"Can We Talk?" Workshop of Three Critical Conversations for UVic faculty
Hosted by The Centre for Studies in Religion and Society and The Centre for Global Studies 2024-2025
Workshop description
Recent global and local events have reminded us of the importance of universities as potential sites for civil discourse and deliberation across social or political divisions. Still, universities do not exist in a vacuum – they are subject to political pressures, anti-elitist sentiments, and economic crises. While expertise is a critical component of an informed public debate, universities have recently encountered serious challenges in determining how to play this role most meaningfully and effectively.
The Can We Talk? conversations for UVic faculty will begin with music, art, and lunch. Following lightly curated lunch conversations, there will be open engagement with three UVic panelists. These meals and discussions will be hosted by Paul Bramadat (CSRS) and Oliver Schmidtke (CFGS) and their colleagues and will attempt to foster respectful critical conversations and community building.
The first event takes place on November 29th at and will include up to 108 people. On that day we will discuss the role universities might play in a polarized society. The other events – see below – will take place in March and May, 2025. If you are interested in joining us for any of these events, register on our Eventbrite page from the button below and save your spot. These events are free of charge.
Session One - 29 November, 2024
Can We Talk…about the role of university in a polarized society?
In this workshop, we aim to examine the university’s role during global conflicts and political extremism. How can the university promote innovative, respectful discussions about fundamental challenges? What is the appropriate balance between the freedom of academic debates and the need to address hate-speech and promote feelings of safety? How do researchers balance their scholarly commitments and their political engagement as citizens? How can the university adapt, respond, and contribute to the development of inclusive and resilient democratic societies?
Session Two – 7 March, 2025
Can We Talk…about how to address global conflicts without losing your friends?
In this workshop, we will discuss the ways global conflicts create significant tensions in local settings. We have certainly seen this at UVic in recent memory. Sometimes these dynamics reveal elements of both the local and the global arenas in useful ways. What lessons might be learned about the ways local tensions, personal traumas, and regional interests often inflect the ways we talk about, and experience, global crises? What examples are there in our classes or in the broader academic contexts that might illustrate these lessons?
Session Three – 6 May, 2025
Can We Talk…about the religious elements of global or local crises?
In this workshop, we will address the ways we deal with the explicitly religious elements of political and social crises. Religion figures prominently in a great many of our most pressing global and local challenges – from religious nationalism in India and the US, to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. And yet, there is a strong tendency either to focus exclusively on this influence, or to attribute it to some other force (geopolitics, the control of women’s bodies, greed, oil, etc.). What are helpful ways to discuss the religious aspects of these problems? Why is it so difficult to discuss religion in a dispassionate way?
Our Format
Instead of just gathering people for a conventional expert-driven discussion, we want to use a different format for facilitating open conversations in a respectful spirit drawing on what works so well at the CSRS and CFGS. That is, we will begin these events by sharing lunch with all participants, who would spend the first half of the event in lightly facilitated small groups (as they eat and socialize in a lightly structured manner). After these small convivial groups have had a chance to reflect together on the issue being addressed that day, representatives from each table would share some questions or observations that emerged during lunch with the larger group and a carefully selected panel of UVic experts.
This pivot from the small-group experience of hospitality and gathering to the moderated large-group setting of open inquiry and debate should work well for the three issues we have listed above.
Music and the arts will enrich the space, offering another way of bringing together multiple perspectives.