Flow

Julie Sondra Decker shows how asexuals are silenced when denied as a “real” orientation, not divergent enough by queer groups, or overlooked by some sex-positive advocates. We look at how silencing then reverberates in TV shows, institutions and personal violence. But how has the scene been changing? And what can we do about it through our conversations? Julie is a leader and advocate in the asexual or Ace community and author of The Invisible Orientation. Sources we mention include: the Trevor Project, Asexual and Visibility Education Network, Asexual Outreach in Toronto, and Julie`s YouTube channel, "Letters to an Asexual."   Julie further recommends... - "Ace Dad Advice" (Cody Daigle-Orians) on TikTok, their book, I Am Ace, because of their positive and mature perspective; -Yasmin Benoit, an asexual model at the forefront of visibility efforts, who responds to the intersection of asexuality and people of color and sex positivity, and being sexy while not desiring sex; -TAAAP (The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project, https://taaap.org/) and their book, Ace and Aro Journeys; -the TV show “Heartstopper” for its Ace discovery journey.

Best-selling author David Sax joins me to discuss "analog” as in non-digital conversations and why he believes face-to-face conversations will always be a must in a truly human world. As everyone lived the lockdown phases of pandemic, we all went through similar experiences of being isolated from family and friends, colleagues and classmates and even acquaintances and strangers who aren’t part of our social circle. So when we turned to platforms like Zoom and WhatsApp to fill the void, while they may have been a lifeline, we realized these digital exchanges were not quite the utopia we may have once believed. David brings to light why. Why we were left wanting, sometimes bored, and often zonked out. Beyond the blips of unstable eye contact, static and audio lags, crucial conversation drivers are missing. As he quotes Darren Wisdom in his book, digital chats are more like a "series of statements" than the push and pull, back and forth, the flow of the real thing. Finally, we look at the decline of in-person conversation and why we should care. When I learned that his position has generated some pushback, I was curious about what was going on. I ask him to clarify his thoughts on digital usage for those separated by distance (like he and I during this chat!) or those dealing with limited mobility. David Sax`s latest book is The Future is Analog (2022). David recommends... camping in Parque Fjords du Saguenay, something about that place is so majestic and inspirational, even in the pouring rain.

Bruce Kuwabara, one of Canada’s leading architects, makes stories — stories full of characters and rich with themes. Today he joins me to discuss how he crafts multi-layered stories and enables dialogue through his built spaces. That dialogue begins in the earliest stages of designing a new building. It continues through cultivating connections with the past while serving, sometimes showcasing, the current occupants of a building. Yet, perhaps more than other kinds of conversation, architectural themes resonate far into the future, as long as the structures endure, literally shaping how we will relate to each other. Though his work at KPMB Architects is aesthetically and formally stunning, I learn that Bruce’s commitment to architecture stems from a consideration of the people who will animate it, inside and out. He channels his voice and those of others through wood, concrete and triple-glazed windows to build meeting places that house our ideals, invigorate our public life, and invite us, all of us, in.

Bruce Kuwabara is founding partner of KPMB Architects and the Chair of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Among other awards, he has been recognized with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal and the Officer of the Order of Canada for shaping “our built landscape in lasting ways.” You may find Bruce`s works, including the ones we discuss – the National Ballet of Canada, Boston University, Manitoba Hydro, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and the Global Centre for Pluralism – at kpmb.com Bruce recommends... Hanya Yanagihara`s novel A Little Life and her articles in the New York Times on friendships and dinners, for example, “The Wayward Joy of the Dinner Party” from Dec. 2, 2022. And for visiting, he recommends The Darling Foundry, a visual arts centre in Montreal, and Peter Zumthor`s Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland.

Sandi Mann helps us confront one of our deepest fears in conversation: am I boring?!  And its twin, what to do when someone is boring us! Like you, I'm sure, I have been bored and sometimes I`ve been caught in conversation with someone one might call a bore. But the more I have studied this phenomenon, the more I got pulled in to learn more. My first guest this season Haesun Moon awakened me to the fact that we can`t always be right in reading someone`s cues of boredom... sometimes a yawn is just a yawn.  And my next guest, Nick Epley echoed Haesun in that the most accurate way to find out how someone else feels about your conversation is to ask them.  Which may not always be that easy to do when you are talking about boredom! Sandi Mann fills in the gap on this topic because she has done much of that leg work in her research, directly asking people what makes them bored in conversation. We discuss which characteristics top the charts in making conversation boring: some may seem obvious, some counterintuitive. What is cool about Sandi`s take here goes beyond learning how we as speakers may avoid being boring ourselves, to why we instinctively want to do so! She also helps us discover how we, as listeners, may manage these sometimes-trying moments. Sandi Mann is the Director of The Mind Training Clinic in Manchester, Senior Psychology Lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, and author. Her latest book is The Science of Boredom.  Sandi recommends… when not in conversation letting your mind wander, whether losing yourself in swimming or creating art, such as adult colouring or the simple but joyful works of deco patch. Thanks to the VCTA for their suppport for this episode.

Anne-Marie Lafortune joins me to talk about authentic conversations in a second language. Maybe this is something, being summertime, that makes me think of travel. This year the numbers on international travel are up and we see how ardently people are wanting to explore and connect, even in the face of flight delays and lost luggage. There is no doubt that learning a language helps us explore distant lands and cultures.

My own trip a few years back to South Africa, a country of 11 official languages, had me reading the local writers and among them, this gem from Trevor Noah:

Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being” (qtd in Born a Crime).

Anne-Marie will explain how, no matter if we are old or young, introvert or extrovert, we all can get closer to that heartfelt connection through conversation in a second language, even while at home. But if practice is key, it is not always easy to find conversation partners! And it can be downright intimidating when trying to find your words in another language.

Having taught English as a Second Language (ESL) in Korea, France and Australia, now as a professor at Gaspé Peninsula and the Islands College in Quebec (or Cégep de la Gaspésie et des îles), Anne-Marie has created a new possibility of conversation exchange for learners through the platform www.worldchat.live. With this platform, as students connect to non-native speakers from the four corners of the globe, she reflects on the benefits of these exchanges, going far beyond grammar, that open up the empathic world of knowing other peoples and, ultimately, becoming a better person.

Anne-Marie has received the 2018 award from the Canadian Association for Teacher Education and is working on the impact of distance education and Community of Inquiry. I first came to hear about her projects in the cafeteria line-up from a mutual colleague and I am very grateful for what I have learned since. I invited her to come on the show as soon as we met with my own hope that her words may reawaken, as Mandela says, speaking to the “heart” through each others` languages.

Anne-Marie recommends... How Learning Works, by Susan A Ambrose et al; Why Don’t Students Like School, by Daniel T. Willingham; If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Will Eat the Students!, by Neila A. Connors; Happy Teachers Change the World, by Thich Nhat Hanh and Katherine Weare.

With social historian Nicholas Terpstra, professor at University of Toronto, we go into the problem of drawing out erased voices of the past, a conversation mediated by manuscripts and transposed over time. We focus our attention on the case of a Renaissance orphanage for young girls, The Pieta, where the girls were dying in frighteningly high numbers. That conversation is filled with a panoply of sources from a broad company of figures: women and men, surviving orphans, caretakers, bookkeepers, patricians and tax officials. With writers fulfilling different roles, and spurred on by different motives, the reader of manuscripts has to suss out who is diligent and reliable, and who evasive or silent. Beyond what is expressly said, we learn an attentive reader has to fill in the gaps of manuscripts gone missing (or recycled), and that the physicality of manuscripts can sometimes help elaborate on these questions. Nick, who has spent his career giving voice to the voiceless in history, takes us along these conversations, which became an ongoing back-and-forth between the girls, caretakers, and officials of Renaissance Florence, and himself, his research assistants (like me) and other collaborators today. Of Nick`s numerous works, we refer to Abandoned Children of the Renaissance, The Art of Executing Well, Lost Girls, Lives Uncovered: A Sourcebook of Everyday Life in Early Modern Europe and his digital humanities project, DECIMA, which contributed to the suite of smartphone apps (Hidden Cities) that present historical walking tours of early modern cities. Nick recommends… a novel, a memoir and a popular history: The Children`s Book (2009) by A.S. Byatt, where you`ll get totally transfixed by the interconnections of families in England as the First World War advances; an astonishing memoir of the Holocaust, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (2010); and Vermeer`s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the World (2009), by China historian Tim Brook, who tells the history of global trade, taking off from a painting of Vermeer in each chapter. Send us your comments! https://anchor.fm/sheila-das/message

Journalist and writer Anna Goldfarb leads us through both the pitfalls and the fun of conversation on that all important first date. We explore in particular how to cope with the altered dating scene within the current backdrop of the pandemic. I think this is such an important topic at this time, for singles and couples alike, because it is a reminder of that deep human drive to have intimate connections, whether a serious love relationship or a light romance. At the same time, in these endless Covid waves, a relationship can give us that hand to hold to help us through hard times. With humour and understanding, Anna infuses her positivity into how we can improve our chances of getting there by adding thoughtful tweaks to our approaches or by bouncing back from fumbles.  And who doesn`t want to up their conversational game? Be it with those we already love or those we hope to love someday.

I first discovered Anna Goldfarb through her work in the New York Times where her compassion for people struggling through Covid, especially singles, was palpable. Still super relevant is her piece on how to avoid dismissive positivity: "What to say when people tell you their coronavirus fears" (NYT, July 3, 2020). In addition, she has written articles for Vice, Vox, Time magazine (upcoming), and her first book, chronicling her own romantic misadventures: Clearly, I didn`t think this through. She has another book in the works on how to be a remarkable friend. Find Anna on Twitter: @AnnaGoldfarb.

Anna recommends... How Not to Die Alone (2021) by Logan Ury.

Marcel Danesi discusses with me the semiotics of teen talk in a moment of major transition, as we are moving more and more from face-to-face conversations and print culture to a digital world. Drawing on Giambattista Vico, he starts by identifying teenage speech as a veritable dialect meant to distinguish itself from the adult world as well as consolidate identities within peer groups. We then move to the digital communications that dominate teenage conversations today in texts, Instagram, and TikTok, and explore how the brevity, rapidity and universality that characterize these media may affect belonging and also meaning. At the same time, Marcel indicates the rich emotional texture emojis can weave into these verbal-visual exchanges, both in intimate and professional messages. Now professor emeritus of University of Toronto's Department of Anthropology, Marcel ignited my own interest in Vico when he was my Italian linguistics professor in undergrad (!). Among the numerous books he has written on youth culture and semiotics, I want to signal, Cool: the Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, The Semiotics of the Emoji, and Geeks, Goths, and Gangstas and Understanding Nonverbal Communication.

Marcel recommends... Understanding Media (1964) by Marschall McLuhan and La scienza nuova (1744) by Giambattista Vico.

Laura Bourjolly, who has spent the last 10 years working for various international NGOs, recounts her personal experience in overcoming hurdles listening to locals in the context of humanitarian work. Regularly navigating linguistic and cultural differences in low resource areas or conflict zones — from Togo, Malawi, Haiti, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza and Afghanistan — she shares with Sheila how she learns customs and insights from local staff, receives outpourings of struggle and trauma from community members, as well as maintains essential relationships with family and friends back home.

Laura recommends... seeking out locals in their own voices, directly, wherever they are: books, news articles, Twitter, Instagram, films and documentaries.

Dylan Reid explains to Sheila how public space can encourage unexpected encounters and thriving community life. From basic courtesies, small talk, to the buzz of conversation, he explores how talk happens and its effect on us when we are out and about. Key elements of city design that foster these exchanges are outlined as are some ideas we may adopt to foster greater inclusion in public space. Dylan dips into historical perspectives as well to compare how negotiating trust with different communities occurred in earlier times. Dylan is Executive Editor of Spacing, co-founder of Walk Toronto, author of Toronto Public Etiquette Guide, and "To Speak Well and Prudently" in Communication by Performance (1200-1700).

Dylan Reid recommends... "Why complexity improves the quality of city life," in Urban Age by Richard Sennett, and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, by William Whyte.