We kicked off the new year with a Climate Conversation at the Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) at the UBC Okanagan campus. Thank you to Fabiola Melchior, Tim Paulson, and Mary Stockdale for sharing their experiences engaging in climate conversations throughout their work and research and to ICER for providing a welcoming space.
The session opened with Fabiola Melchior, a PhD Student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program, who shared their experience of entering the research space through advocacy work. As a climate justice organizer, they have been involved in initiatives like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In their early academic career, they felt a lack of critical engagement through their courses in the climate space and began to explore research methodologies including critical feminist theory and critical queer theory. These approaches provided a framework through which to engage in reciprocal climate research with the community.
Through their research, Fabiola endeavors to engage in a constant exchange between community and the university. This includes inviting community members into the research space through funding or other resources, as well as considering how what is learned is reinvested back into the community. Fabiola shared that the structure of post-secondary institutions can present a significant challenge to having meaningful reciprocal climate conversations. If researchers are engaging in climate justice-oriented conversations, how can they work through the dissonance they may feel between the university work and community?
Tim Paulson, environmental historian and Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology, shared his own experiences engaging in climate conversations. His applied research program uses historical materials and contemporary insights to evaluate models from range science and to understand active land management on ranches and formerly grazed rangelands. In this work, he frequently engages farmers, rangers, practitioners, environmental scientists and other researchers. He shared that these discussions can be challenging and often have surprising outcomes; he emphasized the importance of maintaining an openness and not letting assumptions or stereotypes drive these conversations on climate.
Tim also addressed the methodological challenges of engaging in climate conversations as a historian. The timeframe of research and engagement is at a slower pace than those of collaborators from other disciplines, and much slower than the urgency of the climate crisis demands. Tim shared that history provides us with the opportunity to test our ideas, by seeing what others have done and the outcomes of those actions. This can be a challenge in itself, as often when engaging with environmental history, past examples are not positive. Climate conversations with others who have different, and potentially more positive outlooks on future outcomes, can also be a source of motivation for continuing the work.
As both a member of the university community and an active community member engaged in climate work, Adjunct Professor Mary Stockdale often finds herself acting as a bridge in climate conversations. She has been an active member in several initiatives in her home community of Vernon, including as Co-Chair for the Climate Action Advisory Committee of the City of Vernon, and co-founder of Climate Action Now!. As a mentor in this year’s cohort of Solutions Scholars, Mary is co-leading a project with Jon Corbett and Maged Senbal with Solutions Scholars Theresa Dearden and Blair Visscher. You can learn more about the project here.
This project includes engaging residents in conversations related to community resilience in the face of climate change, through an approach called deep canvassing. Part of the objective of this approach, which was successfully used in another recent community project, is to open dialogue across differences, in the hope of better understanding the community’s interest in developing a Climate Engagement Centre (CEC). In this approach, pairs of canvassers invite conversations by going door-to-door and focus on connecting with people through storytelling, rather than arguing about facts – change is made through emotional connections. The research will be collected through focus groups with canvassers, and insights will be used to help develop a community-relevant model for the CEC.
Many questions emerged, including the place of social media in climate conversations, managing the stereotypes that confront researchers, the importance of messaging, and ultimately the importance of agency. Connections were made across disciplines and dialogue continued following the event.
Thank you to Fabiola, Tim and Mary for sharing their experiences, to all of the participants for sharing their own knowledge, and to ICER for providing the space to gather. If you are a faculty, staff, student or community member who would like to join us for future informal Climate Conversations and build connections, please sign up for our newsletter to hear of future events.
Interested in more?
Read Fabiola’s recommendation Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points by Kyle Whyte
Learn more about the Deep Canvassing Approach used by Neighbours United, which Mary and team are incorporating into their Solutions Scholar Project.
Learn more about Tim’s work with the UN Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists and how they are planning to use social media during soccer’s World Cup to engage people in the relevance of rangelands.