Infrastructure seems to be everywhere in the news these days, whether its promises from politicians to rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, demands for better transit and bicycle pathways, or the new movement toward Smart Cities and connecting infrastructure in new ways. And infrastructure remains a huge investment, of both resources and of time. The decisions we make now must continue to work for years — possibly generations — to come.

Twenty-first century infrastructure needs to be sustainable, moving away from the most environmentally-intensive materials used in the past, such as concrete. It also needs to be flexible -- but what does this mean in practical terms? How can we design and build cities for the future? How do engineers plan for change when making choices about major infrastructure projects? This salon will discuss how we shape the systems that underpin our cities, and how they shape us in return.

Shoshanna is an Assistant Professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure. She investigates the relationship between the infrastructure we build and the society we create to identify opportunities – and pathways – to better align infrastructure provision with sustainability. Her research and commentary have been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Toronto Star, The Financial Post, and Wired, including “What We Really Need Are Good ‘Dumb’ Cities.”

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This salon took place February 24, 2022.

"Stay home, save lives" quickly became the rally cry of the COVID-19 pandemic, but was it a fair appeal, particularly when considering the limited agency that individuals have to influence the pandemic's trajectory? The slogan, which was plastered across billboards and social media alike, implies its converse – go out and risk lives, perhaps even go out and cause death. Billboards in the state of Oregon warned people explicitly not to "accidentally kill someone." Did such messages place an appropriate moral burden on the shoulders of individuals? If not, what was, or what would have been, a fair slogan to encourage people to remain at home when the pandemic was at its worst?

Public health campaigns, from "breast is best" to "friends don't let friends drive drunk", are a form of advertising, employing the tactics that are typical of advertising. We tend, however, to be less critical of overstatement and over-simplification when they are used in service of a public health goal than when they are used to sell a car or a tropical vacation. Alexandra Campbell, once a practicing criminal lawyer and now a bioethicist, will lead us in a welcoming, inclusive discussion about the ethics of "Stay home, save lives" and other public health slogans.

Alexandra Campbell is a bioethicist working in Toronto.

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This salon took place January 21, 2022.

Universities around the globe are in the midst of a period of unprecedented change. Society has in the last few years begun treating higher education as private commodity —with huge increases in tuition costs to go with it — which poses a significant threat to the idea of education as a public good. Yet there are significant opportunities as well, for new demographic groups to attend post-secondary school, and for new approaches to teaching at all levels. There is power and promise in new learning models like Coursera, for example, but also drawbacks.

This salon is based on the idea that there is no better form of investment in the welfare of individuals or society than higher education. How can the way we teach be improved, and why it is so difficult to change our ways of thinking about teaching? In a time when information and knowledge is essentially free, and can be accessed anytime, what is education for? What does it mean to know something, and who decides what should be known? Join us as we explore the ways in which education contributes to making the societies we want, and need.

Noah is a Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder where he researches physics education, specifically studying the conditions that support students’ interests and abilities in physics. In parallel, he conducts research on how educational transformations get taken up, spread, and sustained. He is involved in a number of national coalitions advancing undergraduate education transformation, with a focus on STEM education.

Noah is a Trustee of the Higher Learning Commission, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Presidential Teaching Scholar and the inaugural Timmerhaus Teaching Ambassador for the University of Colorado system.

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This salon took place December 10, 2021.

This was England in the mid-seventeenth century, but it is not difficult to draw parallels to 2021. Our last salon, A play without a stage: art in the time of closed theatres, considered what artistic culture looks like without high-profile performance. Are we destined now for a dark age of dramatic art? Perhaps not. As our speaker Heidi Craig explained, the absence of live performance in the period of Puritan rule did not signal the end of English theatre, but in some ways its solidification. Without easy access to live performance, people repeatedly pored over texts of their old favourites, and this nostalgia-driven process reinforced their popularity. Shakespeare, in particular, rose above all to became central to the English dramatic canon.

I cannot do justice to the scope and nuance of Heidi’s research, which you can read more about here, but will offer a few thoughts of my own which came out of our discussion.

Seeking the familiar

These are uncomfortable times, in which we weigh potentially existential threats when deciding to walk out the door. (Will it be microbes or the rising seas that will get us?) And in uncomfortable times, in dark times, we seek comfort. Nostalgia is comforting. As Heidi argued, it was nostalgia for the good shows seen, the grand evenings in the theatre, the buzz of live performance, that spurred Shakespeare and some of his more illustrious contemporaries to enduring fame.

A recent NPR podcast offers a fascinating discussion about nostalgia, which “for all its ambiguity, … does reliably offer one thing - an escape away from the uncertainty of the future and towards the permanence of the past.” It is comforting to experience old favourites again, to know what the next punchline is, not to be surprised by an unpleasant plot twist. It is this comfort and familiarly that drives the popularity of formulaic literary genres like mystery and romance (as we discussed in our salon about romance novels). They follow a familiar pattern .

I find myself wondering who and what is being canonized on a societal level in these dark times. In popular culture, the 1990s seem to loom large in the imagination again, with the enduring popularity of Friends, a level of media coverage of Britney Spears almost on par with the last years of the millennium, and the return of the fashions so ubiquitous in that decade. Send help: we may be in the process of canonizing Monica Geller and the crop top.

What will future historians make of that?

The collective intake of breath

I could not help but draw parallels between Heidi’s discussion of the energy of live performance — the collective intake of breath, the shared emotion — and these very salons. I have sorely felt the absence of a collective of humans in my living room this last 18 months. Perhaps you have felt a similar absence, in a classroom, a restaurant, or a concert hall. Oh yes, we now have a broader reach, and I am grateful for those who have been able to join us from Atlanta, and Waterloo, and Hong Kong, but we all know something is lost when conversation is filtered through the Internet.

There is a difficult line between access and impermanence that we are treading here. Live theatre is a rarefied privilege, more than it ever has been. Being able to see a virtual experience is more democratic. To experience even half of the wonder of Broadway, or the symphony, or yes, a live stream of Shakespeare from the Globe itself, is a gift.

And yet, what is lost when the theatres are closed, when every lecture can be seen on a recording, when we rewatch the old favourites again and again, is the unknown. The time we spend together may be transcendent — or it may all go horribly off piste. But whatever happens, it will happen and then it will be gone. It is ephemeral.

The artist Andres Amador designs stunning geometric shapes on beaches at low tide, intentionally and with the knowledge that within hours his creations will disappear. It is akin to a Buddhist mandala, painstakingly created out of sand and then ritually destroyed, which represents how fleeting our material existence is. As Amador says on ephemerality, “…as a cultural norm, we view permanence as having more value. But through this art I came to recognize that in the long arc of time, nothing will last — eventually all things I have done and that all humans have ever done will be erased.”

In some ways, ephemerality is the opposite of comfortable. Perhaps this is its appeal. A live performance, a live salon, a new dish, a book one has not read before — these are risky. Anything might happen. We might not like it! In that way, it is analogous to life itself.

Woven, together

People often ask me why I do not record the salons. The answer I give is twofold: first, because I believe in the ephemeral. I like the idea that our times together are fleeting and therefore more precious. Second, I’ve discovered that people behave differently when they know the way they show up that day will live on after the event. They become more guarded. They weigh their words more carefully, hoping to avoid anything being taken out of context.

I love this word, context. When I was doing my Masters research in History (back in the middle ages), a number of my primary sources were accessed in a novel way: online. They’d been digitized by libraries across the Western US, giving me far greater access to them than I would have had otherwise. Yet with all this new content came the risk of it being taken out of context, of doing a simple search for key words and phrases, casually ignoring the paragraphs, books, or physical sites in which they sat. I spent a lot of time then thinking through the implications of my power to talk about history, and my responsibility to represent these sources as honestly as I was able, even when they were messy and nuanced and did not support my neat thesis argument.

I know of other salons that are winding down, endangered less by the pandemic than by a creeping fear people have of saying the wrong thing and being “cancelled.” What a tragedy this is, to take away our opportunity to build context and understand the many layers that surround how we see the world.

I reflect that the word context comes from the Latin for con [with, together] + text [weave, woven]. A number of our modern idioms in English relate to weaving, and in many ways the material culture of the past is our best way to understand it. Much of what we have preserved from Shakespeare’s time is not on paper, as Heidi has written about, but on very thin linen cloth woven from old, recycled rags.

In these salons, there is something of this idea of weaving. We need both the warp and the weft, in their opposing directions, to make a sturdy fabric. We need our differing ideas, our impermanence, and our willingness to risk going off piste to understand each other better.

Together, woven.

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038 // A play without a stage: art in the time of closed theatres

What does artistic culture look like without high-profile performance? How does art become canonical? And what parallels can be drawn between the ban of the mid-17th century and our modern, socially distanced era? With Heidi Craig.

Kathryn Exon SmithKathryn Exon Smith

Heidi Craig

Heidi Craig0

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In September 1642, English Parliament outlawed public stage plays, a prohibition that would last 18 long years. Formerly bustling theatres stood vacant or were converted into tenements, and the celebrity actors of the day fell into penniless obscurity. The culture of dramatic performance was forced to change. Amid nostalgia for what had come before, publications of dramatic works flourished, laying the stage for what we now know as the modern canon, the editorial, and the elevation of Shakespeare’s works to lasting dominance in English language drama.

This salon will consider the nature of drama in a world without live theatre. What does artistic culture look like without high-profile performance? How does art become canonical? And what parallels can be drawn between the ban of the mid-17th century and our modern, socially distanced era?

Heidi received a PhD in English Literature from the University of Toronto and is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is also the editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography, and editor of Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts, which once completed will be a fully-searchable open-access database of all dramatic paratexts printed up to 1660. Heidi's research and teaching is about Shakespeare, early modern drama, gender studies, book history, and digital humanities.

This salon took place November 12, 2021.

How has our understanding of the outdoors evolved over time? In the past year many of us have longed for wild, unpopulated spaces, and at a more local level there is now a general consensus that time in nature is important. Recently, “nature deficit disorder” has even been named as a biological ill that must be remedied, and outdoor time an essential activity for mental health.

But the idea of wilderness exists in tension with the infrastructure and impact that humans leave behind in these spaces. Who has access to the outdoors, and in what ways? Should there be limits on the number and kind of interactions we have with nature? This salon will explore how humans experience the outdoors through the lens of history and culture.

Phoebe is an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she focuses on the cultural and environmental history of the modern United States and the American West. She is the author of California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Her second book, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to Occupy (Oxford University Press, 2021), traces the hidden history of camping and the outdoors in American life that connects a familiar recreational pastime to camps for functional needs and political purposes.

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This salon took place June 18, 2021.

In recent years there has been a growing movement away from disposable packaging waste, toward re-use and recycling, known as the circular economy. Yet this requires change at all levels, from manufacturers and governments down to consumer behaviour. Recycling cannot simply work as a theoretical possibility, but in practice and at scale. This means everything from manufacturers using materials that can actually be recycled, widespread collection and sorting, consumers that know what to do with products, and the technical ability to actually recycle what it receives.

This salon will explore the biggest challenges in moving toward a truly circular economy, and how organizations are responding to them. We’ll go beyond the view of the individual to explore the systems-level changes that are required for us to have a circular approach to materials. What are companies doing to design for circularity, from changing packaging to changing the disposability mindset? What government incentives and policy interventions are making a difference? And what will these changes look like in our communities?

Katherine is Director of Circular Ventures at The Recycling Partnership, where her work includes stakeholder engagement to support the transition to a more circular economy, as well as development and execution of engagement strategies for sustainable innovations in consumer packaged goods (CPG), supply chain and logistics, or waste management and recycling. She holds an MBA from Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business where she was a Sustainability Fellow with the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business.

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This salon took place May 21, 2021.

It is common to be concerned about the amount of data digital technology firms collect about us, and use for their own purposes. AI-powered technologies such as facial and emotion recognition can infringe upon our privacy and unwittingly manipulate our emotions. Yet many of us welcome digital surveillance in the form of cameras in our homes, an added layer of security for our phones, and more. AI is fuelled by this data, but the technology itself is not autonomous — it is infused with the values of those who design and control it.

This salon will explore how facial recognition and other AI-driven surveillance technologies are only the most recent form of classifying and categorizing individuals, and how their use has been adopted both by governments and private corporations — and is increasingly sold back to us as a consumer good. Where are these technologies being used, and how will they affect our lives in the future? What questions should we be asking about their growing prevalence? And how can we as citizens and consumers shape the values embedded in AI and its applications?

Luke is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His work interrogates the historical, social, and ethical impacts of computing and artificial intelligence technologies, particularly those mediating social and emotional expression. His scholarship highlights the asymmetries of power, access and justice that are emerging as these systems are deployed in the world, and the social and political challenges that technologists, policymakers, and the wider public face as a result.

Luke has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE) Group at Microsoft Research in Montreal, QC; a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College, a Fellow and Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and an inaugural Fellow with the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Technology, Society, and Policy. He completed his PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in 2016 under the supervision of Helen Nissenbaum, and holds an Honours BA and MA in History from the University of Toronto.

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This salon took place April 30, 2020.

Because English: As English evolves, new words and usages arise. Some are beloved, some are despised, some are barely noticed. Some stick around; some are fleeting. Some become “standard”; some seem forever consigned to the “error” category. How language change works – and how speakers deal with it – depends on a variety of factors, including geography, technology, context and audience. How standard language is used and defined is not set in stone; it, too, evolves. But that doesn’t mean a standard language is useless or “there are no rules” – we still need to communicate, after all.

Lisa is chair of News & Information in the University of Kansas School of Journalism, where she teaches writing and editing. Before KU, she worked for 12 years as a newspaper copy editor after finishing a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages & Linguistics. She is the author of “The Perfect English Grammar Workbook.”

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This salon took place March 5, 2021.

The airline industry took a major hit in 2020, but a number of economic challenges existed already, from aging infrastructure to labour concerns to the effects of climate change. What factors determine who succeeds and who fails? How will airlines manage the coming mass retirement of pilots? Will the historic increase in air travel continue apace despite the setbacks of the past year? And how will all of these changes affect how consumers experience air travel?

This salon will get into some of the large-scale economic trends in the airline industry, and how they will shape air travel in the years to come.

Kerry is an Associate Professor of Economics and an airline expert at Loyola Univeristy Maryland's Sellinger School of Business. He has a Ph.D. and M.A. from The Ohio State University and a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include industrial organization and applied microeconomics, with a particular focus on the airline industry.

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This salon took place February 12, 2021.

How much are we defined by the size of the places we live? After a year in which many wished simply to get out, move away, and find a small patch of land outside the city, this question has become more pertinent than ever. When we can be connected by internet cables, what does it mean to be a suburb, and exurb, a city?

2020 offered a glimpse of a different way of living and working. When we — at least temporarily — don't need to be tethered to our physical workplaces, how do we choose to live? Is this sustainable? Will 2021 and beyond see a change in our relationship with commuting?

This salon will discuss the relationships places have with each other, and the relationships we have with them.

James is the author of several nonfiction books that explore what it means to be human in the natural world, including My Backyard Jungle (Yale) and the forthcoming Naturebot: Unconventional Visions of Nature.

He currently teaches creative nonfiction and environmental writing at the University of South Carolina. He earned a PhD in English from the University of California, Davis, and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana.

Before becoming a professor of creative writing, James held a variety of posts in wildlife research and management, crossing paths with wolves and mountain lions in remote wilderness and promoting “mini-beast”habitat in urban schoolyards in England. Here, surrounded by sheep on the ancient Yorkshire moors, he began to recognize the deep and enduring influence of domestication on human existence, and the value of experiencing this kind of nature in an increasingly wired world.

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This salon took place January 22, 2021.

Why do some people see yellow when they hear a sound? How do we adjust our body-image to fit the boundaries of objects we use, like our cars? How does knowing the identity of a speaker and what their voice sounds like help us hear them better at a party?

This salon will explore how our brains process information, and how input into one sensory system can influence processing in other sensory systems. We will learn how the brains of synesthetes work, and whether multi-sensory experiences are a continuum that anyone can experience under the right circumstances.

David is an Assistant Professor in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience area in the Department of Psychology, where he directs the Multisensory Perception Lab. His research examines how the sensory systems (such as vision and hearing) influence one another in order to enable sensory signal recovery after brain damage or disease.

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This salon took place November 20, 2020.

Three years ago the Hungarian government passed new legislation on higher education that resulted in the expulsion of Central European University (CEU) from Budapest - the first time a university in Europe has been forced into exile since World War II. CEU, a private university founded by George Soros and regarded as an institution of liberal thought in the increasingly far-right political context of Hungary, was relocated to Vienna.

Why is there a rising authoritarianism taking place within the European Union, and what impact is it having on academic freedom, critical pedagogy, and independent research? In this salon, Sara will draw from her experience living, studying, and politically organizing in Budapest to talk about how CEU was forced out of Hungary, what tensions this caused between students and university administrators, and how activists tried to tie the issue of academic freedom to wider societal concerns within the political environment of Hungary. Importantly, what broader lessons about intellectual work under authoritarianism can we learn from the case of CEU?

Sara is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University. Since 2012 she has lived off and on between Toronto and Budapest, where she has been involved in activism around academic freedom, student-worker solidarity, and migrant justice.

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This salon took place October 30, 2020.

It is three years since sexual harassment became a widespread and enduring public issue with the rise of the Me Too movement. How have claims of discrimination and harassment been made and prosecuted since then, and which industries have been most altered? What effect has the movement had on workplace dynamics more broadly? And what can we expect in the years to come?

In this salon we will hear from a practicing employment lawyer about trends and insights she has observed and about how this movement might be an analogue for other types of systemic discrimination in the workplace.

Tamarah Prevost is a Partner at Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP, practicing in a wide range of civil litigation areas including employment law, antitrust litigation, and consumer rights. Originally from Vancouver, Tamarah now lives in the Bay Area and was recently named a Rising Star for Employment Litigation by Northern California Super Lawyers magazine.

This salon took place October 9, 2020.

Refugees and refugee policy are frequently subject of political debate and discussion. However, we rarely hear from refugee applicants themselves, or the public servants who spend so much time negotiating their claims. Who are the people who do these jobs, and how do they interpret national refugee policy in the middle of war? What does agency mean in this context -- who has it, and what does it look like?

In this salon, Andriata and I will discuss the insights and personal stories Andriata learned from her extensive conversations with policy officers about their experiences and their role in determining “who gets in.” She will also talk about refugee policy within the context of the Cold War, and the experience of representing a nation abroad. Andy’s research focuses on Canada, but (as always!) the conversation will touch on more general themes and ideas.

Andriata's research is on the history of international migration and refugee protection policy since the end of the Second World War, with a focus on African refugees. She received her Ph.D. in History from Carleton University in 2019, titled Narrators, Navigators and Negotiators - Foreign Service Officer Life Stories from Canada's Resettlement Program (in Africa), 1970 to 1990. Andriata has also worked as a policy analyst with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada since 2010.

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This salon took place June 12, 2020.