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Hikma Collective Podcast: Season 3

How to Grow Change

 

3 Tips for Asking Generative Questions

Season 3, Episode 1

Erica Machulak
Season 3, Episode 1
5:30
 

“It’s a way of honoring the knowledge and experience that’s in the room.” 

Generative questions are a way of entering a conversation with a new or existing partner and honouring the knowledge and experience that’s in the room. To kick off Season 3, Hikma’s founder Erica Machulak shares 3 tips for asking generative questions to spark authentic conversations with your potential partners and collaborators. These tips will help you: 

  • Start collaborative projects on the right foot, 
  • Surface potential connections that may not always be intuitive or visible, and 
  • Maintain relationships over time. 

In the episodes that follow in this season, we talk with some of our dream mentors and show firsthand how we use generative questions to leverage our empathy and curiosity to move conversations forward.

Links:

Browse Erica's portfolio: https://www.hikma.studio/founder

The Business of Doing Better

A conversation with Madeleine Shaw

Season 3, Episode 2

Madeleine Shaw
Season 3, Episode 2
33:06
 

“The practice of entrepreneurship is the ‘how,’ and the social is the ‘why.’”

In this conversation, author and social entrepreneur Madeleine Shaw invites us to reimagine the landscape of entrepreneurship. She shares insights about how we are all unlearning something, how flexibility is the new balance, and how we can create the conditions for social change using empathy, storytelling, and community.

Topics covered in this episode include:

  • Employing the tools of entrepreneurship to build the scaffolding for social change
  • The importance of nurturing relationships,
  • How to communicate productively with people who might not share the same values, and
  • Encouragement and advice for people just starting out and for those who want to start doing better

Speaker Bio:

Madeleine Shaw is a social entrepreneur and author based on unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver BC). She is best known as the co-founder of Aisle (formerly Lunapads), one of the first groundbreaking ventures in the world to commercialize reusable menstrual products. In 2014 she founded G Day, an event series for girls, and in 2018 she launched Nestworks, a family-friendly coworking community. In her first book, The Greater Good: Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World, she offers encouraging tips and reflections for aspiring impact-based entrepreneurs.

Links:

Read The Greater Good: https://madeleineshaw.ca/the-greater-good/

Rebel with a Cause

A conversation with Brittany Brathwaite

Season 3, Episode 3

 

Brittany Brathwaite
Season 3, Episode 3
32:00
 

"I don't break things without consequence."

In this episode, Brittany Brathwaite discusses her willingness to break the rules in order to change the world, our society, and or ourselves for the better. Brittany shares insights from her work interrupting health inequality for women and girls of color, supporting women and non-binary owned businesses, and creating a community of practice for youth workers.

Topics covered in this episode include:

  • What is a worker-owned co-operative business model
  • Countering the idea of disruption in innovation
  • Advice for building more humanity into business and operationalizing your values both externally and internally

Speaker Bio

Brittany Brathwaite is a reproductive justice activist, youth worker and community accountable scholar with a deep commitment to supporting the leadership, organizing, and healing of girls of color. Brittany has worked to create change in the lives of girls of color through sexual health education, local base building, advocacy, curriculum development, storytelling strategies and participatory action research. Brittany holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology from Syracuse University and a Master of Public Health and a Master of Social Work from Columbia University. She is currently a doctoral student in Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Grad Center.

Links

Browse Brittany's Website: https://www.brittanybrathwaite.com

Learn about the Kimbritive Platform: https://www.kimbritive.com/about https://www.rise-boutique.com/thehomegirlbox

Join the Rebellious Root Collective: https://www.rebelliousroot.com/the-collective

Developing respectful relationships with Indigenous communities

A conversation with Camille Callison

Season 3, Episode 4

Camille Callison
Season 3, Episode 4
33:49
 

"It's that interconnectedness that really defines Indigenous ways of knowing."

In this episode, we share highlights from our Hikma Office Hours event about Indigenous ways of knowing and how to work with partners and collaborators in a meaningful and respectful ways to drive change. Camille brings expert knowledge and lived experience to our conversation about Indigenous knowledges, reconciliation, and building relationships in library, archival and cultural memory praxis. 

Topics covered in this episode include: 

  • Getting comfortable talking about truth, reconciliation, and "Indigenous ways of knowing"
  • Better practices for collaboration and partnership with Indigenous communities 
  • Connecting scholarship with local knowledge to advance better policies, practices, and tools

Speaker Bio 

Camille is a Tāłtān Nation member, the University Librarian at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV), and a passionate cultural activist pursuing a PhD in Anthropology dedicated to the continued survival and activation of Indigenous knowledges, languages and cultures. Among many other contributions, Camille serves as the Chair of IFLA Professional Division H and a member of IEEE P2890™ Recommended Practice for Provenance of Indigenous Peoples’ Data, OCLC Reimagine Descriptive Workflows Advisory Group, NISO Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion subcommittee and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce on Archives. She is committed to advancing matters related to Indigenous peoples and creating meaningful change related to equity, diversity, and inclusivity within cultural memory professions. 

Links 

Check out our blog post about this event for links to additional resources: https://www.hikma.studio/blog/creating-space-for-indigenous-knowledges-in-truth-and-reconciliation 

Listen Beyond What You Can Hear

A Conversation with Dwandalyn Reece

Season 3, Episode 5

Dwandalyn Reece
Season 3, Episode 5
41:37
 

"Everybody wants to heard. They have a story to tell."

Music is a universal language that can activate a community. In this episode, Dwandalyn Reece discusses her work examining the material culture of music, telling stories across contexts, and making knowledge accessible to general audiences. 

Topics covered in this episode include: 

  • Telling the stories behind the objects of music to reach people 
  • How to determine whether what you’re doing has an impact 
  • How listening better helps build relationships 

Speaker Bio 

Dwandalyn R. Reece is Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and curated the museum’s permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017. Reece has collaborated with other SI units on such programs as the 2016 NMAAHC Grand Opening Festival, Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration and the 2011 Folklife Festival program, Rhythm & Blues: Tell it Like It Is. She is chair of the SI pan-institutional group Smithsonian Music and is currently working on the NMAAHC and Smithsonian Folkways collaboration, The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, and serving as co-curator of the Smithsonian Year of Music.

Links 

Read Dwandalyn's Profile: https://music.si.edu/dr-dwandalyn-reece 

Read Dwandalyn's edited book "Musical Crossroads: Stories Behind the Objects of African American Music": https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/publications/musical-crossroads

 

Find agency and community within and beyond the academy

A conversation with Andrea Webb and Jillianne Code

Season 3, Episode 6 

PEG Team
Season 3, Episode 6
47:57
 

"What does being a scholar mean to you?"

How do we create learning communities that offer participants the agency to thrive? This question is at the heart of our “Beyond the Academy” research initiative, in partnership with researchers Andrea Webb and Jillianne Code at the University of British Columbia. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we have gathered insights from professional learners who know firsthand what it means to teach, be taught and co-create knowledge: PhD Students and alumni. In this episode, we share some of our findings, implications, and next steps for this ongoing work. 

Topics covered in this episode include: 

  • What does being a scholar mean to you? 
  • Professional agency within and beyond the academy 
  • Communities of practice and the benefits of building a constellation of communities 

Speaker Bios 

Dr. Andrea Webb spent a decade as a classroom teacher and department head before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold Concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education.  

Dr. Jillianne Code is a Canadian researcher, educator, and learning scientist specializing in learner agency, online learning technologies, and the impact of social media on student success and well-being. As the Director of the ALIVE Research Lab at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Code studies agency ‘unbundled’ from formal education, including video games, virtual reality, technology education, and social media communities. 

Links

Learn more about our UBC/Hikma research partnership: www.hikma.studio/research 

Follow ALIVE Research Lab: https://alivelab.ca

Gratitude

Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world. Wherever you are, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

Our work would not be possible without the generous encouragement, labor, and funding of many. We thank our past and present team members, speakers, mentors, funders, and Hikma Collective members for making this work possible.

Our first season features guest speakers from our Summer 2020 course, Entrepreneurship for PhDs. This program brought together a cohort of creative and generous emerging scholars and speakers across academia, industry, and the social sector. The participants and speakers in this course inspired and built the foundations for our learning community, the Hikma Collective.

This podcast weaves together the ideas and contributions of Hikma team members, many of whom have enriched our work as students and consultants: Simangele Mabena,  Ai Mizuta, Matthew Tomkinson, Nadia Sasso, Amanda Bohne, Chiara de Silva, Nicole Markland, Dasharah Green, Eufemia Baldassarre, and Sophia van Hees .

At Hikma, we are committed to supporting emerging scholars and practitioners through our internships, made possible with the generous support of our partners and funders. The following organizations have supported this podcast by funding past and present members of the Hikma team. We thank them for their investment in creative, outstanding people who have enriched and amplified our work.