when we talk about ASEAN it includes only ten countries, but now I’m trying to move to include East Asia and even Australia, New Zealand and India.

That’s what I’m working on at the moment for a group of scientists, but at the same time it has been my dream to inject the element of intellectual property rights to this group of young scientists, because apart from what I’m doing with the GYA, or young scientists or national young academics, I’m also directing another project, where NSTDA has been working with world intellectual property organizations.

We call this project the IP Environment; this is a project in Southeast Asia, so we are trying to work together with IP professionals in Thailand, and trying to connect them with other countries in ASEAN.

Whenever we at NSTDA, or other organizations, are hosting on this theme, we can invite some people from other communities to be our guests, but the big challenge for me is that many members from the National Young Academy or Global Young Academy are academicians, so IP may not be their interest at the moment. But sooner or later, it will be the key element in their lives, so I try to find a proper timing to inject this element into their daily lives.

Nerina: What do you like doing when you are not working?

Orakanoke: Work has become my life, and I don’t really have much of a personal life. Even now, being on vacation, I’m looking to work some more, because I see that there’s a lot to do, and it’s the right timing when you’re capable of making a change, so I say that whatever big part I can do, I’ll carry on with work.

Nerina: What is a personal dream?

Orakanoke: Having been traveling a lot over the past few years, I would prefer to stay home and spend time with my family, with my dad, my brother, my sister, and my dog. I often joke with my friends that my dog, a beagle, is one of the success factors in my life.

Nerina: Who is Orakanoke in three sentences?

Orakanoke: For those who don’t know me, I’m someone who works very hard, for whom work is her life, but people often come to her as a solution provider, despite her expertise as an intellectual property lawyer or as a friend, who will try every bit to help and solve the problems for you.

Nerina: Thank you so much, Orakanoke, for this conversation.

Orakanoke: Thank you a lot, Nerina. I had a great time talking to you this morning, so I hope you find some inspiring information from my story. Thank you.

Nerina: Thank you so much, and thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and thank you for sharing. Keep wondering and see you next time again. Goodbye and ciao.

Biography:

Dr. Phanraksa received Ph.D. degree in laws from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2005. She is currently with the Technology Licensing Office, Technology Management Center at the National Science and Technology Development Agency, Pathumthani, Thailand, as a manager of the Intellectual Property Policy group.

She has involved a number of research projects, with a focus on intellectual property management and technology transfer such as the benefit sharing policy from intellectual property commercialization project; the interface between intellectual property and anti-trust laws project; and the access and benefit sharing for biodiversity in research and development institute in Thailand project.

She also serves as the working committee for the University-Business Incubation (UBI) Project and the Technology Licensing Office Promotion Project of the Higher Education Commission; and the Thai Patent Law Amendment of the Department of Intellectual Property, the Ministry of Commerce Thailand. Recently, she has engaged in a national research project with the National Science, Technology and Innovation Agency to develop a policy framework to promote the role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in research and development in Thailand.

Clarissa Rios Rojas

Clarissa Rios Rojas
Molecular biologist, policymaking advisor
Biography:

Scientist who after finishing her bachelor in Biology in Peru (UNMSM) decided to look for new avenues of professional development. She did exchange studies in Finland at the University of Turku, got her master in Biomedicine at Karolinska Institutet University in Sweden, worked in a pharmaceutical company in Germany and later got a PhD in Molecular Biology in Australia at the University of Queensland.

While finishing the PhD, she started to feel the urge to contribute to the world with something else than only her scientific work at the laboratory. This feeling pushed her to create an organization called Ekpa’palek that empowers Latin-American young professionals through different free mentorship programs that align with the Sustainable Development Goals of reduction of inequalities, gender equality and education.

Encouraged by the impact these programs had on young professionals, she discovered the need for creating new local, regional, and international policies that could help to tackle global issues. Motivated by this, she applied and was selected to participate in numerous events (international conferences, forums, and workshops) in science policy, citizen engagement in policy relevant to science & innovation, science diplomacy, open science & education, science outreach and global governance in different countries (Argentina, Jordan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, India, Chile, Germany, Thailand and Morocco).

In 2017, she worked at the Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement (OEFA) from the Ministry of Environment in Peru and since May 2018, she works at the EU Science Hub, also known as the Joint Research Center from the European Commission’s science and knowledge service where she provides scientific advice and support to EU policy. Also, as a member of the Global Young Academy, she works on initiatives related to science outreach, women empowerment and science advise.

Learn more about Clarissa's work:
http://www.ekpapalek.com
Connect with Clarissa:
facebook.com/cla.risa.54 twitter.com/Clarissajaz linkedin.com/clarissariosrojas instagram/being_a_scientist_is_cool
Empowering Latinos and filling the gap between science and society

What is the social purpose of science today? How are ethics and research linked in the modern world? What are the policies that keep scientific and social paths going in the same direction? Clarissa Rios answers these questions from her position as a molecular Biologist and policy maker at the European Commission, deriving from her experience in both the social and scientific aspects of research the core values of the purpose of science in favor of the smaller communities.

Founder of Ekpa’palek, an organization destined to offer academic help to Latin American students who want to broaden their horizons and stock up on the experience and advice from other professionals before entering their own fields, Clarissa expands on the need for science to hold a truly useful track of investment to help indigenous communities and developing countries through scientific research and the encouragement of young professionals to assist in these projects. The values of growth and development through inclusion and action make Ekpa’palek a unique vision for the young professionals who will contribute to wholesome communities, richer societies and a brighter future.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Clarissa Rios Rojas's Video here ◂

Nerina: Thank you, Clarissa, for joining me. Could you please introduce yourself?

Clarissa Rios: I am Clarissa Ríos Rojas, form Peru. I am a molecular biologist, and now I’m working in the interface of science and policy making, the European Commission in Italy and also, I’m the founder and director of Ekpa’palek, which is an organization that empowers Latin-American professionals.

Nerina: Could you tell us a little bit more about your position and your work right now?

Clarissa Rios: My project right now at the European Commission is to write recommendations for citizen engagement initiatives in the topic of social and ethical aspects of emerging technology, in this case, genomics and gene editing, and so on. So, for what I have found on my research so far, is that technology goes faster than policies, and sometimes it’s really hard to keep track of everything that is happening, and to implement the laws and the policies that need to be implemented in order to regulate science, as well.

So science, as we now, is research and innovation, but sometimes it goes to the next steps and becomes a start-up or a company that offers services that can be used for different reasons and by different types of people. I have seen right now that there are, for example, genetic testing companies offering a lot of ancestry testing and health testing, so it would be good to know who’s regulating these companies; are really experts the ones who are providing the information about your genes? What happens with your DNA once it is stored in their company? Is it in store forever or is it sold to another company? Can they trace it was your DNA?

These are things that are happening right now, and people don’t really know much about it. For example, genomics is also working at the interface with blockchain, so now we are having cryptocurrecy that is based on selling your DNA data, so what does that represent for business and society? Again, we have those ethical questions, but does it really help big companies to have more genetic data to have a better analysis of which diseases can come from different types of genes? There are many things that have to be evaluated, but it’s important to citizens to know what is happening, where it’s happening, and what is going to happen in their society if they accept it, or if they are consumers or become users of it.

Nerina: Why did you decide to take this new challenge?

Clarissa: I think that the in the European Commission, the Joined Research Center is the best place to learn about how scientists can contribute to society in terms of policy making, so I thought that this would be the best place to work and learn and contribute to, and I hope that this will be one of the first steps into a career and to a lot of work; I hope to use science-based evidence to create policies and help policy makers to better understand not only the citizens, but also the science behind every decision.

Nerina: Why is this relevant?

Clarissa: I think that the biggest problem that I see right now is that scientists are doing science just because; just because of curiosity and I now that’s a main drive that many of us had to become scientists, but I think we need to build places or spaces where we as scientists can speak with citizens. We can understand what are their needs, because I have seen during my time as a scientist that there are many projects that really don’t have any implications in solving anything at the moment; it’s just knowledge that is being generated with the hope that in the future is going to be used.

We can relocate not only the money, but the human capital, the PhD students that are being put into these projects, into something that society really needs. I think that we should have a priority table and see what the problems to see how we can fix the first hundred, instead of having fifty thousand projects and giving money to all of them and keep going.

I think that basic research is important, but I also think that basic research should be always tailored into fixing something, or producing some kind of technology. Without that, I think trust in science will never be achievable because citizens see this, citizens see their taxes are being used in projects that may never be published, that cannot be replicated, or that are not helping anything in their communities and local problems, and that just one side.

I also see that there is a problem with citizens not learning or trying to have some curiosity about science. I think they could interact more with scientists, see what they are doing, visit open days at universities, see where taxes are being used and have an opinion about it and learn from scientists, what they are producing, how they’re doing and use this scientific knowledge in order to make better decisions on the government they’re going to choose, about the political party they are going to vote for, what is this political party focusing on. Is it correct? Is it based on science, which is the most trustful thing that se have at the moment? Of course, it has its pitfalls, but it’s the best thing that we can work with.

The citizens should also think on how to improve science. If they don’t have faith in science, then tell us how we can improve it, how can science and society and citizens work together in order to make science better , achievable for everyone, and open in a way that everyone can understand it, and use it for the best of society and the environment, because sometimes we are just super anthropocentric and thinking about humans, but we are responsible, whether we want it or not, for all the species that are around us, and the ecosystems and the habitats we have, so I think that we should take our citizens’ role a little bit more responsibly.

Nerina: What would you suggest?

Clarissa: I think that’s why I was mentioning before that we should have these spaces where scientists can talk to other scientists, for example, about social science, as I talk about the ethics. I know that during university we have courses on ethics – animal ethics and human ethics -, but I think that we should have also courses with politics in science. Have courses where we bring politicians and scientist to understand how we’re both working together and making things better.

Other courses could be about scientists and citizens, and scientists and society, and create debate between them, answering questions form both sides, and trying to think how we can work together, because as you said, the theory of science in great, but who is doing the science? Us humans, with our imperfections, with our sometimes poor equipment, and with the limited knowledge that we have. I think it’s very important for scientists and citizens to acknowledge that scientists are not perfect; they are humans and make mistakes, and also the equipment and machines that they use make mistakes from time to time, but then having that as a premise to figure what we can do based on that, and then is when all these interactions with all the different groups take place, and then all three groups together can think about how science can be better, how can it have less errors and less mistakes, and how to bring all the traditional knowledge into it, as well as the ethics and the social aspects.

Sometimes we think that the problem has to be fixed by only one expert. That, for example, climate change has to be fixed by an environmentalist or a biologist, when in reality, problems are fixed by everyone. By economists, lawyers, citizens, biologists; it has to be fixed by everyone, because otherwise we are not creating a solution, we are just fixing a little patch, not the whole picture.

Nerina: You just mentioned traditional knowledge, and this is something that very often comes up when speaking with you. Why this interest in aboriginal culture?

Clarissa: Yes, well, my dad is from the jungle. Of course, he is part of an aboriginal community, but I guess that was my first encounter with aboriginal tribes and with people who are part that whole society. Also, when I was working with one of the agencies in the Ministry of Environment in Peru, one part of my job was to try to understand the narratives and how to bring the projects that the government had for these communities, how to make them learn, and how to learn from them what were their needs and priorities, and I think that all these encounters made me realize that they are not heard enough, their voices are not shared enough, their needs and their priorities are not communicated, and sometimes, with friends, I’ve heard them say things like “No, they should evolve like us, like the city people”, and I’ve been hurt by those comments, because I feel like our opinions are too superficial always, not just in these topic, but in many. It’s just something that has not has been thought through, you have not had an encounter with them, so how come you have a conscious and educated opinion about that?

For example, Ekpa’palek is a way to promote indigenous languages. Ekpa’palek comes from the Shiwilu language, form the Amazon in Peru, and it means to teach a little kid to take his first steps. Trying to translate everything in our programs on indigenous communities is a way to make it more accessible.

Nerina: You are the founder of Ekpa’palek. Can you tell us more about this organization?

Clarissa: We are an organization of around 45 to 50 people, and what we do is to offer programs for free to any Latinamerican students that want it. One of them is the professional mentorship, so we connect the students with professionals that are a little bit advanced in their careers so they can guide them, they can talk, they can tell them how to gain certain scholarships, but also about what’s out there. If I am a psychologist, if I am an economist, I want to know what’s happening in Australia, what’s happening in China, so that person can get inside information, so students in Latinamerica can shape their minds thinking about what’s next, and they should be studying now, or working on, or doing an internship with.

The second program is women empowerment. The first year, we were bringing new women from all over to schools; we had five professional women bringing their stories, bringing their pitfalls, the experiences they had been through and how they got where they are now. That worked for one year and then we had to stop it, so now we are focusing more on campaigns on line; we are doing the same, showing new women role models but in a visual way. We have engineers, economists, from different parts of the world that are Latinamerican women, and then they send a three minute video telling how they are there and why they decided on that career.

The third program will be the empowerment of indigenous languages, so basically we want our programs to reach everyone. We have started translating the articles on our blog into Quechua, which is a language that is spoken in Peru and Bolivia, and it’s a official language in Peru as well. Also, we have tree videos in Quechua, as well; we had one of our mentors make theses videos, telling how he went from a little town in the highlands of Peru to do his Master in France, and to study in Lima, Peru, as well. We are trying to promote translating everything that we are producing into different languages, not only Quechua.

Nerina: What motivated you to start this organization?

Clarissa: Well, because when I started my professional path, I was a bachelor student that really wanted to learn and to go more from theory to practice, and that was something that was not happening in Peru in terms of molecular biology. I think my motivation was to learn more, and I could do it with scholarships and people helping me take the next steps, as you mentioned, and then after ten years of doing my master and my PhD I realized that I was not the only one, and that the case that I had ten years ago where I didn’t have money to pursue studies, I didn’t have connections to create opportunities in professional development were still existing in Latin America, and we were at a disadvantage with the rest of the world.

So I thought about what I could do with this tools that I had gathered over the years, and one of them was my network. So I think it was really personal, because it was not that I was trying to fix something that happens somewhere else to some other people, but I was trying to help someone like me at this moment, someone who didn’t have opportunities, didn’t have the network, didn’t have ideas, or someone from outside to talk to and just get inspired.

Nerina: How did you become what you are now?

Clarissa: I studied Biology and Genetics in Peru; I was very interested and curious about science. Then I went to Finland for exchange studies, and I did a Master in Biomedicine and Neuroscience, which I was also completely in love with, specifying different types of neurons in the brain, and then I decided to move to Australia to do my PhD in sex development; how the sperm cells and the egg cells develop.

When I was finishing my PhD was when I decided to create Ekpa’palek, this organization that empowers Latinamerican professionals. And then, looking at the results and the people that we were helping, I started to realize that a nes passion was growing inside myself, and then I decided to leave the lab where I was doing experiments and start to communicate with citizens and policy makers and start to find a way where I could use my scientific background and I could help society in a different way, and that way is creating better policies for everyone. Now it’s in the European Union, but later I hope it will be in Latinamerica and in Peru.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson that you have learned?

Clarissa: I started this project thinking that I would help many people, but I’m being helped as well. I’m learning so much, I’m meeting so many people, we are doing so many nice projects outside Ekpa’palek as well. This has also motivated me to change my career; as I said, I was working in the lab as a scientist, and the Ekpa’palek happened, and then I started to pursue new paths within myself that make me happy, so what I would recommend to anyone is that if you always think that there is a problem and you want to fix it, try to do it with one friend, and it may grow and it may not, but you have the satisfaction to learn from it.

Nerina: What is your vision for Ekpa’palek?

Clarissa: When I created Ekpa’palek, it was only for Latinamericans, but in my wild dreams we have Ekpa’palek Asia and Ekpa’palek Africa interacting with each other. But that is also based on the idea of the «brain drain» – I think that’s what they call it in English -, when professionals and all the talent goes from the south to the north and then never go back, or just a few of them. So I thought it would be very interesting to have a blog of developing countries in the south, exchanging professionals, exchanging knowledge, exchanging what we already know how to do best, and empower each other, because the south also need to keep growing, to keep learning, and it would be really good to create these alliances between universities, student associations, and governments, and think about what are the good things and benefits that can come from it.

Of course, going to the north and having the technology to learn is really good, but I think the next step on that path could be to start doing these collaborations.

Nerina: Is there something you believe we should think more about?

Clarissa: I would just like to point out that we are creating so much technology, and these technologies are mostly created in developed countries, and are mostly created to fix and find solutions for local problems, so that means that the problem that, for example, indigenous communities have will never be solved by the technology that we are creating now, and I think they would benefit so much from that.

Sometimes we are talking about gene editing and blockchain, and how does that benefit indigenous communities? They are people who also have struggles and many local problems that they would like to solve; how good would it be if used these technologies to find solutions for those problems as well? So that would be my contribution, to make people think about technology is being biased towards certain problems, certain “local” problems, and not really towards developing countries and indigenous communities.

Nerina: And what is the relation between science and traditional knowledge, in your opinion?

Clarissa: It has always been known about, this traditional knowledge. Sometimes it is treated with respect, and sometimes it’s treated like it’s not science. It’s very curious that you ask me this, because in my group, one of the projects is about mapping arctic communities, so they are mapping every community that is Finland, Norway, Iceland, U.S, Canada, and besides doing the mapping, they are gathering the information that they have in the terms of climate change. They’re voices about climate change and how that’s impacting them in the first place because they are close to the first places where the impact is being observed, and what they have to say about.

I think that nowadays it is taken more seriously, and I’m glad to see that the European Commission, for example, is also taking them seriously and writing reports about it, having their voices heard and their opinions shared with policy makers and with people in the European Union.

I’ve seen this happening in Europe, but I have not seen it in Latinamerica. However, when I was working at the agency of the Ministry of Environment, I could see that the interaction between the experts, the biologists, the chemists was really open when they were informing them about what was happening, I think the efforts are becoming more and more important, and in order to listen from them as well, not just coming and giving a lecture about what is going to happen and what they need to know, but also empowering them in teaching them how to use equipment to measure pollution, how to analyze data so they can have their own data analyzed. Also, I heard that in Bolivia, if you want to be part of the government, you have to speak one of the indigenous languages, and I think that’s important, because, for example, for these types of jobs you can speak in Spanish and then you have a translator, but how would it be if you could speak to them in Quechua, in Aymara, and hear them, so they also feel more comfortable in sharing their ideas in their own language.

I think languages are a very powerful thing. I am going to learn more about different types of languages because I think that is the way to really go into a deeper connection with someone, especially if you’re working in this field, and understand what they want to see in their environment, what they want to contribute to the government, for example, in terms of analyzing the data, letting them know when they see a case of contamination, on the river, on the cause, etc.

Nerina: Do you have a wish or a dream?

Clarissa: Yes. I really dream sometimes that there is a society that is respectful of everyone, but more than anything, they have empathy. Everyone in this society has empathy that makes them really feel how the other person would feel in every situation, not only in how we interact as friends, but in different geographical parts. How these people may feel in different social classes; how these people must feel, what can I do to help this person. I think empathy should be the key factor in this society that I envision.

I think the society that I dream of in one where there is the feeling of connection and belonging with every single part of this habitat; not only humans, but plants, insects, birds, the rivers – I mean, the water we drink comes from the river -, so I think that connection is missing sometimes. We don’t feel like we belong or that we are part of something bigger that needs us to take care of it and to contribute to keep it going in a healthy way, so I think if that could be spread into all citizens and make them feel responsible for each other, for other species, for the soil, for the river, for the climate, it would be my second wish. That feeling of belonging and connection.

Nerina: What was the most beautiful day, and what was the mist awful one?

Clarissa: I think the most beautiful day for me is just being with my family having lunch together. It is something that I haven’t had for many years as a daily thing. I did a little bit when I finished my PhD; I could go back and leave again for six months back in Peru with my family, so I think my most warm and beautiful feeling is to have just that: my mom, my dad, my brother, now my partner as well. Laughing, talking about what happened during the day, maybe complaining about something that happened at university or at our jobs, just sharing and being together in a peaceful, quiet place.

Maybe the most horrible moment has been when sometimes I feel that I’m in a place where there is just too much horror, too much darkness, that all the good things really don’t compensate for the bad things, and that it’s not a nice world. Sometimes I feel like this world is the hell of someone else, or is the imagination of how hell should be, because I see so many awful things, so much suffering, even though I’m not experiencing it myself. I’m not a someone that has been a sex slave, or someone that has been raped, or someone who wakes up with bombs ten meters from them, but I still feel like it could be me, I feel people don’t deserve to grow in an environment like that; they didn’t ask to be born in this world.

I think those have been the hardest moments in my life; just to be overwhelmed by sorrow, by sadness, and to think that there is really nothing that we can do to change it, I’ve had those times as well. I think activists are always in that twilight, where you think that everything can get better if you do something, but you’re also on the other side where you think that everything is horrible and terrible and too much to take in.

Nerina: And what brings you up?

Clarissa: What brings me up is to see people doing amazing things. Because I’m doing Ekpa’palek, for example, I’m in touch with different organizations and meet people that are always doing something, and I see them and I think that there is hope.

There are a lot of amazing people doing things for animals, for the environment, for other humans, and I thin, Yes, things can change. At some point.

Nerina: What is life about, Clarissa?

Clarissa: I think life is about learning, experiencing all the feelings; sadness is part of and part of what we are as humans. I think we should be grateful that we can experience it, although it’s not a nice thing, but sometimes good things come out of it. Sometimes, not always.

It’s about meeting other people; trying to be, as Maya Angelou said, a rainbow in someone else’s cloud, and just to try and make other people happy, because sometimes you’re sad and the other can make you happy. Sometime the other person is sad and you can make them happy.

It’s just about trying to enjoy what we have. Talking as a biologist, we have theses fabulous senses of touch, smelling, seeing. It’s enjoying theses things that we can give ourselves. About learning more about what’s happening in all parts of the world, to see documentaries about the life of animals and how they interact; it’s absolutely beautiful.

I think those are pleasures that even if you cannot travel, you can see it and sort of experience it from afar, and I those are the things that bring me happiness and joy, besides being with my family and friends, and also things like reading books and entering the mind of someone else that you never met but they wrote a book and let you go inside their minds for a little bit and have a taste of it. Like music; humans make music and it’s beautiful, so I think that if we focus on those things, that is what life is, or what life should be.

Nerina: Thank you so much, Clarissa, for this conversation.

Clarissa: Thank you, Nerina.

Nerina: And thank you for listening, thank you for watching and thank you for sharing. Keep wondering and see you next time again. Goodbye and ciao.

Biography:

Scientist who after finishing her bachelor in Biology in Peru (UNMSM) decided to look for new avenues of professional development. She did exchange studies in Finland at the University of Turku, got her master in Biomedicine at Karolinska Institutet University in Sweden, worked in a pharmaceutical company in Germany and later got a PhD in Molecular Biology in Australia at the University of Queensland.

While finishing the PhD, she started to feel the urge to contribute to the world with something else than only her scientific work at the laboratory. This feeling pushed her to create an organization called Ekpa’palek that empowers Latin-American young professionals through different free mentorship programs that align with the Sustainable Development Goals of reduction of inequalities, gender equality and education.

Encouraged by the impact these programs had on young professionals, she discovered the need for creating new local, regional, and international policies that could help to tackle global issues. Motivated by this, she applied and was selected to participate in numerous events (international conferences, forums, and workshops) in science policy, citizen engagement in policy relevant to science & innovation, science diplomacy, open science & education, science outreach and global governance in different countries (Argentina, Jordan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, India, Chile, Germany, Thailand and Morocco).

In 2017, she worked at the Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement (OEFA) from the Ministry of Environment in Peru and since May 2018, she works at the EU Science Hub, also known as the Joint Research Center from the European Commission’s science and knowledge service where she provides scientific advice and support to EU policy. Also, as a member of the Global Young Academy, she works on initiatives related to science outreach, women empowerment and science advise.

Learn more about Clarissa's work:
http://www.ekpapalek.com
Connect with Clarissa:
facebook.com/cla.risa.54 twitter.com/Clarissajaz linkedin.com/clarissariosrojas instagram/being_a_scientist_is_cool

Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Philosopher
Biography:

Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he took his Ph.D (Doctorat d’État) in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). His field of research includes Boolean algebra of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature.

He is the author of Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989) (a book on Boolean algebra), Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar, Codesria, 2011), African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011), The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Dakar, Codesria, 2016), Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018).

His book, Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011) is forthcoming in an English version to be published by Fordham University Press. That book was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year professor, Diagne received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work.

Professor Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy, and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth-century French philosophy.

Learn more about Souleymane's work:
http://cloudconversations.com
Connect with Souleymane:
facebook.com/souleymane.diagne
A passion for philosophy, science and society

What does it mean to be a philosopher in the modern day? Does philosophy still offer answers to todays’ most pressing issues, or does it belong to the questions of the past? What can philosophy teach us that we don’t already know?

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Senegalese modern-day philosopher that is here to answer these questions and more. With an extensive academic career that encompasses African literature, History of Philosophy and Francophone Studies across three continents, Souleyman offers a unique point of view on the history of Philosophy in today’s beliefs, actions and ideas, its influence across different cultures, and the decolonization of philosophical concepts.

A strong supporter of doing good in your own sphere before taking on the world, Souleymane believes that human progress goes beyond individual convictions, instead residing in the common forces that move us towards the greater, brighter goal of a shared human experience that pays no mind to religious, national or ethnic fragmentations.
Watch our interview to better understand today’s relationship between philosophy and religion, the importance of both in creating a better world for younger people, and how the ideas of the past have been revolutionized to provide a clearer reflection of today’s philosophical and spiritual needs.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Souleymane Bachir Diagne's Video here ◂

Souleymane: My name is Souleymane. Souleymane Bachir Diagne. I’m a Senegalese philosopher. I’ve taught twenty years in Senegal, after finishing my higher education in France, and in 2002, I crossed the Atlantic again and went to the United States, where I taught Philosophy, first at Northwestern University in the suburbs of Chicago, and then now, I live in New York, where I teach Philosophy and Francophone studies at Columbia University.

Nerina: Thank you for your time and great to speak with you. How did you get into philosophy?

Souleymane: That’s a really good question, because there is some chance, always, in the choices we make. When I finished high school and when I first traveled out of Dakar, in my country Senegal, and went to France to study, I was hesitating between two different paths; one of them would have made me an engineer by now, because I was admitted in a school of Engineering named INSA – Intitut National des Sciences Apliquées -, which was in Lyon, and I also was admitted to go to what is known in the French system as classe préparatoire, these elite paths where students prepare for entrance into école normale supérieure, the system of Grandes Écoles, as it is known in France. The first choice would have meant becoming an engineer, the second choice would have meant becoming a philosopher, and I decided for Philosophy after a while. It took me a while to make that decision, and now I’m very happy I made that decision; that was really what my life was about, being passionate, having feeling this passion for Philosophy, reading texts that I loved, explaining them and writing somehow from them in doing research in the field I had chosen.

Nerina: You had to choose between two completely different paths. What is the relationship between science and philosophy, in your opinion?

Souleymane: What I do is, in fact, not separate them, so the reason why I do not ask myself what is the difference between the two is that I do not separate them in the first place.

Let me give you an example, a precise example of my own work. As I said, I started working in the field of logic, history of logic and mathematical logic, and the author I worked on, George Boole, the British logician and mathematician, who actually invented our binary system, the 0 and 1 that we use in the language of our computers, was an invention of Boole. Something that people do not know is that his project was philosophical in the first place; he wanted to make Aristotelian logic more efficient by using the language of Algebra, and in so doing, he created the scientific object that would be called the Algebra of Boole and that we are using in our computers. So this interpenetration, I would call it, this interaction between science and philosophy is very important, so this is why I believe that the Humanities and the so called ‘Exact Sciences’ should never be separated. After all, it is one human mind which needs, at once, scientific procedures and artistic and humanistic values, and these should be together.

Nerina: What does it mean, being a philosopher in the 21st century?

Souleymane: It’s complicated, what does it mean to be a philosopher? Well, let me answer that question by letting you know what my experience was, and I said I was always between science and philosophy, mathematics and philosophy. The way in which I reconcile those two passions that I had, was when I finished, when I was going to choose a topic for my dissertation in Philosophy to work in the field of Algebra, of Logic, so I wrote a dissertation and my first two books, the first two books that I published, were both in the field of algebra, of logic, so that’s one way of answering your question, to be a philosopher may mean to be a philosopher of science, a historian of science, which was what a did.

And then I went back home, I went back to Senegal, and of course I was going to teach philosophy. My goal, going back home, was to create in the Department of Philosophy in Dakar, a strong curriculum in History, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science, because that was my fundamental training, and I did that, I created that curriculum back home. But then, at the same time, you had all the debates going on, and that is what it means to be a philosopher; you cannot be a philosopher in the same way you are a natural scientist or a physicist, etc, etc; which means that you pay attention to what is going on. Your thinking is also one way of intervening; you intervene in the public square, in some respects, or at least something of the debates going on around you find an echo in your thinking. So I could not just decide that ‘Ok, I’m a specialist in philosophy of science, this is what I’m going to do’. I had to be part of the debates that were taking place at that time.
And so one aspect was the question of philosophy in Africa, what does it mean to philosophize in the African continent, to philosophize (indiscernible, 7:02) the problems in Africa. To give you an example, what does it mean to look at African art in its difference from European art, for example. So, those were the debates going on, and I started taking part. The 90’s had been years of transition towards democracy, and so the thinking was about African democracies, what does it mean to make these countries democratic, what kind of institutions were to be designed, so this was a very exciting time for someone to think philosophically about the problems facing Africa.

Another aspect was also the question of religion. I went back home in the early 1980’s, and this was the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, and political Islam as we know it now was very much on the scene, was very much on our screens and our newspapers and so and so forth, and Senegal is a Muslim country, so that was an aspect of the debate as well, what connection should we have now, where’s the intellectual and spiritual tradition of Islam, which is not known and of which philosophy is an important part. So I decided, also, in addition to my more technical teaching in philosophy of mathematics, to teach the history of philosophy in the Islam world, and to intervene in some respect on the debate surrounding Islam today. So, this is a very long answer, but that is for me what it means to be a philosopher. Again, not just chose a path, a specialty and work in that specialty narrowly defined, but being ready to go different ways, to change and to adapt, also, to the discussion about what is going on around you.

Nerina: Religion and philosophy. They are considered by many people be opposite ways to see life. How do you see it? Is there a contradiction?

Souleymane: Well, sure, one could say, defining things in these broad brushes, that on the one hand religion is really about faith, and even blind faith; you have to believe in something, you have to believe without evidence, you have to believe in things that you cannot see, that you cannot touch, that are not for your sensible grasping or even for your human understanding, on the one hand. And then you have philosophy, which is based on reason, rationalism, and proof and evidence. So it would be simple to just oppose the two and say that religion is one thing and philosophy is a very different thing, but now if you look at the history of religions themselves, you can see how, from within religion, there is a need to philosophize; that was the birth of Islamic philosophy, for example.

You cannot just decide that everything has been said once and for all by a revealed text; even the text you have to read it. So you can never be in the situation where you say ‘This ends philosophical questioning and I have the answers now’; you have to build your answers, you have to keep them open, you have to understand how open they are and how open they remain, because it is really, truly, your own human duty to examine. One important Muslim philosopher (indiscernible name, 11:28) has said ‘He who does not doubt, does not examine, and he who does not examine, doesn’t believe’, and this is probably the best single sentence to explain why philosophy is necessary to religion itself and how the connection between the two is really an internal relationship and not an external relationship between two very different things.

Nerina: You mentioned that, as a philosopher, you have to take part in the discussions that take place in the public sphere. Right now, it is religion in focus, and not always in a positive way. How do your books participate in the general discussion?

Souleymane: We live in times where, paradoxically, religion is so present in our lives. I mean, if we open our television sets, we see religion everywhere, and many terrible, violent, unbelievable things being done in the name of religion, and at the same time, we are so ignorant about religions in general, because years and years of so called secularism has made religion something that is not known anymore.
You know, even independently form the political situation that we are living in, and the security questions that religions and fanaticism, rather that religion, by the way, are posing, there’s an ignorance of religion. I mean, younger people are even incapable of reading works of art because they just don’t know who the people represented in art are, and most of the time these are religious characters, biblical characters that you find in paintings and so and so forth. But what it means, also, in particular for Islam, which is probably the religion nowadays associated with violence and everything. It is a terrible thing, and people need to be reminded that this religion was not born yesterday, and it is the religion of one billion and a half people, and it is a spiritual and an intellectual tradition.
So there is a need to make that tradition known, primarily for younger Muslims, for Muslims themselves, and this is what led me to the decision to teach also the tradition of philosophy in Islam, and this is the decision that led me from there to use my teaching for many years and make it a book, and I believe that that book, by precisely reminding people of what this intellectual and spiritual tradition that we call Islam, that we should be knowing as Islam is, this becomes de facto, a kind of intervention in the public square to, again, make Islam known and, primarily, known to Muslims themselves.

Nerina: And your books somehow change the narrative about the history of philosophy, right?

Souleymane: Absolutely. It is important for philosophy, for the discipline of philosophy in general, to sort of decolonize itself, as I would call it, because philosophy has been constructed as a uniquely European phenomenon, and this has happened very recently, actually. Traditionally, historically, philosophers in Greece or in Europe before the contemporary modern times never really thought of themselves as being the unique philosophers that humanity has ever seen; this is something that happened almost around the beginning of colonialism, that Europe defined itself has the heir of Greek philosophy and the continent of philosophy par excellence, and decided that philosophy was really the defining feature of Europe, so African philosophy could not exist; philosophy could not exist anywhere else outside Europe.
So this changed, because the history of philosophy is just not supporting such an idea if you look at who is the heir of Greeks. Many people have been the heir of the Greeks; Greek philosophy was appropriated by the Islamic world, so you have a tradition of philosophy in Islam that we do not know; this is something that I decided to teach, to let my own students know, because we were a department of philosophy in a Muslim country and we needed to know about that tradition as well, and I mean, human beings are naturally inclined towards philosophy, because human beings, by definition, know that they are mortal, they bury their dead, they look up to the sky, and they ask themselves about the destination of humanity, what it means to be human, what it is be born, what it means to die, and so and so forth. So philosophical thinking and philosophical wisdom exist everywhere, so we have to think about that and reconstruct the history of philosophy in such a way that it ceases to be this uniquely Western history of thought, and that is a very important aspect of my work as well.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson that your students have to learn?

Souleymane: You know, to just give you my experience, among the class that I teach in my university, Columbia, I have one class on history of philosophy in the Islamic world, where I introduce my students to classical Islamic philosophy, form 9th century to 13th century, and then also modern questions and so on. I also teach a class that I call African Literature in Philosophy, where I look at what is being written in Africa and what are the problems being debated by African intellectuals and philosophers, and I also teach, of course, general history of philosophy and philosophy of logic, as I’ve always done. And when my students have the feeling that they are more of what Islam is, or that they are more aware of Africa in terms of the intellectual production of the continent – Africa not just being a subject of conversation associated with diseases, problems, epidemics and so on so forth, but what are Africans thinking and writing now, what have they been thinking and also writing – it is not known that, for example, you have a long tradition of written edition in Africa; Africa is generally associated with orality, and people are now discovering all the manuscripts in Timbuktu, for example, that this is not true. And when they become aware of that, when they change their mind about what they thought, or what they thought they knew about the topics that I’m teaching, I think that I have done my job as an educator.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Souleymane: Well, I dream of a society that would not be fragmented into what I call ethno-nationalisms, which is unfortunately what we have today. It is not just that there is a kind of stiffening of identities where people are fighting in the name of their religious identities or their national identities and so and so forth. It’s not just religion, but even in the field of politics we can see that. What I call ethno-nationalism is, as well, all these movements, extreme right movements, that we are calling populism. We should call them tribalism, because that is what it is, and my dream is the reconstruction of the philosophical and ethical idea of one humanity, which means hospitality.
Let’s look at the crisis of migrants that we have nowadays, refugees and migrants. They are met with what the Pope has called the globalization of indifference. The Pope is appalled and is always reacting against what he sees as indifference to human suffering, because we are so fragmented and thinking about ourselves and people who look like us, have the same religion, have the same skin color, and so and so forth. We are losing sight of the ethical general idea of humanity, in general. And that is the foundation for common life, that is the foundation for building together our Earth, that is the foundation of having the sense that we are one, our Earth is one, and the we should come together and take care of it.
This was, for example, something we saw during the Paris agreement on our environment. This was a wonderful metaphor for the idea of humanity being one, and looking in the same direction and taking care of our common home, which is our Earth. Unfortunately, we have seen the forces of fragmentation come again, when the United States, for example, just decided that they are going to, you know, come out of this common agreement and so and so forth. So that is, somehow, what I think is important, and will be the ultimate goal of all the different aspects of my work, working really to what’s, you know, this general idea, this universal idea of one humanity.

Nerina: How can we reconstruct our notion of humanity?

Souleymane: This is long-term thinking. In the short term, it has to be played on the political ground; we have to resist this type of populism. I believe that we have to fight for that ideal of a world of social justice, where you do not just have a global capitalism indifferent to human suffering and to that kind of fragmentation that I have described.

Nerina: Do you have a dream?

Souleymane: Well, I’ve had for a long time the dream of, you know, all young people have that dream, of changing the world, and I was thinking of doing science, I was thinking of having the discovery that would change things on Earth and things like that. Growing up, you learn to be much more humble than that, and you just ask yourself ‘Ok, am I, right now, touching the lives of people and changing things in my own sphere of influence?’, because, if you are in my position, obviously you have some influence on certain number of people. So my dream is to be able at one point to ask myself honestly that question and be able to answer that yes, I did that, and I realized that wish of making difference in the lives of a certain number of younger people.

Nerina: What is life about?

Souleymane: For me, life is about love; in other words, the force of life. I believe in the force of life. If I have to define myself in terms of my philosophy, I would say that I am very much a vitalist, in the sense that I believe in the force of life, and I think that the force of life is the same as the force of love. That this world has been created out of love as an open ended, always emerging cosmology; that this world is something that human beings have to invent an reinvent all the time, and that the energy they use, the force they use for that, which is the force of life, is the same as the force of love. So, for me, that is the sort of cosmic significance of love, it is also the personal significance of love. It is because the world itself is a creation of love, and that its movement forward is the movement of love, that our individual lives are always about love.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation, and thank you for watching, thank you for listening and thank you for sharing. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any suggestion. Keep wondering, and see you next time again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he took his Ph.D (Doctorat d’État) in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). His field of research includes Boolean algebra of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature.

He is the author of Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989) (a book on Boolean algebra), Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar, Codesria, 2011), African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011), The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Dakar, Codesria, 2016), Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018).

His book, Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011) is forthcoming in an English version to be published by Fordham University Press. That book was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year professor, Diagne received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work.

Professor Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy, and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth-century French philosophy.

Learn more about Souleymane's work:
http://cloudconversations.com
Connect with Souleymane:
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Sandra Goulart Almeida

Sandra Goulart Almeida
Professor of Literary Studies
Biography:

Rector of UFMG, placed in the southeast of Brazil, the most industrialized region of the country. UFMG is a free-of-charge public educational institution, in the oldest university in the state of Minas Gerais.

Women. Readers. Writers. Translators.

“To be a feminist means to have a position in which you believe that you are able to do whatever you want to do without having to tell people that you have the right to”. So speaks Sandra Goulart Almeida, Brazilian professor and president of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, who devotes her work to the research of feminist literature, its history and its parallels in today’s world.

Literature has always been a reflection of our society, so it’s only appropriate that female writers get a long denied focus by intellectuals such as Sandra to better understand matters of cultural identity regarding the role of the woman all over the world, while also zeroing in on the ways that language builds us as members of one great community.

Listen to Sandra shed light on female authors who discuss the identity of women throughout different cultures, as well as how these identities and cultures must be approached and respected through external mediums to preserve and expose its ways of life and thought.

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Read the transcript of Sandra Goulart Almeida's Video here ◂

Sandra: I’m Sandra Goulart Almeida, I’m a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. I’m also currently the president of the university.

Nerina Finetto: Thank you, Sandra, for joining me. What are the topics you are interested in?

Sandra: I like to work with comparative literature. I like to see what women are writing about; so mostly I work with contemporary women writers, and I like to see what they are writing from different parts of the world. So that’s what I’m passionate about. So for that reason, I’m also interested in feminist criticism, and also in the notion of cultural translation, since I work with literatures in English, and literatures in Portuguese. I think these are fields that are very exciting for us today; it’s a good time for us to be discussing those issues. There are, I think, in the history of literary studies, it has never been so many women writing.

Sandra: So I’m interested in researching about what women are writing at the moment, what are they interested in.

Nerina Finetto: What are women writing about?

Sandra: That’s an interesting focus. They’re writing about just everything right now. There was a moment in which we could just say that women were writing about their experience as women, you know? They’re writing about taking care of children, about other relations with women, what it is like to live in the private sphere. But now it’s a good, a very interesting time for us, because they’re writing about everything. What I’m mostly interested in, since I work with comparative literature, is how they talk about the notion of space. Especially because I work with women who write in English, but they live, for example, in other countries. So they are part of what is known as contemporary diasporas. So I am interested in that as well, what these women are writing about.

Nerina Finetto: And what are these women writing about?

Sandra: I just published a book on space, women writers and space, the notion of space, diaspora, migration. So I’m doing some research, also, on two aspects of what women writers are talking about. First one is the notion of affect, that a lot of women writers are choosing some affects of emotions to talk about the present moment. But most of them are angered, we have a lot of notion of anger, fear, you have that as well, so I’ve been working with that. And now I’m starting a research on the notion of post-human feminism, that is, women writers, how they’re also writing from others’ perspective. In the effect that believing there’s not a centrality of the human anymore. That are other things that we have to concede when we are discussing our contemporary world.

Nerina Finetto: What kind of things?

Sandra: Some women, I can give an example, Margaret Atwood was a Canadian writer, who’d been writing a lot about that, about how the future is going to be a society in which humans are going to share either physical or psychological, or even the space without animals, but also with machines as well. So the fact of that, we live in a nature that there is no way that we can have the centrality of men, as we understood that, for example in the 19th century or in the previous century, some questioning, showing how women are writing about those topics as well.

Nerina Finetto: Do women write in a different way than men?

Sandra: You could say that, especially in the past we could say that the women, they tend to have a different way of writing, but I think this question doesn’t take us anywhere. The question of sexual difference, I believe that it does more harm than good, because then we start establishing “rules” for how women should write and how men should write. And I think that’s not what I am interested in. I think women are writing regardless of what we say they are writing about. There are a lot of women who are writing about the experience of migrants, as refugees or people who live in transit. It’s something that’s more recent for women to write about; it’s nothing about the private sphere, they’re writing about what it is like to be out there, so I am interested in that. I think asking whether they like different from men, limits the scope of what they can do.

Nerina Finetto: This means that actually we do not need these categories, ‘men’ and ‘women’ writers.

Sandra: No. Yeah.

Nerina Finetto: But at the same time, you tell me that you are interested in female literature. You do not say “I am interested in literature”. Why?

Sandra: For historical reasons. Traditionally, there are more men writers, it has always been easier for men to publish. Being a writer was something that men were, not women in the 18th century. Women started really publishing extensively in the 19th century, over all. So the area of literature, of writing, is traditionally dominated by men, so I think there are two different things here; one, it’s the historical conditioning of women as writers. Either they were silenced for many years, or they were published and nobody knew about them, or because they were not writing because the social and political and economic conditions were not favorable for them. And now we are in a very good time in history, and we could say that the conditions are better for women to write, and they are writing. So I am interested in what they have to say, there is still some kind of prejudice against women as writers, or in all professions in general, so I think it’s a political position, you know, giving visibility to what they write, how they write, what they discuss. Many of them talk about their conditions as women, many of them discuss issues related to the body, you know. So there are some things each day they talk about, and that you don’t usually find in writings by men.

Sandra: But again, it does not mean that they have to write about this. My position as a literary critic is not to set up the standards for them to write according to those standards, but rather to see what they are doing, to examine what is behind the kind of narrative that they are constructing.

Nerina Finetto: Is there a writer who you admire and would like people to know more about? And why?

Sandra: There are many writers I am interested in, as I said I work with literatures in English, and also in the context of Brazil and literature. There is a Nigerian writer who’s been very well-known, and I like her work because of the political position that she stands for. Her name is Chimamanda Adichie. Not only does she write novels, short stories, but also she gives lectures and then they turn into essays. You can find them in the internet. For example, she has a very interesting lecture that she gave about the danger of a single story, so this is available for whoever wants to listen to in the internet. And she also gave another lecture about We Should All be Feminists, that’s the title. And that was turned into a booklet about showing her belief that men and women should all be feminists, so there is a position that we have to take in relation to society. And recently she has published another one about how to raise a daughter as a feminist. So I like the fact that she is a writer; she writes fiction, very very interesting fiction, she talks about several important issues for women, but also for humankind in general. But she also has a theoretical thinking about her position as a writer. And I like that. I think it’s inspiring, the kind of work that she’s doing.
Chimamanda: So that to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There’s a word, an [inaudible 00:08:45] word, that I think about whenever I think about the past structures of the world. And it is “nkali”; it’s a noun that loosely translates to ‘to be greater than another’. Like economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability, not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Nerina Finetto: I really like The Danger of a Single Story and I really like her message and theoretical position. And probably the richness that we can have through different narratives is also one of your main topics, right?

Sandra: So there’s something that I am interested in, these women writers are telling a different story. A story that we have never heard before. There is also a Brazilian writer whom I like very much, who’s called Conceição Evaristo. She’s a black writer, and she talks about her experience, you know. She comes from a very poor family, in a country that has a tradition of racism, so she talks about her experience as a black woman in Brazil, and she talks about several other narratives that we usually do not encounter on an everyday basis on the literatures of the country. You come across that occasionally, but not that often. So I think this is a very important issue, to have these writers tell stories that we’re usually not familiar with, that we have not heard before. For example, Adichie, she tells this story of the Biafran War, which was a tragedy in terms of history. She tells that from her perspective, from the perspective of women, from the perspective of a poor boy, in the story. So she gives us the possibility of looking through literature, looking at histories. She and Evaristo also do that.

Sandra: I remember that story from when I was a child, I remember the pictures of the children in Biafra dying because of hunger, but I didn’t know the context. So I just read her novel, and it’s very good. I do recommend Half of a Yellow Sun.

Nerina Finetto: I mentioned you are not only writing and teaching about women’s literature, but you are also a role model for young women because of your position at the university. How do you see it?

Sandra: I think more than being a woman in the university, I think there’s still many women who teach at my university, but they’re not as many women who address the issue of women writers, of gender studies, or feminist criticism, they’re not as many. So, of course, I’ve been doing that for the past 20 years. And I usually say that my role is to teach the younger generation, you know? And I’ve noticed a change. I think the women nowadays are more interested in the subjects. Whenever I teach a course, I have many people wanting to take a course with me because they are interested in what I have to say regarding gender studies, about literature written by women, about feminist literary criticism. So I think it’s my role; my position as a professor, as a teacher, it’s really to teach the younger generation, who in turn will teach younger generations too. So I usually tell them “we have a task, a role to play in teaching them, even in the most basic level.” For example, to watch a film, and be able to criticize the way that women are portrayed in the films, to see an advertisement and see how sexist or how racist that advertisement is, beyond the study of literature. I think it’s an everyday practice.

Nerina Finetto: What is the lesson that your students have to learn, if there is such a thing as one lesson?

Sandra: To be critical. They have to be critical. They should never take anything for granted, no discourse for granted, no news for granted, no narrative for granted. They do have to be critical about what they are reading; to be able to stand and say “What is behind this? What is discussed here?”. So I usually try to tell them that they do have to be critical, they have to have a critical position regarding either the object of study, or anything that they’re reading or they’re watching.

Nerina Finetto: And what is the most important lesson that you have learned from your research?

Sandra: Maybe that’s exactly the same lesson that I have learned. That there are many stories being told, that we have to know those stories to start with, we have to know about what other women are writing about, and we do have to be critical about what we read in general. Not only about what women are writing, but what we read on an everyday basis.

Nerina Finetto: Was there a turning point in your life that determined who you are now?

Sandra: I think I’ve always been like that, I think I’ve always been interested in the topic, maybe because of the way that I was raised. I had a very interesting grandmother. I am of Lebanese descend, so she had a very difficult life in the sense that she was not allowed to study, she was not allowed to do what she wanted to do as a woman. She was a musician, but she wasn’t at the time, she had to get married, to have children, so she didn’t… so she gave me a lot of support, because I always was very much interested in doing research. I was always a feminist at heart.

Nerina Finetto: What does it mean to be a feminist?

Sandra: It means to have a position in which you believe that you are able to do whatever you want to do without having to tell people that you have the right to. You just do it, you can do whatever or as much as men do, so there should be no limitations. I do believe in equal rights for men and women.

Nerina Finetto: What does it mean to you, being a professor?

Sandra: This is what I like best about the kind of work that I do. As I said I am an administrator, but I like to be a professor, I like to publish, I like to think. I like to be able to teach my students a lot of the things that I research on. I think it’s a way for you to pass on not only your knowledge, but it’s a way for you to contribute to a better society. I do believe in that.

Sandra: As I said, if my students leave my classroom and they learn to be better readers, more critical about what happens in the world, I’m happy with what I did with my job. That’s what I like best.

Nerina Finetto: What is the role of the humanities, in your opinion?

Sandra: I think all over the world, there is being the evaluation of the humanities. I think we can’t deny that. I think the way that the world has evolved, what has been valued, is usually the exact science, administration, not very much the humanities, which of course I think it’s a mistake. I think the humanities are essential for our world as it is nowadays. Not only because it provides us with the tools to be more critical about what goes on in all other disciplines, but also because it adds to whatever you are doing in the other fields. So I’m very much a believer in the power of interdisciplinary, to your transdisciplinary, that’s what people have been talking about. A world that is not limited to a discipline specifically.

Sandra: So because we have moved towards a society that wants results more than anything else, the humanities have been devalued as a profession. Which I think is horrible for the world, and I think, on the contrary, what has to be done, is to have more dialogue among the disciplines, so that the humanities are able to do what it does best, which is to open the grounds for other ways of thinking, to be critical, I think it teaches us how to be critical, it teaches us how to deal with the other. That’s what we have to do all the time, especially in the world we live in.

Nerina Finetto: To deal with others and to listen to others. One of your main interests is also translation, right?

Sandra: The ideal situation would be for us to know other languages, but since we do not know other languages, the means for us to listen to the other that we would not otherwise listen to, is by means of translation. But that means that the translator has a very important role, the role of mediator. So the translator has to mediate not only the context, but also he or she has to have an ethical responsibility towards the subject whose language this person is translating. So it has to do with cultural diversity. I think in terms of culture, it’s not only translation from language to language. It’s a political positioning as well. Since we cannot learn all the languages of the world, we do need translation so that others can speak through us, and also translators. So I’m interested in that. So I’m working with the Swiss theory of translation as a means to listen to the other.

Nerina Finetto: What connection does language have with identity?

Sandra: It has everything to do. You are built, you’re constructed through language. The way that you think has to do with the language that you speak. What I’m trying to discuss here is that especially those so-called minority languages, if they’re not preserved, if they’re not translated, if there’s no dialogue with the other language, they’re going to end up simply disappearing, you know? So that’s what I’m talking … the important role of the translator as a mediator. Translators are kind of mediators between two worlds. But this translator is a translator who, especially when you translate from, for example, an indigenous language in Brazil, they need to be preserved, but they also need to be translated, if there’s going to be some kind of understanding between the peoples.

Sandra: But for you translate, you have to show respect for that language. Because that language is part of that, an identity of a subject, but it’s also a cultural identity of a people. So it’s important for you to show respect, to show understanding, towards that people.

Nerina Finetto: What kind of society do you dream of?

Sandra: An equal society. We live, especially in Brazil, it’s a very unequal society. Few people have a lot of money, and a lot of people don’t have enough. And I dream of living in a society that is more just, more equal in all aspects, [inaudible 00:20:16] gender equality is very important that people … I dream of a society in which people have access to education and to health. And I try to work towards that aim, because I do believe, and I think education has a major role, and I think universities play a major role in countries like Brazil, in which not many young adults are able to get into the universities, so our contribution is to try and put as many students as possible into the university, so that it reaches a way of social mobility as well. It’s a means of inclusion; it’s a way to give them access to things that otherwise they would not have access to. So I think it’s a long battle. It’s not easy, but that’s what I dream of. When we’re a just, equal, fair, inclusive society.

Nerina Finetto: With all the challenges that we are facing, do you think that we should keep speaking about feminism?

Sandra: It is essential to continue speaking about feminism. It’s essential to do that. I think it’s the way. Feminism has come a long way. It fought many battles, and I think it’s always going to be essential to talk about that. When you still have a lot of violence against women, when women are not allowed to have the same jobs that men do, or the same salary as men do, when women are forced to follow some kind of dress code, because of impositions of a patriarchal society; when all of these are still happening, it becomes even more relevant to talk about feminism. Because it’s about equal rights, about women doing whatever they want to do, having no limitations in terms of what society tells them what they have to do, what they don’t have to do.

Nerina Finetto: It is still pretty complicated for women to combine children, a family, with a career, even your research. How do you see it?

Sandra: If they want to be mothers, they should be mothers. If they want to have kids, they should have kids. They should do whatever they want to do. We don’t tell men what they should do and what they should not do. Nobody ever told them. Maybe they say “we should not cry, because men don’t cry”, maybe like that, but they’re not … if they want to do something, they should be able to do that as well. So I think women can be whatever they want to do. If they want to be mothers, they should be that, if they don’t want to be, they shouldn’t be forced to be mothers, either.

Sandra: I’m not a mother. I don’t have children, but my whole life people ask me “aren’t you going to have children?” What is behind the question is “oh, poor thing, she’s not a mother, oh poor thing”. I don’t feel like that, so it’s nobody’s business. It’s up to me. Because I’m a woman, it doesn’t mean that I have to have children, okay? But if somebody wants to have children, I think they should have. But of course, having children is, the way our society’s structured, is a burden for women most of the time. Not always but most of the time. Why? Because once you have children, it’s difficult for you to have work, to go out and get a good job, you’re responsible for the house. Some women like it, but most of them don’t like it, they want to go out and to do other things, they don’t want to stay home taking care of kids and taking care of the house, but if they do want, and they are happy with that, I have nothing against it. They are not “less” women because of that.

Sandra: So then that’s why politics, based on women rights, is also important. We have to give the women the economic conditions to do that if they want to be mothers. Then we have, what, day care for women, they should have maternity leave so that they can take care of their children then come back to work, they have to be protected by law, because if it’s up to society, they’re not going to be protected.

Nerina Finetto: What was the most difficult day, and what was the most beautiful one?

Sandra: The most difficult day? Possibly one day when I had to face sexism. When I was disregarded for being a woman, when my ideas were not considered, not because somebody doesn’t like my ideas, but because I am a woman, and because of that, my ideas are not valued as a man’s idea. This was a sad moment.

Sandra: And a happy moment was recently, actually, when a student of mine took a course with me, and sent me a message. I think those moments, I think sometimes it happens … it doesn’t happen every day, but it happens once a year, somebody sends you a message saying that you made a difference in her life or in his life; I think this is a very good day. That your teaching, the way that you work, what you did in your job, was important enough for somebody to feel that “oh, my life is changed. It changed the path that I was going towards”.

Nerina Finetto: Thank you, Sandra, for this conversation.

Sandra: Thank you. Thank you, it’s a pleasure.

Nerina Finetto: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing. And feel free to reach out to me if you have any suggestions. Keep wondering, and see you soon again. Bye and Ciao.

Biography:

Rector of UFMG, placed in the southeast of Brazil, the most industrialized region of the country. UFMG is a free-of-charge public educational institution, in the oldest university in the state of Minas Gerais.

Michel DeGraff

Michel DeGraff
Professor of Linguistics
Biography:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. Founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. Fields of scholarship: inguistic theory, Creole studies and the relationship among linguistics, ideology, education, human rights and development.

Learn more about Michel's work:
en.wikipedia.org/Michel_DeGraff More about: MIT-Haiti Initiative
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The language we speak. Education, innovation and the future of Haiti

How does language use and suppression mirror societal power? What impact has colonialism had on the Haitian Creole language and its role in Haiti’s development? And how can linguists succeed in promoting the use of Creole languages, and elevating their prestige in the eyes of native speakers and their governments?

Michel DeGraff, a Haitian linguist and tenured professor at MIT, is interested in these questions and more, using his work to try and understand how languages like Haitian Creole come into being, and how new varieties emerge due to the contact of diverse populations throughout history.
Through his studies, and his own life growing up in Haiti and being forced to use French during his education, Michel believes that educating young people in their home language is essential for their freedom, well-being, and development.

In this video, he tells us why he set up the MIT-Haiti Initiative after the country’s devastating earthquake and discusses the challenges and successes in his research and teaching about the development and structure of Haitian Creole and other Creole languages, and his bringing Haitian Creole, alongside modern pedagogy and educational technology, into Haiti’s school system.

Michel DeGraff is a professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. He is also a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His fields of scholarship are linguistic theory, Creole studies and the relationship among linguistics, ideology, education, human rights, and development.

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Read the transcript of Michel DeGraff's Video here ◂

Michel: Hello, my name is Michel DeGraff. I was born in Haiti. I’m a professor of linguistics at MIT, which is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And I’m also the founder and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative.

Nerina: Thank you for joining me, Michel. What are your main research interests?

Michel: My main research topic in linguistics has been to try to understand the way that new languages come into being, and how new varieties of languages also emerge. My focus is on the interaction between the contact of populations and the creation of new varieties of language. In a way, my laboratory case is my own native language, Haitian Creole, which emerged in the Caribbean, in Haiti, back in the 17-18th century, out of the contact between varieties of French and various West-African and other African languages. And out this contact, this new variety emerged, which we now call Haitian Creole, or Kreyòl in Haiti.

I also work on the relationship between linguistics and education, especially in the context of my native country, Haiti. I think what we’re doing there can also be used as a model for other countries that speak a local language that, because of historical reasons, has been stigmatised, and excluded from the schools, courts and government, and other domains where knowledge and power are created and transmitted. So, I’m hoping that the work we are doing in linguistics can have a positive impact on education and development in countries like Haiti, but also other countries in the Global South.

Nerina: What makes your first language, Kreyòl, so unique in your opinion?

Michel: From my perspective, what makes Haitian Creole and other Creole languages special is the fact that both their own history and development and the way they have been studied by scholars reflect colonial history. At the same time, because of their very origins in situations of really drastic power inequality, I mean slavery, colonization. now those languages offer a path out of domination and stigmatization, a path into liberation. For me, that is what makes these languages very special: the fact that they come out of a history of colonial struggles. In a way, there are still the theater of struggles. But if you better understand how they emerged, how they are created, but also if you understand their capacity for education, literature and liberation, then they can be used for development in a way that hasn’t happened yet in the case of many Caribbean communities but also other communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, where you have either Creole languages or what we think of as “indigenous” or “local” languages being spoken.

Nerina: The point is that French is the official language of Haiti, but Kreyòl in Haiti is not the language of a minority but it is the language of a majority, right?

Michel: Absolutely. What you’ve just said, Nerina, is absolutely right. In Haiti, Kreyòl is the language… I wouldn’t even say of the majority… but I’d say it’s the language of the totality. In Haiti, everyone speaks Kreyòl. In fact, you can hardly function there in French, except if you were to stay at a hotel or in the capital or in fancy neighbourhoods. Once you go out in the outside country, on the streets, into the busy vibrant neighbourhoods where people are living their lives, you have to use Kreyòl. So, everyone speaks it, even those who are forbidden to speak it! I remember very well when I was in school, I went to a school run by French Catholic brothers, I was forbidden to speak Kreyòl, but yet I learnt it, I speak it. In fact, it’s my soul language, my first language. Although my own parents were very concerned that I should speak French first, but in fact, Kreyòl is my native first language. And it’s the first language for most Haitians.

Nerina: How does this situation that you are not allowed to speak in your native language and that somehow your native language may be seen as not important or not even a real language, how does this affect you?

Michel: I often ask this very question, how does this stigmatization and oppression of a native language, how does it act on a child? I’ve done research on that. So I have many videos of children in classrooms and how their languages are being suppressed. Often when they are being taught to speak French, and if they have a Kreyòl accent or they pronounce the vowels in a Kreyòl way, the teachers look down on them and make fun of them. Then those children come to believe that what they speak at home, what their family speaks is a broken language, is broken French.

So, what it does to them, I think, is to make them believe that they are broken people. It makes them believe that they are inferior, that for them to be fully human they have to speak French. To me, the effect of that entire system, of what I would say is MIS-education, is undermining the entire foundations of our nation. In the school, the children are being taught from day one to mimic. In fact, they learn how to read not as they learn how to think. They learn to parrot, to mimic, because they read sentences by sounding out words without understanding what the words mean.

So, what it does to them? It teaches them that you go to school not to learn, but to become a parrot, to pronounce or mimic French words without understanding them. So, it becomes normal for them that learning means parroting French text without understanding it. I can imagine what in the long term it does to the nation because you have cohorts upon cohorts of children who come out of school without really knowing how to read a text, without any capacity for critical thinking. Even teachers teach by repeating without questioning what they repeat.

Nerina: What is the relationship between language and power?

Michel: Well, I think of the situation of a country where everyone speaks Kreyòl and a small group speaks French and yet French is the language used for power. I think it’s a good example of what psychologists and philosophers and sociologists have studied as the power of ideology, the power of prejudices to even affect those who are being oppressed. What you find is that it has been so long, since the 17th-18th century, that French has been presented as the real language, the superior language. Then, linguists and creolists have also played a role in that, in ranking Creole languages as if they were the world’s simplest languages, as if they were languages that were below in terms of capacity of expression, below languages like French for example.

So, what you find is that even those who speak only Kreyòl are also convinced that in order for them to achieve citizenship, to be real and fully human, they have to speak French. So, Steven Biko said something that is very important: he said that the most powerful tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. The idea here is something that Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Frantz Fanon understood very well: that hegemony works because those people who are being excluded, those people who are being oppressed, they’ve been convinced to believe in their own inferiority, in the validity of why they’re oppressed.

And that’s why the situation in Haiti still holds, because you have parents who are so poor they give all this money to schools, and they don’t care whether the school teaches the kids math or science or literature, all they care about is whether the kids learn French, as if French is the key to knowledge and to humanity. But, no, it’s not. No language can have that kind of function, right? The best tool to develop your humanity and your knowledge is your native language, and with that, you can also learn other languages. So, that’s why I think it’s really important for teachers, scholars, leaders, linguists and anthropologists to really look at this issue very closely—also psychiatrists—to deeply understand how to correct it, because until it’s corrected, you’re going to have a nation that’s totally upside down. As my colleague Yves Dejean says, we have a country that’s upside down because the schools are upside down.

Nerina: Haiti is a beautiful country, has a long history even pre-Columbus, and after the years of the colonization it was a proud moment when Haiti became independent before other countries did at the beginning of the 19th Century. But what do you think or feel went wrong, why does Haiti still struggle?

Michel: I think that Haiti, as you said, is a beautiful country with an amazing history. It was one of the first lands to welcome Columbus when he got lost. Of course, he didn’t discover Haiti. He just got lost there. That’s why he called it the “West Indies.” And the Amerindians welcomed him to their own detriment because very quickly they were decimated. It was the first genocide in the Americas.

We’ve had this glorious history whereby the Europeans brought in the Africans as enslaved labourers, then these Africans managed to outwit the Europeans: they won an amazing independence war, back in the beginning of the 19th century. There’s something that our founding fathers understood. Jean-Jacques Dessalines who was our first president understood that we may have won the war of independence in terms of getting rid of the French, but if we don’t also become independent culturally, intellectually, linguistically, then we won’t really be independent.

He also understood that there was this danger of neocolonialism. So although the French had been expelled, there were descendants of the French in Haiti, there were also free blacks who for selfish interest wanted to just replace the French and not share the wealth with their compatriots, but create a new class of colonizers that could then oppress their own compatriots.

This is what we’ve seen. We’ve seen that in Haiti from the very beginning there was this small class of free blacks, the blacks who were free even during the colony, but also the mulattoes (descendants of French who mated with African women), and they replaced the colonizers, the French colonizers. One thing that they did that was actually quite clever was to enlist the school system as a way to preserve power, because very early on, although there were attempts at the very beginning to say ‘well, we need to use Kreyòl for the school system because given that we are a population that speaks mostly Kreyòl that’s what should be used’, but those proposals from the very beginning were excluded. So, what happened is that the school system very early on was based on French which means that only those who could speak French, and that was already a very small minority, would have access to success.

So, it’s basically a privilege given to the elite that became cemented, and became so entrenched in the society. That’s what we’ve been living with since then. So that’s the tragedy of Haiti, that’s the problem. But now with all that we know about language and education, I think that we can do another revolution, which is to convince the leaders and the population that our native language, our national language, is essential for our freedom.

Nerina: You wanted to use your knowledge to change the situation, right?

Michel: Absolutely. I really believe in something that Karl Marx said, that what is important is not only to understand the world, but it’s also to be able to change it. In linguistics, and in all the humanities—anthropology, history, psychology…—we have all this knowledge about the way the mind and society work. But what good does it do if we have all this knowledge, but we cannot make the kind of changes that will make the world better, and the lives of people better? What good does it do if we build all this knowledge about Creole languages, but at the same time Kreyòl speakers cannot benefit from this knowledge? Sometimes it’s even worse, Kreyòl speakers sometimes suffer because of the kind of statements and theories that linguists have been producing for centuries about Creole languages, classifying them as if they were the world’s simplest languages. This is the very reason why certain scholars and educators prefer to use French instead of Kreyòl, because why use a language that’s ‘simplest’ when you can use a more ‘sophisticated’ language, meaning French. You see…

So this is one area where the knowledge being produced by linguists is actually undermining the livelihood and the future of the very speakers of these languages that we study. At least, we have to understand the impact of these kinds of ‘knowledge’ and question the basis for them. Because if we have any doubt whether our knowledge is solid, then we should really think of what are we doing in the real world with this knowledge? How can we make it better?

Nerina: You are the founder and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. When and how did it start?

Michel: I like to think of it as having its roots from my childhood because as a child I was never allowed to use my native language in the school system as a means of knowledge. I was prevented from using it. When I was a computer scientist, my first job as a professional computer scientist was to write programmes for linguists who were trying to help computers to understand language, to have computers able to read, say, the New York Times and be able to pronounce text for people who cannot read, for example. As I was doing this work, I couldn’t help but think about my own language, Kreyòl, and I realised that if I were to write the same programme for Kreyòl it would also work maybe even better because in Haitian Creole we have a very transparent and logical spelling system which is a lot better than what you have both for English and French. It’s a very logical, transparent spelling where every sound is always written with the same letter. It’s very rigorous and logical, which would make it much easier for a programme to be able to read Haitian Creole as compared to French or English.

From that moment onwards, I was always thinking about the use or misuse of Haitian Creole, our national language, in the school system in Haiti.

Now, to make a long story short, in my work as a linguist I always kept in touch with colleagues in Haiti. The one colleague that really influenced me a lot, his name is Professor Yves Dejean, who used to run this state office to promote Kreyòl in the 90s. So, Yves Dejean invited in the mid-90s to do a seminar at the Kreyòl Language Bureau in Haiti, and there I met other linguists who, like me and Yves Dejean, understood the importance of promoting Kreyòl as the main language of education. So, we did some work together, training young linguists to understand the structure of Haitian Creole and to also realise that it has the full complex structure that makes it capable of expressing science, mathematics, philosophy… so there is no reason to exclude it from the school system.

So, when the earthquake happened in 2010, I was on this phone call with Yves Dejean, and all of a sudden, we got cut off! Ten minutes after, I realised that there was this major earthquake in Haiti. So, of course, I was very worried! Thank God, he was safe, his house was safe.

But then in the aftermath of the earthquake, me and my colleagues at MIT were discussing the best way that we could help. We realized that the best way was not to send money or bottles of water. The best way to help was to try and change the school system from the inside. In fact, Yves Dejean wrote a manifesto soon after the earthquake, where he says that the best way to rebuild Haiti is not with cement or with infrastructure, but it’s to rebuild Haiti from within, from the soul, to change the attitudes of the leaders of the society towards their own native culture, and their own native language. If we can do that, then we can really rebuild a Haiti that will be better for all.

So that moment after the earthquake and talking to Yves Dejean, I realised that what I could do at MIT is to try and create a team of colleagues, because at MIT we have very good scientists, educators, mathematicians, and engineers. Then we could see how we could bring some of our know-how and share it with Haiti, at the same time also expand our own humanity and expertise at MIT. So, it would be a two-way relationship where MIT would be sharing with Haiti, but at the same time, Haiti, with its own rich history and expertise and human capital, could share with us. So basically, both MIT and Haiti would expand and become better in the process. It would be an opportunity for both MIT and Haiti to try to create a new kind of university that might become a model, not just for Haiti, but for the entire world.

Nerina: What are the main pillars of this programme?

Michel: Our goal in the MIT-Haiti Initiative is to try to share with Haiti the best know-how at MIT when it comes to teaching and learning, because MIT is one of the best universities in the world. I think we’ve become very good at developing methods and tools and resources for students to learn in a very creative fashion. This notion of creativity is at the core of the initiative, because when I was growing up in Haiti I remember very well that, in order to succeed as a shining student, it was a matter of just memorising lessons, and being able to recite them by heart. If there is one feature that characterises the Haitian school system, it is rote learning. It starts from kindergarten and first grade, where children are being taught to read text they don’t understand. All that matters in ‘reading’ is to be able to sound out and repeat words without understanding them in any deep way. So, this is what my colleagues and I felt, from my own experience as a student, needed to be changed in order for the country to use the full capacity of its citizens who are very creative. If you look at Haitian art and at children on the farms in the rural country, those children are very creative, and yet they go to school, and their creativity is shut off and not exploited. So, the goal then was to create a school system, from kindergarten to university, where you can learn in a very creative way, you can learn in an active fashion.

The main aspect of the MIT-Haiti Initiative is to introduce methods and tools for active, creative, interactive learning. To do that, we need one indispensable condition which is that the students have to be able to use the language they are most fluent in because they cannot be creative learners if they have to use a language that they are not comfortable in. So that’s the second piece of the initiative.

The third piece is something that MIT is very good at, which is the use of software and tools that trigger and promote this kind of interaction.

So that’s basically the MIT initiative.

Nerina: What is the relationship between language and personality?

Michel: I think in Haiti the relationship between language and personality is such a clear one. For example, if you go to Haiti, you will be pressed to find a typical Haitian giving any joke in French. If you are in a courtyard or on the playground, all the jokes and stories and songs happen in Kreyòl. And those in that context who switch to French, they switch to French to be formal. When you go and court a girl, in order to impress her, you have to speak French, so she thinks that you are smart and well educated and of a good social class. But then once you get comfortable with the girl, you would switch back to Kreyòl. Once I was on the phone talking to my girlfriend, I was maybe 11 or 12, and we were talking in Kreyòl, and the mom heard us speak Kreyòl, got offended, and picked up the phone and said ‘Sir, please speak French to my daughter! You are disrespecting her by speaking Kreyòl’. I could speak French, but I was so frozen by this command that I had to hang up the phone. This shows you how, in Haiti, that link between language and personality is so clear because you cannot be yourself in French. For most Haitians, to be true to yourself is to speak Kreyòl.

Nerina: What motivates you, Michel?

Michel: I think it’s my own history in many ways. But also when I go to Haiti and I see those children and speak to them, I can feel and hear their intelligence and creativity and desire to succeed and I can feel that they have the capacity to succeed. Then, to look at them in the school and they start failing, but it’s not because they are stupid. They start failing because the school system is set against them. That is what motivates me.

Nerina: Do you have a dream?

Michel: My dream, really, is to see the Haitian leadership own that project because, so far, the project has been pushed on the MIT side, and by a growing number of Haitian teachers and faculty at the level of high school, elementary school, and university. But, for that project to have fruit in the long term, at some point it has to be owned by the Haitian society in total—meaning the government, civil society, the parliamentary system….

So my dream is that at some point, hopefully soon in the future, there will be political leaders in parliament and in the executive , alongside the society and all the NGOs, that will realise that for the country, or any project, to succeed, there has to be models like the one we are promoting where the national language is at the core of the project, but also that it be participatory—that everyone can participate without any barrier of language or technology. Of course, I would hope that a stronger alliance between MIT-Haiti and the powers that be both in Haiti and beyond.

And eventually the bigger dream is to have this initiative become a model for other communities—in Jamaica, Curacao, Seychelles, Mauritius, Latin America, Africa, and all over. Did you know that 40% of students are still being taught in a foreign language? That’s a huge number. And also what is really crucial is that there is a direct correlation between those countries that do not use their national language and the countries that are impoverished. So, the most impoverished countries are also those that do not make use of their local languages. So, the bigger dream is that this model will be applied globally, that in each community with a local language, the school system will enlist that local language in the teaching. On paper this is what UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, USAID… that’s also what they believe in. Obviously, there is some blockage against this. But hopefully, in my big dream, those blockages will disappear.

Nerina: Is there a question that nobody ever asks you but you wish somebody would?

Michel: One question that I would like to be asked is: What would I have loved to do if I were not doing linguistics? What other profession would I have liked to have had!

Nerina: And what would you have become?

Michel: I have asked myself that question many times. And I answer it when I go to dance class! I have a dear friend who is an Afro-Haitian dance teacher, and I’m part of his company’s board as an advisor, and I often like to go to his dance performances. Whenever I see beautiful dance performances, I wish that I grew up in a country where boys could have taken dance lessons and become dancers. When I dance it makes me feel really good! So, sometimes I wonder if I would have enjoyed being a professional dancer, would I have enjoyed dancing maybe ballet or Afro-Haitian dance or the kind of dances that the Alvin Ailey dance company performs because they are so beautiful. It’s like a different language, but a beautiful language that people can speak even though they come from different backgrounds. So, in Jean Appolon’s dance classes, when you go there on Saturdays, you see people from all walks of life, of all ethnicities and sizes and ages, and all together they dance beautifully, and when in the class everybody feels so good and so happy! You see this community they built through dancing, and even though people don’t speak to each other that much. But they dance together, they have the drums going through their souls together, it creates that kind of coziness and love and bond that I rarely experience elsewhere. So that’s what I think I would have liked to become maybe, a dancer.

Nerina: My last question, what is life about?

Michel: Well, it’s like what I tell my little boy, that life is trying to make a change to make the world better. It could be very small, it could be something you do within yourself or in your family or neighbourhood. But in your life, if you can make that small change that will make someone’s life better, then it makes life worth living. Life is also about love: without love, life wouldn’t be worth living. That’s what I think life is about: to make some change that will make someone’s life better, and to fall in love and enjoy love and love other people and be loved by other people. That makes life worth it!

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Michel: Thank you Nerina, that was a nice interview!

Nerina: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing. If you have any suggestions please feel free to reach out to me. See you soon, and keep wondering. Bye, ciao.

Biography:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. Founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. Fields of scholarship: inguistic theory, Creole studies and the relationship among linguistics, ideology, education, human rights and development.

Learn more about Michel's work:
en.wikipedia.org/Michel_DeGraff More about: MIT-Haiti Initiative
Connect with Michel:
twitter.com/MichelDeGraff facebook.com/michel.degraff linkedin.com/michel-degraff-a

Paul Shrivastava

Paul Shrivastava
Chief Sustainability Officer
Biography:

The Pennsylvania State University. Director at the Sustainability Institute. Professor in Management and Organization, Smeal College of Business.

Learn more about Paul's work:
wikipedia.org/Paul_Shrivastava sustainability.edu/dr-paul-shrivastava
Sustainable management – sustainable life

How do we create a more sustainable world? Why should we care? And what parts do management practices have to play, in helping us to create a more stable equilibrium between the human and the natural worlds?

These are some of the questions that Dr Paul Shrivastava, an academic entrepreneur and the Chief Sustainability Officer at Penn State University, is seeking to answer with his research.

Paul advocates for a transdisciplinary approach to the world’s problems, in which we don’t just take an in-depth view of one particular subject, but instead integrate and synthesise our collective understandings, and work holistically to create meaningful change.

Watch our interview to discover the ways in which a new style of management can help lead us closer to an open, creative, and imaginative new world.

Watch the trailer:
Watch another trailer:
Watch the trailer with Kreyol subtitles:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Paul Shrivastava's Video here ◂

Nerina: Hi Paul, nice to have you here. Would you please introduce yourself?

Paul: Hello, I am Paul Shrivastava. I am the Chief Sustainability Officer of Penn State University, before that I was the Executive Director of Future Earth.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about sustainability?

Paul: So I’m passionate about sustainability for both some intellectual reasons and for some very personal, practical reasons. So let me talk about the practical reasons first. I have two children they are both grown-up, I have other friends and relatives and neighbors and communities that I am going to leave behind when I’m gone and I would like to be able to say that my life contributed in some positive way to longing the sustainability of the earth. I think a lot of the things that we’re doing in our lives are wrongheaded, they are going in the wrong direction. So I see the need for people who can make some corrective action and I see my work towards that.

On the intellectual side I think you have come to a point in human history where the relationship of humans to nature is in the process of reversal. So for a million years we lived with natural cycles of working in a natural way and defining the world and we humans were sort of part of those natural cycles. Whether it was the water cycle or the carbon cycle or the nitrogen cycle or phosphate cycle nature had its own logic and we were part of that logic.

Since the 1950s there have been such a great expansion of human population and of the social impacts on earth that we are now disturbing the natural cycle, we have become the dominant force of nature and nature is getting broken in a lot of its ecosystems. So it is our intellectual responsibility, as academics it’s our professional responsibility to understand this reversal and try to create a better balance between humans and nature. So I feel my work is trying to understand nature and human relationships in a broad canvas, in a global scale, on a planetary scale and try to develop solutions that will make us more sustainable.

Nerina: You have also worked a lot on management and leadership. What in your opinion is sustainable management?

Paul: So yes, I’ve been a Professor of management in business schools and in schools of arts and science and I see management as a generic function of society. You and I do a lot of management in our own lives: we manage our children, we manage our kitchen, we manage our transportation, we manage our social life etc.

In the world today corporations are the major engine for producing wealth but they are also a major engine for destroying the natural systems. So management is the function in my view it’s not about maximizing profits, it’s not only about creating wealth, it is about managing human-nature relationships in a balanced way so that we can create a system of producing well-being for all of humanity and be able to do it in the long time frame not just for our lifetime. Certainly, not only for this quarter or this year that many corporations focus on but for the next generation and multiple generations afterwards.

So this kind of a planetary management of all the resources of the planet to serve the interests of 10 billion people that will be on earth by 2050 that’s the management that I want to advocate, I want to study and I want to teach.

Nerina: What do we need to implement this?

Paul: So there are a number of things that managers need: they need certain competencies, they need a certain kind of awareness and they need a certain set of values. So in terms of competencies we in the last 50 years have found out a lot of things about how corporations and their activities impact everything around them from the physical landscape and nature to communities and social landscapes. So that’s one set of competencies that managers need to develop. They could be in the form of developing mechanical technological efficiencies, energy conservation and resource conservation, etc. or they could be in the form of ecological efficiencies so that they can do more things with natural products and conserve natural resources or they can be in the form of social efficiencies so that we create communities and society that are more ecologically sensible and economically viable. So that’s at the level of competencies.

Those competencies are based on awareness. So managers need to be aware of the basic principles of how ecosystems operate. They cannot just be economists, they cannot just be technologists, and they need to understand how economy and technology are embedded in the larger natural systems and what technology and economic systems do to the natural system. That relationship and the awareness of it require them to read more broadly, to be multidisciplinary not just economists. So that’s the level of awareness.

Then at the level of values managers need to understand that money is not the only measure of performance, that finances and dollars is not what their own organization performance will be measured by, that we need to value other things in life. We have a world in which that a lot of people living without adequate food. There are 2 billion people who are living under two dollars a day and we need a kind of system in which the whole world can live a meaningful life, and that requires us to valorize and put more value on society, on culture, on arts, on equality and things like that. So they need some kind of reframing of their own values and this is not something that they have to come to it by themselves voluntarily, they have to understand the need for this kind of a broad prosperity and well-being for all and by all I don’t mean just people who might be poor in poor countries. I also mean the natural ecosystems and animals and plants and creating a world in which there is a kind of balance between humans and nature.

Nerina: You often use the word passion when talking about management. How are they related?

Paul: Part about this field of management with relatively a young field of study it originated in the 1920s or so with the idea of technological efficiency and rationality at the heart of it. The factories were being built and they wanted to make it very productive. So the whole field of management studies has focused mostly on sort of scientific rationality, bringing scientific rationality to the industrial workplace to me.

To me life is much broader than just rationality. Being a full human also means being an artist, being a family person, being a father, being a citizen and that’s not all captured within this narrow view of technological rationality. So I wanted to see what was the other side and the other side is emotion and science and rational thinking sort of separates itself from emotional side of things.

So to me, bringing the emotional and the passion into management is a way of expanding the function of management and I think it creates a more holistic way of managing and to the extent that sustainability is about managing holistically across the planet, across all human beings and all other species. I think this kind of an expanded view of management which includes passion and emotion into it is a very helpful thing. So I see this as the next generation of management studies which will allow a deeper emotional engagement and understanding of the phenomenon that we are interested in and helping shape that.

Nerina: What does your job as a Chief Sustainability Officer entail?

Paul: So in my current position my mandate is to incorporate sustainability into all the research programs and educational teaching programs and student life programs and employee programs off the 23 campuses of the University. So it’s like using sustainability as a spice to sprinkle it all around everything that the University does because my University as part of its strategic plan has stewarding of our natural resources as one of the three key pillars. So they have created this new position and my job is to add sustainability across the board.

Nerina: You advocate a lot for a more interdisciplinary approach to reach a more sustainable world: science, humanities and art working together. Could you tell me more about this?

Paul: Yes. So interdisciplinarity is a view that has been around for the last 50 years in an emerging science domain that has broken itself into literally more than 8000 different disciplines. So we have created these bubbles, these isolated conversations that go deep but they’re very small and very narrow. In the world that we are living in we have to think broadly and at a planetary scale, we have to look at the big picture. It’s also important to look at the individual silos and look deep but if everybody just looks deep and nobody is integrating and synthesizing and taking the big picture view then that doesn’t help us. It gets us to optimize at a sub or even sub subcomponent level while ignoring what is going on at the systemic level.

So the idea of interdisciplinarity and I don’t like the term interdisciplinarity I will talk about more about trans disciplinary in a second because that captures more my feelings of how this integration should take place. So it’s not just that biochemistry has to talk to neurochemistry, has to talk to physical chemistry, that is sort of within disciplines but we need to step out of the disciplines altogether because the real problems of the world are cannot be discovered at the bottom of the silo of disciplines.

The real problems with the world are happening in the world. So, we have to take the problem from outside of the disciplines and then bring the disciplines whichever ones are needed to address to solve the problem; that to me the meaning of transdisciplinarity. Where you pick the problem not from a disciplinary gap in knowledge but from the real world, you bring the right disciplines to interact with that problem, you engage stakeholders, communities, people who are affected by the problem to co-design and co-create knowledge that will solve the problem.

The real measure of how good your research is is how well you solve the problem. It’s not about how many papers you write. All the papers are important and you can write papers and books you can stop over there that is not the need of the hour. The need of the hour is solving real problems in real time because we have 20 to 30 years after which there are going to be some really catastrophic changes that are going to kill a lot of people. So, on the one hand we predict that there might be 10 billion people on earth but there are also scenarios that claim that if we don’t change now we might end up with 2 billion people. There will actually be a drastic reduction in population and if we want to avoid that we have this 20 or 30 year period in which we have to act and we have to create solutions.

So I say that yes you can write and think about it in academic silos but you also need to be able to make changes to the real problems. So bring your research to policy makers, bring your research to activists and the public, to the society at large. We want to create these interfaces between science and society, between science and policymaking.

Nerina: What is to biggest problem or challenge we are facing?

Paul: So there are many big challenges. I think the biggest challenge is sort of a self-imposed constraint on imagination. We are because in some ways creatures of habit, we are accustomed to doing things a certain way and we feel that the artificial barriers that are imposed by institutions or by society or by culture that we have to live within them. We need to find internal personal courage to break out of those barriers and do things that we are passionate about that I think is going to lead to solutions that are different, than are more creative, more imaginative and will actually produce solutions.

So the word is structured in a certain way, but God or no other creature told us to do it this way. We collectively decided we are going to be in the University, we are going to teach courses, we are going to do it this way but that’s not the only way to do it. So we have to be really imaginative and creative and find our own pathway into solving the problems that we perceive in our communities, on the ground, in society broadly rather than limit ourselves to the definitions that are handed down to us either by bosses or rules or disciplines.

So I’m not advocating anarchy here. I’m advocating an open, creative, imaginative engagement with the world to solve problems that are very real now and these problems are going to affect… they are already affecting our lives, but they’re definitely going to completely change the lives of our children and our grandchildren.

Nerina: If you change one thing tomorrow and money would not play a role and time wouldn’t matter what would you like to change?

Paul: So I wouldn’t say money plays no role, of course money plays a role and time plays a role, but I have great faith in human ingenuity, I have great faith in the human spirit. I think people need to look at themselves and their mode of living and engaging life and they need to find ways of enlivening. Everything they do, every ordinary thing they do has to be enlivened and made more than it is and it is possible to do this, it is possible to do it in your dining room, it is possible for us to do it in this interview. We can animate ourselves, we can jump up and down, we can create more life right now and we can do it everywhere that we exist. So we need to rethink of how we are going to live so that life is expanded in relationship to others, in relationship to nature, in relationship to our family, to our neighbors, and to our community.

Nerina: Who are the people who influenced you the most?

Paul: Yeah. So we are all sort of an accumulation of our many, many years and I am on the wrong side of 60s now so I’ve had a long time to form myself, and sometimes I even forget what part of me was formed as a child. But I did grow up in household led by a woman, a very strong woman my mother and I think I grasped a lot of things out of the way she ran the family. She was a working person, she was a gynecologist, a doctor in a small town in India which didn’t have any other female doctors, so by the time she retired she was almost like an icon and a big influence on the values that I took away, on the practical need to care. Because she was a doctor and caring for patients this idea of care, the value of care was deeply ingrained. It also gave me the value for education and knowledge because she was trained in the sciences and for her it was very important that her children and anybody that she could influence in the family go to school and college and do all the things that science has to provide.

So I think that the fundamental shaping as a child had happened but I think I also learned equally after reaching my own age of reason and becoming a person on my own and again I have to say a big influence on this has been my wife of 37 years. We have kind of grown together with the mutual understanding and she has shaped a lot of things and I always rely on her. She’s like my “strategic advisor” on times when there are challenges and especially around question of values and meaning. What is that is meaningful to do in life you know.

So I take a lot of guidance from her and then the third big influence is actually my children. So I hear from them. They sometimes ridicule me, they sometimes flatter me, they sometimes make fun of me and sometimes they’re loving to me and I kind of see in them a life that I haven’t passed over, but I’m seeing them and it becomes a form of renewal for me. So I always look forward to meeting them and learning what’s going on in their life, what is important to them, what is not important to them and I’m always surprised that they are thinking so differently from when I was 25 or 28 years old what I was aspiring to. So they have kind of opened up the windows to the next generations for me. So those are the main influencers on my life and they all come from very close and within my family.

And of course then I learned from the books and I like to read a lot and try to gain information from conversations with people and the community around me.

Nerina: What keeps you going?

Paul: I think I’m an optimist at heart. I think that the place that we are now is a place of turmoil and change both at the global society and also in terms of local issues. I feel that there are better answers that can be found and I am eager to be part of that imaginative, creative space and with that we can find better answers.

I’m dissatisfied with the way things are in the world and the way things are in my own community and in my country, which currently is the United States. They are deep sources of dissatisfaction and I think that is a better place and I think that there are solutions. So I’m very eager to contribute those solutions and improve those things that keep me going.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Paul: So what do I dream of? This is a really good question. I think we all live our dreams and we all knowingly or unknowingly interpret dreams on a day-to-day basis. The life that I dream off is one of balance; balance between competing forces. I have experienced life in the form of competition and conflicts and I have always strived for finding the common ground and finding the place where we can bring some equilibrium to the competing forces that evolve us into the next phase.

So my dream for life is that we as a whole global planetary society will be able to achieve balance. A balance amongst us as human beings so we don’t fight with each other, bring peace. A balance with nature with whom we are on a war and we are destroying nature and nature can come and destroy us. It does so regularly in the form of floods and storms and so on. So finding a way of balancing with nature and finding a way of balancing within our communities in our local spaces so that we can create well-being and prosperity in the long run.

Nerina: What makes you happy?

Paul: My wife and I have been dancing Argentine tango for last 15 years and we see that as an embodiment of the passion we have for each other, but the passion we have for the community in which we dance because Argentine tango is a social community dance. You dance with everybody in the community, you become part of the community and you learn together and you become friends and so it embodies many parts of this connectivity. Everything from the body – dancing in between two bodies, the human body and the floor and the environment, the music, the people and the whole sense of community. So to me it’s a very good physical manifestation of the passion that I have for life in general.

Nerina: Difficult question but what is life about?

Paul: What is life about? Yeah, that is sort of a deep question. So to me life is about… It’s a kind of relational thing. It is about everything and it is about the quality of the relationship to everything. So to me life is manifested in ordinary, everyday events and activities and we can make that life bigger by being mindful, by being meaningful, by adding ourselves our enthusiasm, our spirit and connecting it to others, connecting it to nature. So expanding that connectivity expands life.

So instead of thinking about what his life I think about what will enliven. So I try to make it into an activity that will actually expand life rather than thinking about it as a static thing. I like to think about it as a dynamic moving thing that I can engage with and increase so that I can have this conversation with you and if this can be an enlivened conversation it will leave us both at a higher level of understanding and also well-being and joy. So creating the joy and well-being and expansion of life I’m calling that enlivenment is what life is all about.

Nerina: Thank you Paul for this conversation.

Paul: Thank you very much.

Nerina: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening and feel free to reach out to me if you have any comments. Keep wondering and see you next time again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

The Pennsylvania State University. Director at the Sustainability Institute. Professor in Management and Organization, Smeal College of Business.

Learn more about Paul's work:
wikipedia.org/Paul_Shrivastava sustainability.edu/dr-paul-shrivastava

Willa Huston

Willa Huston
Molecular microbiologist
Biography:

Senior lecturer, School of Life Sciences. Associate Member, ithree – Institute of Infection, Immunity and Innovation, University of Technology, Sidney

Learn more about Willa's work:
http://www.uts.edu.au/staff www.equalfutures.uts.edu.au
Connect with Willa:
www.linkedin.com/willa-huston twitter.com/willaonthego
What do you know about Chlamydia?

So, you think you know about Chlamydia? There is a lot of stigma surrounding Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), and the secrecy around the subject often prevents people from getting tested and seeking help. But how much do we actually know about Chlamydia? And how can better education, more research, and a more equal society help us to tackle the infection?

Willa Hutson, a Senior Lecturer and Research Group Leader at the University of Technology in Sydney, spoke to Traces.Dreams about her research on Chlamydia and its link to female infertility. As a researcher, Willa is preoccupied with discovering why some women become infertile while others don’t, as well as engaging with the reasons why more people in marginalised communities are affected by the infection, and the ways in which outreach work and equality can help prevent the spread.

For her, removing the stigma around STIs is a vital part of helping patients to seek and access treatment, which is why she focuses on both the scientific and social avenues that will help prevent infection. Watch the video to find out more, and join in the conversation.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Willa Huston's Video here ◂

Willa: Hi, I am Willa Huston. I am a Senior Lecturer and Research Group Leader at the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia.

Nerina: What is your research focus?

Willa: My research is looking at chlamydia and other infectious diseases and how they lead to infertility in women. So we’re really interested in trying to understand what happens in those women that develop infertility and what we could be better to either prevents or treat the chlamydia at that time so they don’t go on to progress to developing infertility. So we look at treatment and better diagnosis.

Nerina: What is actually chlamydia?

Willa: Chlamydia is a unique, little bacterium. So it’s a microscopic organism and we all know about microbes now, they’re everywhere around us and we hear about them being part of our body. Chlamydia is a bit more special because chlamydia actually lives inside our own cells. So it’s a bacteria but it’s like a virus in that it takes over our own cells, and the only place that the chlamydia that infects human lives is in humans.

Nerina: If I look up what Wikipedia says for example, chlamydia is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Chlamydia and most people while infected have no symptoms. The infection can spread to the upper genital tract in women causing pelvic inflammatory disease which may result in future infertility or ectopic pregnancy.

Willa: This is our subculture facility here at UTS. This is where we grow chlamydia and it’s a fully contained room and we use human cells. Here is an incubator and I will show you some cells in flasks where we work on our chlamydia subculture experiments. In here you can see a whole lot of flasks growing chlamydia. At the moment the lab is pretty busy working on some new molecules that might be good new antibiotics against chlamydia and we’re working on some new models of human disease including some patient samples that we’re working on from women with different symptoms of the disease. So it’s an exciting time here in Australia for chlamydia research.

Nerina: Not everyone who is infected react in the same way and gets complications. Why?

Willa: It’s really interesting. So it’s transmitted sexually throughout the population. So lots of people know about it as a sexually transmitted infection and in fact our research is trying to understand how it is that in some women there’s very severe pathology that leads to infertility develops and so we look at those women. We look at the organism in lab models and we think that what happens is a combination of what’s happening in the woman’s body at the time she gets the infection and what are the stages of her cycle and the other organisms there. All of that comes together so that in some unlucky women they go on to develop infertility but that’s about as much as we know at the moment.

Unfortunately, we need to know a lot more. But one of the things we’re trying to do is understand the form of the organism during that infertility development and try to develop better drug treatments to treat that form. And so that’s a high priority for us; it’s treatment early to prevent the infertility developing.

Nerina: How many women are affected by infertility?

Willa: That it’s very hard to pin a number on it. Some studies say as high as 20%. I don’t think it’s that high but it’s certainly the more infections there is severe increase in risk. I think the risk is about every about 1 to 5% of infections will develop infertility at least in one tube. But given that… So for example in Australia there is about 80,000 infections, slightly over half of those are in women and if you think even if it’s only 1% annually that still a significant numbers each year of women who will have tubal infertility that they will not know about.

Nerina: How about men?

Willa: There’s lots of evidence that they also get infertility or at least reduced fertility from the infections, no doubt. We think similar scarring occurs up in the fine tubes in the male reproductive tract and they are pretty good transmitters. So they are often asymptomatic, they’re less likely to seek treatment and testing and they’re very good at transmitting the infection because they often have a good infectious burden. So then because of the nature of sex I guess they’re good transmitters. So they have a big role to play A, they can be compromised in their own infertility but B as key people in the networks that we need to kind of get in for testing and treatment who are not as engaged in the healthcare it’s very important that we look at men.

Nerina: What do we know about chlamydia and what do we not know about it?

Willa: So we know that it’s an ancient organism. There is evidence of trachoma the eye infecting version in hieroglyphics, so from ancient Egypt but we even know from genome sequencing analysis that it’s a very ancient organism. So it’s been around as long as we have. So we know therefore that it’s a very clever at living inside us. It’s almost evolved with us in some ways, and so we do know that is really clever and that it’s a really well adapted to live inside our cells.

What we don’t know is why that goes wrong in some women. So logically if you only live in humans you don’t want to stop them having sex and transmitting on the organism and so one hypothesis is that it actually is advantageous for some proportion of women to be infertile or lower fertility with chlamydia because then than they might have more sex in an evolutionary history and the organism could be transmitted. As long as it’s not causing very many symptoms which often it doesn’t cause many symptoms then the women are not prevented from having sexual contacts but they’re prevented from having babies. So they are more likely to have more sex.

So maybe it’s just evolved this feature to increase its spread in the population, but we actually don’t know if that’s what’s happening or it’s something about the women themselves, their particular type of immune response, perhaps their genetic makeup. Maybe those of the factors that they’ve got the unlucky lottery that when they get the chlamydia infection, they’re the ones that are going to develop the infertility. So that’s one of the unknowns that is a big priority. Is that kind of personalized or precision medicine and chlamydia is it really about that.

Nerina: Are there differences between countries in their infection rates?

Willa: Absolutely, it’s a very high burden in the Pacific Rim. So very poor countries like Samoa have very high burden of chlamydia, mostly because there’s very little health intervention and very little treatment and testing. In most developed or well-to-do countries like in Europe or Australia or the US the baseline prevalence, so the average number people who might have it in reproductively aged individuals is about 4 to 6%. But even in those countries marginalized people or people who have low socioeconomic conditions have a much high percent. So it’s a disease of marginalized populations.

For example, in Australia you may be aware that we have the first people, indigenous people of Australia. They are very marginalized and they very socioeconomically disadvantaged, and in young people – young indigenous people chlamydia can be as high as 24%. So that’s really, really high and so we really worry about the burden of infertility and other sequelae from chlamydia like ectopic pregnancy in those young indigenous people.

It’s worth mentioning that the other form of chlamydia that infects our eyes and can lead to blindness. There’s about 5 million people worldwide who are blind from Chlamydia trachoma and a gain to our national shame. The indigenous people of Australia are one of the few peoples in a developed country where we still have trachoma.

Nerina: How are the chlamydia infections of the eyes and of the genitals related?

Willa: They are very related. So they’re quite similar, there are just a few subtle differences between the eye and the genital infecting chlamydia. In Australia in fact, it may be that those eye infecting strains may have come from genital strains that came in with Caucasian people, when Caucasian people came to the Australia continent just over 200 years ago.

Nerina: And chlamydia does not affect only humans but also animals with severe consequences, right?

Willa: This is a really… it’s an important topic for animals worldwide but it’s a very dear topic to Australians because our national icon, the koala is suffering severely from chlamydia. The chlamydia that infects the koala is called Chlamydia pecorum, it’s a different species from the chlamydia that infects humans but the disease presents almost identically. So they get ocular infections all around the eye that can lead to blindness, very severe blindness. They get your urinal genital infections in their urinary and genital tracts, which can lead to incontinence, which we call wet bottom and it’s really debilitating. They’re in a lot of pain, their whole bottom rump is covered in sort of wee basically that isn’t evacuating properly and that’s from scarring. That also scars all through their reproductive tract.

That scarring in their eyes and in their reproductive tract looks exactly like what happens in humans. So it’s a different chlamydia but present in the animals in the same way and it’s a really sad story. In the koala it’s very hard to treat because we can’t give them oral antibiotics very often for koalas. Most the time we can’t because they have a special complex gut composition that they really need because they eat gum leaves.

So part of our research is actually translated from a human into the koala because we need to find new ways to treat chlamydia in the koala. At the moment it’s one of the major threats to the koala. Habitat loss is the major threat undoubtedly and that’s a real problem, but as soon as we do more habitat loss and the koala populations get more stressed the disease increases. So it’s a disease like our marginalized people, chlamydia in the koalas is associated with stresses and then we already put them under stress from removing more trees or whatever we do and then the chlamydia presents and then they lose fertility. So the koalas are a threatened species right now so it’s not on the extinction list but it is severely threatened and vulnerable in some states and threatened in others. So yeah.

Nerina: But chlamydia in men and women is treatable, correct?

Willa: So in humans we can treat chlamydia and it’s very simple. It’s a simple antibiotic regimen and it’s mostly effective if the people would stick to the antibiotics and take them. The problem is that because it’s often a quiet infection, so it’s often asymptomatic people might not seek treatment and so the problem is that they often don’t get this treatment and then the symptoms develop or the infertility develops, sometimes without them being aware.

So treatment is easy, testing is easy. We can do a PCR from a urine sample or swab. But it’s getting the right people into the clinic and getting them tested and treated in time is the problem.

Nerina: What new information have you learned during your research?

Willa: I knew very little when I started just over about 10 to 12 years ago now. I thought chlamydia was fascinating in a very abstract way and I’ve always loved microbes but chlamydia was kind of interesting. Now I guess I’ve learnt that even though it’s on face value a very simple microbe compared to most of the other microbes it’s an amazingly versatile and niche adapted organism that we really only just beginning to understand.

I think that it’s much more versatile and adaptive than we thought and I think that we are also starting to understand that perhaps it lives in more spots than just the urogenital tract. Perhaps it lives in the gastrointestinal tract. Perhaps it survives longer than we think after treatment. There’s a lot of things that we used to think were simple but they’re not and I think that’s the most exciting thing. Life is always more complex than we think it is.

Nerina: What do you think we need the most: better prevention, treatment or information?

Willa: I love the list that you outlined. So the challenges for the chlamydia field are almost all three of those. Prevention is critical. Most STIs are best controlled with prevention and the best prevention would be a vaccine. Chlamydia is very hard to make a vaccine against but I have no doubt that will happen eventually. Treatment is absolutely a critical aspect of chlamydia control and I think we could do that better, and that’s part of our research is improving the options for treatment. But information really matters. There’s a real stigma around STIs. In lots of populations there’s a real stigma around infertility that might be because you had an STI years ago.

So I think changing our culture around acceptability of sexually transmitted infection but just sexual behavior in general and just more acceptability, more ease of communication. So that it is not so much of a stigma for those women who are infertile and worried that maybe that’s why and they can’t even talk about that, talk about it. So I think all three yeah: prevention, treatment but also change that stigma and open the conversation. Maybe more people will get tested and treated as well.

Nerina: How difficult is it to speak about STI, sexually-transmitted infections?

Willa: There’s been lots of work in many countries around for women, for example, when they come in for the cervical screening to try and get a routine sexual health workup without a stigma. Just you’re already here let’s do that but that’s often in every two years and now that will decrease with the change in cervical screening to PCR.

There’ve been lots of conversations around try to target risk groups to have a broader conversation around healthy sexual behavior and acceptability. But most GPs find it really challenging to have that conversation or they’re just too busy. So there’s lots of activities around the clinic nurse perhaps around targeted screening and outreach in jails, high schools, nightclubs to try and reach the most vulnerable people and screen them more regularly so lots of go to them.

There was a study done by researchers in Australia about postal pee and post. Where they used a special material to dry the pee so they could post it and do a PCR test and then post them the antibiotics later. So there are lots of, lots of research being done in acceptability of seeking, testing and treatment, but I think we’ve got a long way to go.

Having said that, when we talked to our university students about our research and we ran a free sexual health clinic with the doctors, not with our researchers in the campus. The doctors say that lots of young people on university campuses will openly say I’m here for my sexual health checkup. So maybe we’re getting there with some populations.

Nerina: Why did you decide to research this topic? Is it personal?

Willa: I’m really passionate about women’s health. I think that women’s health and particularly the kind of you know that the “vagina” and the reproductive tract are neglected. I think we need to pay them some more attention. You know I think people feel uncomfortable about honest conversations about sex and about reproductive health particularly for women and therefore we do not know as much and I think we need to change that and we need to change the conversations and our comfort levels around talking about our vaginas, our cervix and our own health. It’s deeply important to us at some point to many of us, not to all of us but at some point many of us will deeply care that we would get to reproduce or that we get to be involved in parenthood and so fertility it’s a really personal issue.

It really matters to me that that our research can actually make a difference to individuals that something is so fundamental to many people that is really confronting when they find out they’re not, they’re infertile or they need fertility treatment. We spend a lot of our lives trying to control the pregnancy and plan for pregnancy and prevent pregnancy until we’re ready and then it’s really shocking to some women to find out that they’re not fertile or they’re going to need treatment to achieve their pregnancies and so it is personal.

Yeah, it’s personal. It’s something I am passionate about and I think as a mom and I also I had fertility treatment for my children. My cause of infertility is still not really clear and just as a woman I think that all of those things matter. For me research is something that I really need to care about, I do care about a lot and that’s why I do it.

Nerina: How important is it in your opinion, to have a conversation about women’s bodies?

Willa: I think it’s critically important that we start having open and frank conversations with men and women that we bleed every month, we have pain every month. Some women have very serious pain every month. We go through a normal biological process where our body changes throughout that month and that’s all normal and we quietly hide it. Why? You know it should be celebrated. Can you imagine if men had periods they would be driven through tampon vending machines, they would be at the bar. You could order your gin and tonic and your tampons.

So you know I just think it’s a symptom of patriarchal society that all of a sudden menstrual blood is icky and that we don’t talk about periods and we don’t admit that we are having a bad day because we’ve got period pain but it’s quite fine to say that we’re having a bad day because we have a headache. You know I think it’s really important and I think by keeping it sort of a secret thing that we can’t talk we’re giving some kind of message to our young women that that’s kind of wrong, but it’s not wrong, it’s biology, half the population goes through it. So for me it’s really yeah… I can go on about it for ages. I think it’s really important that we change the conversation and we’re enabling a better attitude to our health, but I think we’re also enabling a better attitude to women as functional, important members of society we just have a different biology.

Nerina: Equality between men and women should not mean that women should become like men, right?

Willa: Absolutely. If we think as a society we can achieve equality by “fixing” the women and making them more like men and fitting in the patriarchal constructs that we’ve made we’re not going to benefit from that. The women will be less happy than they already are and we’re not actually gaining the biological and the wonderful differences that we give and won’t be gained because they’ll be trying to hide them in pretending to be like men. So now I completely agree that yeah I think we just need to really push some pretty uncomfortable and hard barriers around women are different and it’s a really great and you know period blood it’s everywhere, we all have periods, it’s fine. It’s actually fine look at us we’re here. It’s not the scary thing that you think it might be.

Nerina: You’re interested also in equality in your team. Could you tell me more about this?

Willa: Absolutely. So in my work I’m very conscious of those – the gender differences. Equity and diversity in my sector has a long way to go, diversity as well as equity. So the classic white male or even the classic stereotypically math or computation science may be even an Asian male is viewed as being smarter or whatever it is. There are always horrible stereotypes.

So in our team we talk a lot about that, we talk a lot about the fact that our cohorts of participants need to include diverse participants, indigenous participants, people who identify in the LGBTIQ spectrum there needs need to be represented and in our team we’re always open about people who come who have different identities. Whether that’s with respect to their identity or they heritage – ethnic heritage and we’re lucky in fact, that we have a very diverse team of researchers and all those voices in the room creates an amazing, challenging atmosphere, but also it brings so much. It brings us all so much further forward.

We also have a lot of activities in my faculty around championing that diversity and so in my other role within my faculty I am chair of our Equity and Diversity Committee. So we’re constantly calling out for new behaviors and new activities and new ways to change our culture in our sector to support a broader inclusivity within a sector of these different groups and women, but not just women and not just white women it has to be in intersectional approach.

Nerina: You’re really passionate about outreach. Why does outreach matter?

Willa: So I think outreach is a way of giving back to the community. I’m in a position of privilege, I have a permanent university job, I get to do research, and I get to teach undergraduates and postgraduates. I outreach by going into high schools, I outreach by social media and communication. I contribute wherever I can to Internet forums or you know profiles on Internet things like these because I feel if… A, I think the broad exposure of research matters. The community needs to know what research dollars are being spent on in a way that they can understand it so that they see the value of research.

So that’s one reason for doing it, but one of my really main reasons for doing it is if you can’t see role models ahead of you doing things that you think are interesting then how do you know to go into that field. So I think for young women and girls going through high school if all they see in the media which largely they do is men with beards in lab coats then science doesn’t seem like they belong. And so if what if when not out there, pushing ourselves out there how do they know that they belong in science? And so for me that’s why outreach matters.

Nerina: Where do you see your research in 10 years?

Willa: I think I see my research becoming much more holistic and much more engaged with women and looking really at chlamydia and other infectious agents still in the reproductive space but really whole approach it and the whole package. Social factors, their immune response, their body, maybe their genetics and how all of those come into play in some women to have the consequences of infertility and how we can work with the whole woman better earlier to understand her risks and work with her to help prevent her risks of becoming infertile later or knowing that she’s at quite a risk and she can consider how to protect herself.

Nerina: Is there one thing that people should know more about chlamydia?

Willa: I guess the one thing which is that I want people to know is that it’s not their fault, even if they’re positive it’s not their fault. It’s okay, come back for more testing and treating. Don’t hideaway if you think you’re at risk. It’s not your fault. It’s okay to have an STI it’s just better if we can treat you more quickly and prevent it from spreading further but also maybe prevent the disease from getting worse for you.

Nerina: Is there a key message that you would like to tell your children?

Willa: Don’t forget who you are. There’s so much in society that tells you who you should be. Who you are and what your core values are just hang onto that and stick to those and do what you want to do that you feel is the best and the right thing for everyone around you but take who you are into that.

Nerina: Thank you so much Willa for this conversation.

Willa: Not a problem. Thank you. I hope that helped.

Nerina: And thank you for watching. See you next time, bye ciao.

Biography:

Senior lecturer, School of Life Sciences. Associate Member, ithree – Institute of Infection, Immunity and Innovation, University of Technology, Sidney

Learn more about Willa's work:
http://www.uts.edu.au/staff www.equalfutures.uts.edu.au
Connect with Willa:
www.linkedin.com/willa-huston twitter.com/willaonthego

Jason von Meding

Jason von Meding
Disaster Risk Reduction
Biography:

and construction management. School of Architecture and built environment University of Newcastle, Australia.

Learn more about Jason's work:
newcastle.edu.au/jason-vonmeding theconversation.com/von-meding
Connect with Jason:
twitter.com/vonmeding www.linkedin.com/jasonvonmeding
When disasters are beyond natural

As long ago as the 1970s, scholars were already of the opinion that there’s no such thing as a truly natural “disaster”. Instead, there are simply conditions that allow for certain areas of society to be disproportionately harmed by natural events.

So, just how can we reduce the risk to human life during these occurrences? To answer this question, researchers like Dr. Jason von Meding at the University of Newcastle, Australia, are applying the scientific method to social, political, and environmental issues, and asking how humanity will be able to support itself in an era of increased consumption, and finite Earthly resources.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Jason von Meding's Video here ◂

Jason: Hi Nerina. My name is Jason von Meding. I’m a senior lecturer at the University of New Castle, Australia and I generally say my area of research is disaster science or disaster studies, but specifically in my field, we talk about disaster risk reduction.

Nerina: You wrote that there are not any natural disasters. Could you tell me more about this? 

Jason: Disasters are sometimes seen by both the people that are affected by them and by scientists, by decision-makers, policymakers as something that could really be avoided, which is nobody’s fault, which is an act of nature, which is maybe an act of God. They start to approach disaster in this way which takes away any culpability from the people who create the conditions where people are vulnerable to a disaster. A lot of us in that field are committed to fighting against this terminology because I think it creates this context where nobody is responsible, where nobody is accountable for the people that are impacted by disasters.

Nerina: Who is affected by disasters?

Jason: Disaster impacts affect the poor, they affect the marginalized, and they affect the people who are most unjustly treated by the conditions of the society. You will be able to find some examples of a disaster which only affected a small number of rich people, right? So there will be exceptions but they’re exceptions to the rule. The rule is that disasters affect the most vulnerable in society because of their structural conditions which are not an accident, they’re by design. So the way our societies are structured is to benefit a few people at the expense of the others and these are the things which you don’t get to talk about if you use words like natural disasters.

Nerina: How did you get into this topic? 

Jason. I think when I was about 12 in school I really started to feel like I wanted to pursue a career as an architect and right through school that was my one focus. When I went to University to study to be an architect, I started to work in the practice. When I was just finishing off my postgraduate studies I had the chance to do a research thesis and at that time Hurricane Katrina had just affected the US. So I was born in the US, from Chicago originally. So I put together a proposal to go and do some field study there looking mostly at how a hurricane affects buildings. So of course, I was interested in buildings and design, materials, structures. So I went to the Gulf Coast of US and did a very, very simple study.

You know I was affected by the stories coming from Gulf Coast of how people were impacted. I ended up doing not only a study of buildings but of people. So I started to talk to people about their experiences. I started to talk to design professionals but also just residents who are affected. So that fed into my thesis.

Nerina: You decided to change your career from being an architect to a researcher. When was the turning point?

Jason: I think when I went to Southeast Asia to conduct fieldwork for my Ph.D. I went out there with the intention of helping or producing knowledge to help NGOs manage disasters better or become more efficient as organizations. I was mostly collecting data from project managers within these NGOs. I heard stories through them about what it was like for people to experience disasters, but when I got the opportunity to actually hear directly from people who are impacted then it really started making me think about the structural problems that people were suffering from.

Because when I heard from people that were affected by this tsunami in Sri Lanka or by cyclones in Bangladesh they started to tell me about the conditions of vulnerability which they were forced to live in and those were the things that cause them to be affected by disasters. They didn’t feel like well it’s was just a natural disaster that has destroyed our homes or has killed people very dear to us. They felt like they were put in a position of vulnerability by conditions in their society, which were not fair. So they were poor, they were very marginalized and this is why they were affected like they were. So that really changed the way that I thought about disasters because it made me think much more about the social constructs which determine how people experience disasters. That really maybe shifted my research agenda for my career.

Nerina: What are you focusing on right now in your research? 

Jason: A lot of our research is on the social science side. So a lot of the time we’re working with vulnerable communities to understand how they experience vulnerability, how they experience hazards. It’s important to distinguish between disasters and hazards. If you have an earthquake which occurs in a location with no people who are vulnerable then you don’t have a disaster, you just have a hazard. What we try to in my group is to conduct scientific research to better understand the conditions that people experience and produce by their knowledge to present to the public, to present the policymakers, to the whole range of stakeholders in this field to try to convince them that we need to think more about the real courses of a disaster which are rooted in the way societies are constructed. So that’s how I try to explain my research to people.

Nerina: You wrote that disaster risk reduction should be everybody’s business. Should it be and why?

Jason: A lot of people when you speak to them about disasters will not necessarily be thinking about the social and political and economic angle. Of course, if you say economic system or politics is everybody’s business. That’s alright, yeah okay, but if you say disasters are, then not everyone understands the connection. So that’s something that I feel quite strongly about and it’s something I’m working on is how do we communicate the importance of involving stakeholders from across the spectrum in the discourse about disasters, connecting all these disperse interests and actors in this discussion about reducing risk. Because reducing risk is really about addressing the vulnerability, addressing structural injustices which often have its roots in historical events or historical developments. So I think the critical thing is really connecting all of those social constructs which everyone accepts as being part of something everyone should be involved in with the understanding of disasters. That’s what I’m trying to do through my kind of public advocacy and position as an author, as a communicator.

Nerina: What has changed in this field of research over the last few decades? 

Jason: The field has been active for a long time, 50 years. You know that it has very much progressed from a traditional understanding of disasters. In the 1980s you had efforts to manage disasters better; really that was kind of the approach. When the UN got involved it was to manage disasters and then to reduce disasters and then as we progressed over time you start to talk about reducing the risk of disasters. So, there’s been this progression in the language that is used in this. Although even in the 1970s top scholars were saying that we need to appreciate that no disaster is natural. So that’s a long time ago and we’re still having this debate.

So in some ways, things are still the same but we’ve learned so much more in many fields and we definitely learned a lot more about the real causes of disasters. In the last 10 years, that’s been really driving a lot of great research. So in 2015, we had significant global frameworks on climate change, on sustainable development and also on disaster risk reduction. In Sendai in Japan, we had the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction in March 2015 which was agreed by the nations of the UN; which was really a global commitment to adhere to certain principles.

Nerina: Are we on the right path in your opinion? 

Jason: When I go to some of these international forums which are said to represent the international community… I mean now in 2017 we have a pretty good representation of stakeholders from different segments of society. So, you have your government representatives, your NGOs, the UN bodies, the community activists. You know the UN and different UN agencies have really taken the lead on bringing governments, bringing scientists and communities together to talk about these key issues.

So on paper, it all looks like a pretty good representation of the diversity of voices, but when you actually look at who’s speaking, who’s on the panel, who is in the small room at the side or who is on the preliminary stage then you start to see where the real power is. The voices that are given the most space are those who have the existing power, who represents the interest of maintaining the status quo and this is a big problem at that international level. It’s that we’re not putting the issues that really need to be discussed in the primary position.

Nerina: Which are the issues that need to be discussed?

Jason: Some of the things which are kind of unquestioned are this idea that we can have economic growth forever, and maybe through our innovation, we will find a way to stop damaging the environment, while still growing. But it comes back to the ideology that we actually need economic growth. There’s lots of literature out there which challenges this assumption but I think in terms of disaster risk reduction community it’s not really being challenged vigorously enough.

I would say that most of those in the scientific community, certainly most of those in large global institutions move ahead with that assumption. Maybe they agree that we should challenge but they think argh it’s just too difficult, it is not the right time. You know we have to work within the limits of like where we are in this time and space.

The other one that I really felt strongly about recently was this idea that we can continue to consume to the level that is expected by developed societies, highly developed societies. If you’re going to developing countries and you start to talk to people about what their idea of success or of a healthy society would be. They usually point to a country like the US or they point to Europe and say if only we could be like them, then we would be developed and we would be successful. As a global community and led by Western culture, we’ve become addicted to trying to consume and trying to accumulate as much as possible. The reality is that we’re on a planet with finite resources and already we consume far more than the earth can replenish. Only a small part of human society has reached developed or highly developed status.

So, when you start to let your mind think ahead to what would it mean for humanity if 5 billion more people join the middle class and start to consume the average American. That’s really a crazy thought and that’s a very scary prospect because it is just not possible. So, we need to start talking about this much more seriously. We need to start not only talking to developing nations and say well maybe that’s not the trajectory for societies to go in. But we have to challenge our own conception of what’s we are entitled to. Are we in highly developed countries entitled to consume like this forever when everybody else can’t or you know we can’t really say that. But on the other hand, are we really prepared to give up what we’re used to. It’s a big challenge.

Nerina: Yes indeed and what kind of world do you see these for researchers?

Jason: So in my position as a researcher, as a scientist, I try to think about what kind of knowledge I can generate, can I build which will actually help people to fight against injustice, which will help people to mobilize to move ahead, to build momentum to create change. So that’s kind of where I think I can best use my time and my efforts is by using my position to speak, to create this discussion to refocus people on they’re the real problems. They not only need to understand why but they need to understand how, like what they can do. I think there’s an important role for academics, for scientists to generate change.

Nerina: What kind of change do we need?

Jason: I’m making a documentary movie which is called Deviate and it’s really trying to express, articulate a lot of these issues which I’m interested in, which are connected to disasters. In the making of this movie, I’ve been talking with a lot of people who are part of movements or who are kind of influencers in different ways of change. I am hearing stories about how people resist structural injustice in their society and how they generate momentum for movements for change. So, there are different ways and I think we need a coordinated effort in all these different spaces. I mean there is no panacea, there’s no one way to get to a better society. But we need to advocate for all of these strategies as a coordinated movement for change which is inclusive because there’s no one way that we can make things better.

Nerina: Is there something that everybody can or should do? 

Jason: I think we need to really go outside our comfort zone in our own sphere of influence. We need to really make a robust challenge to the existing status quo, which tells us that we need growth, we need to increase consumption, and we need to accumulate stuff. Like we not only need to challenge government decisions, we need to challenge like our friends and our family about the choices they’re making and the ideas and the myths sometimes of which they’re so attached to. So we need to be willing to go, move outside our own comfortable existence. Of course, I speak is a very privileged person.

At the core, I think we need to develop a more human understanding person-to-person across those divisions in society and in international borders and so on. To understand that we have shared values, shared space of this planet and it’s the only one that we have. Anyone who speculates that we might just move on someone else’s is probably a little too optimistic.

We need people to understand, especially people in privileged position that there is actually value in caring for the people who are on the margins. Making the world better for everybody not just for us, not just for you know my family or my friends. It’s actually expanding what we care about beyond our little groups, beyond our social groups, beyond our national border. The solutions will not really happen if people in positions of privilege are willing to recognize that the way that they’re privileged is not fair and for them to be privileged, other people have to lose out. When you realize that then you can start to bring yourself to a position where you say oh I don’t need all these things and how can I be happy if other people are not happy. When we start to do that we start to humanize each other, we start to humanize the most marginalized in society.

Nerina: If you had the power and if it would be possible is there one thing that you would like to change tomorrow?

Jason: Oh wow. I would like to change the behavior of people that exercise power over other people in a negative way and change their behavior… change their mindset so that they understand that actually there are alternative futures. There’s a different way to do things where we can set up a society which functions well around shared values and around respect for each other, you know, around love, around trust and that’s actually powerful as well. If enough people come together around those values we can have a different society, but as long as the way that society is constructed is based on an oppressive type of power, like power over others I think that it’s going to be very difficult to resist that. Because a lot of times people become very obsessed with taking over the power, but as we’ve seen through history many times when a really revolutionary movement or individuals take power, they just end up oppressing other people.

I think there’s a problem with how we use power in the world and if there one thing I could change it would be to eradicate that behavior and that ideology of using power oppressively.

Nerina: What drives you? What motivates you?

Jason: I have five children you know quite young. When I got into this field when I started to read broadly and really understood the gravity of our situation with my limited understanding of science you have to think of the future. You have to think like what is the world going to be like for my kids or for their kids. The thing that motivates me is the concern of course for my children, but also all of the positive things that I see happening around the world.

The more that I meet people who are really on the frontline of the fight against injustice I realize there are more people than I thought that really want a better future. What gives me hope is that the majority of people do want a better future; they do want a future which is sustainable. The majority of us want a planet where our kids will be healthy and will be able to enjoy life.

Nerina: What is your dream? 

Jason: My dream is that the people who are trying to build change movements are successful and actually reach enough people to generate the power of the masses to say the world we want to live in is very different than what we have. So we’re going to dismantle the status quo and we’re going to build something different.

Nerina: Thank you so much, Jason, for this conversation. 

Jason: You’re very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity to speak to you Nerina.

#followup with Jason von Meding | Deviate - the movie about disasters

Jason von Meding, senior lecturer in Disaster Risk reduction is making a movie: Deviate. Disasters are not natural.

We spoke with him about his motivation, the purpose of the movie, some myths about disasters, the challenges, and the experiences during the shooting in Vietnam.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Biography:

and construction management. School of Architecture and built environment University of Newcastle, Australia.

Learn more about Jason's work:
newcastle.edu.au/jason-vonmeding theconversation.com/von-meding
Connect with Jason:
twitter.com/vonmeding www.linkedin.com/jasonvonmeding

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