Interview 1_Introduction

All right well uh hi everyone uh we have uh dr stephen downing and uh james uh walsh with us today uh two of your professors that you probably will see throughout this year in some of your other classes as well uh we thought we'll have a little chat since this is the first uh sort of lecture that we're gonna have online uh we thought i'll uh i thought i'd take sort of advantage And uh start the conversation with maybe some discussion about uh what you guys think is important and for students to take into consideration

when they're doing these sort of online learning uh opportunities and uh sort of how you would imagine yourself uh learning in this environment and then maybe from there we can move on to more Sort of topic related uh issues how do you guys feel about that sure yeah it works for me all right so take it away i just i just posted a video to my course uh youtube page kind of about this so i guess i'll start um i i'm approaching the teaching and learning experience as basically um not too dissimilar from a normal

Semester in that you you know students you're going to be doing really the same thing you would be conventionally in terms of reading materials um probably finding your own scholarly materials to consult related to the course topics and then you're either going to be watching lectures or participating in some sort of lecture Discussion so i think the idea that online learning is radically different from traditional learning might be quite overstated and that's based on my experience preparing a course and and having taught a couple of courses online in the past so i think i mean

that might be an oversimplification i'm sure people who study um teaching and learning might have a more nuanced uh and sort of Elaborate take on it but as far as i can see i think a student could very well approach this semester and any semester going forward that's online as you know they're doing really the same stuff they normally would but instead of commuting to campus they're hopping on their computer to watch a lecture so i think what You're missing is some sort of um physical face-to-face kind of whatever dimensions that brings into the learning

uh process whether it's kind of subtle you know nonverbal cues or or kind of interpersonal things those are obviously difficult to replicate in an online environment but i don't think those you know while those kind of dimensions Might be um in some ways important to the learning process that i'm not familiar with because i think you'd have to probably be like a a researcher in that area to really understand that i think i'm telling my students to approach this as you would a normal class like don't don't overthink it in terms of oh this is

some kind of like paradigm Shift and i have to reimagine how i'm learning so i'm i'm that's how i'm framing it and that's how i'm approaching it in terms of i'm not thinking of this as like a paradigm shift and how i teach either like when i log on and i do lectures or i engage in discussion i'm not going to change my style really too much i'm not going to change What i do in the classroom so to speak i mean i'm going to talk about the same material in the same ways so i

guess that's sort of a strange answer in some ways is that i don't think it's that different i mean i think there's something intangible perhaps missing um but at the same time you do gain like as a professor i can have lots of materials like at my Disposal as i'm lecturing or engaging in discussion that in the classroom you know you can have no lecture notes and that kind of thing um but i feel like as i'm you know i can i can kind of have these things spread out across a couple of monitors or

something and like with our talk today i've got you know a few journal articles open and you could do the same thing i guess in a physical sense in the classroom but I find it a little bit easier and you can kind of switch through things so i find it lens some flexibility in my teaching we'll see how that plays out i think um as a student you can take advantage of the same thing and if you're on your computer i mean you can have the reading up as you're listening to the lecture or as

you're engaging a discussion or if you Can't come to virtual office hours you can have your paper you can have your stuff up right there in front of you so i think there are certain things you can take advantage of with the technology that kind of balance out the lack of those intangibles that you get in a face-to-face environment so i'm not too worried about it i think the the thing to avoid is Psyching oneself out and thinking that this is some uh radically different thing and and uh really i i don't think it will

be i'm not sure what other professors are doing but most people i've talked to are kind of approaching it as you know i'm going to put the same materials online the the assignment structure will be pretty close to what it was before And then the interaction with students might change a little bit but you know you still have opportunities to discuss things with your professor in various contexts so um yeah sure you know the short answer is i don't think we're going to i don't think going online for a semester or two will in any

way kind of change the quality or the scope of the Education that you get um i think it will just kind of alter kind of the interpersonal dynamics of how that education plays out yeah i i mean i i tend to agree with with what's what you're saying stephen um and stephen just you're you're teaching uh a live synchronous class is that correct yeah i'm doing one hour synchronous Each week okay and then i'm putting on it could be i'm not sure how long it'll be yet but probably anywhere from half an hour to an

hour that'll be more of a lecture format where i address um sort of questions and concepts that maybe were overlooked um during the synchronous part yeah i mean essentially i'm i'm like you said i i wouldn't say that my classes are like Substantially different in terms of the the substance the content itself the main thing that and i think there's there's you know strengths and kind of weaknesses to the online model my courses are entirely uh well they're not entirely asynchronous lecture itself is going to be asynchronous i'll have and and lectures themselves because we're

unfortunately Losing kind of the opportunity for in-class discussion you know group work people being able to like follow up to a statement that i make with with questions or statements so on you know lectures wind up being quite a bit shorter so i built in like a voluntary basically kind of live town hall office hours that i'm inviting students to show up to hopefully those will be well attended uh You know we'll see but but that kind of provides an opportunity not just to interact with me but to not feel kind of isolated where you

do get to see other other students you know build something of kind of a sense of community or so on uh so that that unfortunately i think is something that you know folks may potentially miss out one of the benefits of this approach is is you know i i remember hearing like a Couple years ago they did a survey on campus about people's commuting and it sounds like i believe this applies to faculty as much as students the majority of folks commute at least an hour to get to campus so all of that time is

going to be freed up uh for for some students at least uh and and that may you know be useful but i think there is going to be that you know some of the missed opportunity for kind of interaction and i think it's Really really incumbent on on students to you know be proactive uh you know not not to fall behind not to procrastinate because i for for my courses you know knowing kind of all the uncertainty and unpredictability with covid like we don't know if there's going to be a second wave if things may

be shut down again but because of that i've i've been a bit more flexible with kind of due dates and Stuff i have recommended due dates which if we were meeting in person in class would be firm deadlines i'm giving students some kind of leeway in terms of when they submit stuff but i'm i'm a little worried uh that folks may take that as a license to procrastinate so i think it's important that that you know for students at least you know not falling behind But at the same time being proactive about getting in touch

with your your professors um and and trying to meet with them during office hours or reaching out if you have an issue uh you know so unfortunately those kind of interactions that would kind of happen organically within the classroom um you know some of that may be limited by by the setup and that that's my main main concern but i think there are Benefits to this approach but there are also potential you know drawbacks as well yeah and i think the temptation to procrastinate is real um i was talking to dr uh harrell jordan harrell

um just yesterday about how he's setting up his courses and um one of the things we kind of talked about was i guess it was what 19 ish years ago when i was taking online courses Uh or i took a couple of online courses as an undergrad and there were no there was no video it was really basically you had um like readings that you had to do and then you had to do tests like and it was self-paced and you basically had 10 sort of modules where there was a reading attached to each module

and then there was a test and that was the entire class there were No lectures there was really no engagement with the instructor outside of like if you had a question or something you you would email them um and of course i waited until the last week to do all ten modules um and which meant of course how did you wind up performing i mean i think i made like a c um so i passed the course so i mean that's I i think of that in terms of both you know the warning against procrastinating

because i think if i had actually doled out my time across the semester for each module obviously i would have done quite a bit better in the course but then um i i did in spite of both you know the absence of like interactivity with the faculty as well as my own procrastination i still Learned things i mean that's kind of what i was telling jordan is even in that you know model 2 almost 20 years ago where it was just you're reading things and you're taking quizzes um i did i did absorb some information

and i did learn things that you know i was able to kind of apply in future classes so i think given that we have kind of video And we have these ways to interact to some extent in real time i really you know from an anecdotal perspective i think our students if our goal is for learning to take place in our classes like there's absolutely no reason to think that that can't and won't happen in an online environment but the procrastination thing i think yeah that's that's a A serious concern and but on the other

hand it's an opportunity for students to you know experience uh an environment where they're they have to take a little bit more control over their own time management and i think that's one of the things we can work through you know with students and and the reality is by all accounts from what i'm reading even though the pandemic will end This transition to more remote working and working that doesn't necessarily fit within a nine to five you're in an office or you're in a work environment paradigm is clearly going to be a trend so i

think having an opportunity to kind of uh adjust to and develop some sort of self-discipline in that environment is is something students probably will benefit from and probably should experience regardless so I think there's ways you can kind of interpret this as a a positive learning experience in that in that sense no absolutely i think anyone who's going to be going into like grad school law school or i mean this would not apply to like the labor market in general but kind of knowledge work within the labor market at least absolutely you're not going to

have like a very structured you know syllabus That you're going to be following you are absolutely going to have to be setting deadlines setting your own schedule and getting the work done so this is kind of a you know sort of a preview of what's to come i guess for for quite a few of the students um that kind of uh need in the labor market these days also extends to people are just interested in advancing In an even office environment right that the amount of information and the amount of learning that needs to happen

and the amount of people who have you know their fingers in multiple pies in the office environment i feel that the secret to success going forward from this point on is to become self-motivated that if you're not self-motivated it's hard to succeed beyond kind of the Minimal level uh one thing that sort of striked me when james was talking i i have similar concerns about sort of this face-to-face interaction now for example in a classroom environment i could even for example if i'm making a comment i could see on my students faces if i'm losing

someone or if they disagree but they don't want to say anything then i could address the issue Right now i can't see their faces and i have wondered how to encourage my students to basically sort of send me an email or you know uh post a message or something saying you know i was listening to your lecture and this part didn't make any sense to me whatsoever i totally disagree what you have to say and this is why because it happens in a classroom it happens in a very organic way i want i've worried that

online it Might come across as just confrontational therefore they wouldn't want to do it so i don't know how to encourage that you see no and and also just the sheer awkwardness of not talking to human faces but to a webcam it's in in forgetting you're probably going to see this in the video today forgetting to look at the camera as opposed to like the monitor or the wall Or whatever um and i'm recording all my lectures and i've seen some of them i'm not going to go back and record them but just heads up

guys some of them i i look a little awkward like kind of not again not looking at the screen moving my head all over the place yeah i mean yeah i think i know i i think you definitely will when you put these videos online you look at yourself and you For example and i've done streaming and stuff like uh outside of you know just for gaming and stuff and um you notice like the thing about moving your head a lot or like i i guess i move around a lot well when i'm in the

classroom i'm walking all over the place and i tend to be in a chair so i'm doing i don't know yeah yeah and i i but i mean i think to speak to the lack of kind of the Nonverbal cues and that that sort of thing i think on the one hand that's definitely true but on the other even you know i i think people misinterpret nonverbal cues all the time so i think in some sense you know we look out and we think oh our students are um you know bored or they're disinterested but

it turns out they're actually Listening intently i've had this happen where i've said things like oh i guess you know like are you all following this or you know is this you know am i losing you and students say no we're listening so i think there's something to be said for not having those cues present because then if you've got an idea you're running with or you've got an important point you Don't kind of stop yourself because you imagine that people aren't listening or that you need to so i think again it's there is sort

of an advantage to it as well that might balance out some of that but certainly i think and the one thing i noticed is i turned on closed captions for my video um just you know to test it out to see what it looked like in terms of accessibility and stuff And it's amazing you look at when you lecture you obviously don't have a transcript of your lecture [Music] following or at any point and i thought you know i i said oh do i use so many fillers the times i said the number of times

i said um was like shocking um so it actually in some ways it made me think about how i speak and how i Deliver material so i think in that way it might actually make us all better lectures when we get back because we'll be more cognizant of how we look and how we sound so we probably don't have futures as as news anchors well maybe maybe i'll go to work for the tabloids so yeah i mean i'm taking sort of a deliberately optimistic approach to it because my perspective is Why not i mean going

into it with sort of an attitude of we're just going to survive this i don't think is necessarily the best approach because it's not going to be fun to just survive something for anywhere from 12 to 24 weeks i think no i agree i think it's good to have this attitude of listen let's just have fun with what we have rather than i mean we were in Survival mode at the end of last term those who took summer classes we were in survival mode a little bit at this point i feel like it's good for

us to think of it as well this is the new normal at least for the next couple of semesters uh hopefully a vaccine will come out by next summer or whatever uh i guess sort of from here i want to move i guess a little bit it's a good segment to move into Kind of discussion of legitimate uh sort of uh academia uh so i'm gonna do that and maybe if we have time we can come back a little bit to highest how we would imagine the students need to because i feel like we all

test students in the same way we don't have multiple choice tests necessarily in most of our classes uh so you know hobby how students should think about A learning for a this type of class i think is important because at least my students their third years a lot of them in first and second year have taken courses that has been almost exclusively multiple choice uh so i think it's a new shift in thinking as well right that how do you learn for a class in which your professor says just tell me what you learned this

week as a reflection How do you listen to a lecture for that how many how do you use facts on that uh so i guess my uh next question is about our position in academia in a classroom and uh that's something that i know the three of us have talked quite a lot about how do we convince the students that we are legitimate kind of conveyors of knowledge how do we you know in a date in an era of facts or dime a dozen And you know uh for example you know yesterday the press secretary

of the president of united states tweeted a obviously doctored video as truth which one is this now this is the one that joe biden had fallen asleep oh okay okay or some that was clearly doctored everyone knew its doctor it has been debunked so days before uh but here we are at the same time we have a students who Say listen i have lived a particular life experiences for example i have lived as a poor person i have lived as a black person i have lived as a woman i have lived as a member of

a lgbt plus community or on the other hand i have lived as a child of a police officer i have lived as a child of a you know gun right activist or i am a gun rights activist so i'm i want to be a police officer so we have These students who have different lived experiences and different views on it how do we convince our students that these classes and these discussions are actually legitimate discussions to have these are legitimate points to discuss that this is not another sort of you know reddit discussion of everybody

can scream at each other online on a discussion post for our class And then we'll call the discussion how do we legitimize that process in academia i mean i think part of it i mean i i'm this this is going beyond my own classes although i did used to like teach data analysis but i think a lot of kind of the legitimacy of kind of academic inquiry is is you know probably established in you know kind of the second year classes that folks are taking research methods Data analysis the idea that there is a kind

of systematic process that we follow when we generate you know knowledge and that there's like an appropriate way to kind of evaluate evidence draw conclusions from that evidence and so on um you know we i mean in kind of data analysis and so on you talk about this in terms of the scientific method but also add things like you know Critical thinking you know properly sourcing arguments you know so on and also um i mean this goes a little beyond academia but i think speaks to what you were talking about earlier in terms of the

question sort of fake news deep fakes doctored videos so on this question of sort of uh media literacy and uh knowing when somebody has kind of the the I i hesitate to like credibility and authority to speak on a certain you know matter so so you know evaluating things based on who's saying them why did they say them are they trying to push an agenda you know so on and and so forth so i think that's you know and something that i obviously sort of stress in my classes you know i mean part of this

is kind of implicit in the assignments you know i ask you to Draw on like outside sources i don't mean just some random person but you know an academic who's been trained and and you know knows something about the subject matter but also knows how to gather and kind of evaluate you know evidence um yeah so that's that's you know something to keep in mind and when i say evidence i don't just mean that we have to be Talking about kind of facts in sort of the pure objective scientific sense we can also be talking

about you know hearing the perspectives of people from certain you know backgrounds and and trying to kind of triangulate our or sort of a s or the data that we're drawing on so it's not just you know statistics from government but also maybe the claims of somebody living in uh you know an impoverished You know community or community that's experienced you know police brutality uh directly but but knowing that there's multiple ways to kind of draw sources draw conclusions from that and being aware that you know no single perspective on its own is likely to

get it right there's value in trying to combine multiple sources of evidence to try and Develop a more sort of holistic uh view and i think it's also um important to a degree uh when when you're trying to you know play the role of kind of the academic and the analyst to try and this is never entirely possible uh we can never entirely kind of distance ourselves or be entirely neutral when we approach these sorts of topics Um but to try and assess things um in more of of uh uh sort of intellectual as opposed

to kind of emotional you know sense to try and you know that's not to say that we have to be entirely heartless when we look at these things but not to like kind of our preconceived sort of notions about a topic get the better of us um so i mean i'll just kind of end in there that's just some initial You know thoughts on on that kind of matter i guess um yeah i mean i would agree james in the sense that well for me my my kind of initial thought when when you posed this

question in mirror was that it this is a this is a this is the same question that methodologists basically pursue as the core of of what we do and it's the question of legitimacy Um and the reality is that at least in the social sciences and especially as a quality or even as a quantitative scholar you're essentially trying to um analyze a set of lived experiences so i think i usually tell my student like you know yours your experience as um someone who lived this particular life or has this particular you know sort of set

of uh encounters or Experiences throughout that life that is one piece of a larger uh collective of lived experiences so for example you know if you have a particular set of experiences with the police that would be part of if someone were to look at you know uh citizen police interaction your experience with the police as a citizen would be Part of a larger sort of uh analysis of of people's experiences with the police and that's this is where we get into those methodological and analytical problems of well what if two people or what if

a hundred people have very different experiences and that's where i think what james is talking about in terms of training in terms of how we analyze those things and the tools We apply to kind of uh recognizing themes and patterns in those experiences that's the distinction between like an anecdote and then a um a scholarly sort of assessment of a phenomenon but a scholarly assessment of a phenomenon is really an assessment of a large number of anecdotes so i think that's where you run into sort of a an opportunity for people to challenge you and

say well You know what my experience differs drastically from what you sort of framed as the average experience and i i think i would say to them well that's fine that doesn't invalidate my conclusions or or sort of their an average means that this is an average and people will people's experiences will deviate from the average but uh and it becomes particularly hard when we Look at qualitative assessments because we as a qualitative researcher you sort of have an obligation to acknowledge and even incorporate sort of those um those experiences that fall outside of the

norm um and you have to make sense of you know why certain people have had such different experiences um so i you know i was looking at a couple of Articles i've written um to prepare to talk about sort of police uh you know the future policing that kind of thing and in one of the projects literally everyone said they they didn't trust the police so i sort of faced the opposite problem like when you're a researcher particularly a qualitative researcher and everyone says the same thing Then you say well what am i going to

write about i can't just write one sentence and say no one trusts the police like you have to try and dig in a little bit deeper and say okay well what are the different maybe they have different reasons for distrusting the police or maybe there's distrust exist on a spectrum and where one falls on this spectrum affects their Behavior in maybe subtle or not so subtle ways so it really is a systematic i think the distinction is taking a uh you know someone who's generating evidence as opposed to an anecdote is taking a systematic approach

to analyzing multiple perspectives or even if you're doing a case study you're bringing in multiple dimensions And perspectives of the same case so you're looking at a phenomenon from multiple angles but i assign an article to my students like the first or second week of the advanced qualitative course that is about how we analyze the rigor of qualitative research and one of the kind of metrics that's discussed is for example resonance so how uh how does one's story or how does one sort of Presentation of evidence resonate with a particular audience so you could say

for example that you know you write an article you present some evidence through that article that resonates very well with a community but doesn't resonate particularly well with policy makers so you could say well both of those you know they're both valuable but they're valuable perhaps in A different way and in a different context so i think it's part of being a scholar and being a critical thinker is being able to sit back and not eliminate your bias but this is what reflexivity is is saying i recognize my biases and i understand how my biases

are affecting my interpretation of the evidence in front of me and being able to Kind of express an understanding of that process and again it's all about i really you know not to oversimplify it but i think it is about understanding methodology and because methodology is the study of methods um and so if you interrogate your method of arriving at a conclusion that's really what's important and i think that's what we're asking students to do is interrogate How they arrive at the conclusions they do and if you're if you arrive at the conclusion you do

about for example um you know police citizen interactions by looking at your own experience and saying i had this experience therefore all people have had this experience i think that is a it's not a methodological or a rigorous uh methodological way to arrive at that conclusion And i think that's where we you know that's really what the process of teaching students about methods is all about sorry my microphone was muted uh i i totally agree uh and i'm sort of kind of wondering are you guys worried about uh do you guys uh are you guys

worried about discussion posts online and how those can evolve into something wonderful devolve Into you know uh another screaming match that we are all used to seeing on you know places like facebook or twitter or reddit and how should the students think about the difference between a discussion post that's for class and a discussion that they have online with someone on facebook or on reddit on twitter or wherever it is that people are Discussion fair enough uh so so you guys are planning on having kind of a forum online for them to discuss issues from

the class okay i i guess for i mean for my classes i'd it's more i'm asking them to provide like journal entries so not necessarily engaging with each other that's more what sort of the town hall was meant for uh just so i'd kind of be there as sort of a mediator for any discussions Um but yeah that's i mean that's a good good point and i think one thing that maybe we don't emphasize enough with undergraduate students i think it's absolutely something that we tell our graduate students is you know there are sort of

norms of kind of civility that should govern kind of academic you know conversations um you know treating each other with with you know respect and Dignity and not necessarily you know kind of respectful disagreements um you know i mean and the main difference is that there's no kind of i mean there are kind of codes of conduct for reddit you can't make violent threats so on and so forth but in terms of incivility being rude name-calling all of that sort of permitted that that really has no place within you know academia so i mean that's

kind Of the you know main difference and one thing that i think you know hopefully uh is going to prevent those sorts of interactions from occurring uh you know you know within kind of a the the space of like the the web pages for the courses is that it's not an anonymous you know forum people know who each other are and and you know i think that's going to Kind of prevent some of that uh and to be fair i've never really had an issue with with students being like disrespectful to each other although i

haven't haven't really used online message boards so just throwing that out there yeah i'm i'm limiting discussion to the the live kind of synchronous part i i initially planned to set up a forum just in case students wanted to use it i usually even in a face-to-face Class i have a forum on blackboard or canvas or whatever um and students never use it um i i think um i i and and the reason i'm not having one is that i don't really want to have to moderate it um i a because i i really don't

like the idea of moderating people's thoughts and discussions but b it could become Kind of taxing for me to have to read through everything and see if people are being civil but yeah i agree with james in that i mean you're a student so you're you're given a particular kind of uh latitude in terms of professional expectations compared to us i think we this this is in fact you know our paid uh profession um so we have to be extra Cognizant of those professional standards um but as a student you're kind of being you're you're

being a knock you know you're being uh pulled into that professional environment and you do you are kind of also bound or or at least expected to um adhere to some extent to those professional um norms Um and i also agree about the accountability in terms of it it's not an anonymous environment like you would have in another um kind of forum environment um but i think yeah that's the the the last thing i would say is we always talk about kind of the higher education as being like a safe space to share ideas and

i think if you want to participate in a safe space You have to also kind of abide by the same um uh approaches that facilitate a safe space so if you say i want to be able to share my ideas without feeling attacked or vulnerable you also probably shouldn't attack other people's ideas or make other people feel vulnerable because of the ideas they've shared i think that we live in a particularly Culturally and politically charged environment so i think there you run into that question of well what if someone's ideas what if they're espousing a

hateful perspective or what if they're saying something that is sort of tacitly racist or sexist or or xenophobic in some way uh then what is the right reaction and i think that kind of opens up a whole nother can of worms in terms of You know i think that's the rationale a lot of people use on twitter and reddit and all these other uh platforms is if someone says something hateful they should be called out in a very direct and sometimes adversarial way and i think that's a discussion that you could really get into in

kind of a granular way about um how much room there is for just straight up calling someone out In an academic environment so you have to balance that with this idea of a safe space where people can openly share ideas and that i mean this i don't want to get you probably don't want to get into this but i mean this is kind of the question about like bringing certain speakers on campus is well are we truly an open forum for all ideas or do we have particular alignments or perspectives that might Make us want

to uh to some extent vet the ideas that are presented um and and that's a large conversation and debate that you know kind of spans beyond this i think yeah i think one one thing to kind of add there too is in terms of like classroom discussions academic discourse i mean at the end of the day this is not like the classroom is not a space for people's kind of hot taste or just kind Of an informed opinion uh like if you're gonna contribute to the discussion it needs to be based on kind of critical

thought you know evidence it and maybe you don't have like statistics on hand but at least kind of like reasoned you know analysis and discourse um and and yeah like i mean you know hate speech has no place in the classroom that's in the academic code of conduct That's going to get shut down real quick uh it's although it's never really been an issue in my my classes per se but um yeah but i think one thing to kind of mention and this this has more to do with kind of disagreements over sort of academic

perspectives even if like you know somebody presents a position you know like a criminological theory that you're kind Of very staunchly opposed to like so these are not really in vogue you're not going to hear really anyone in our faculty embracing them but somebody say uh promoting kind of a biological theory of crime which i think is just you know not as i personally think it's an invalid perspective um you know rather than kind of shutting down that discussion and refusing to Engage with that individual if nothing else kind of engaging with their their ideas

is going to strengthen support for your own kind of position uh and allow you to better kind of counter argue and so on so you know i think as long as the perspective is kind of grounded in an academic research uh that it's potentially worth you know engaging you know with not just saying I refuse to kind of even acknowledge the existence of that in a line of thought uh if nothing else it's gonna help strengthen your own position uh help you better kind of argue for your perspective whatever it it is so you know

to a degree i think engaging with contrary perspective should be viewed as something of kind of an opportunity um to an extent um you know again that's That's not saying that yet it's not saying anything goes you know in the classroom and it has to be kind of grounded on on you know analysis evidence you know so on and and so forth um so yeah i i you know staunchly opposed to kind of the rational choice perspective but i think that that it's valuable to kind of think through its conclusions engaged with that So on

um just yeah throwing that out there and you mentioned a word that i think is very important in what we do that i think makes a distinction between what we do and what some other hard scientists do or what some of our colleagues and some other departments of social sciences do and the word words to this critical look uh you know we are critical sociologists we have critical criminologists here This is a critical criminology department what in your view do we mean by the word critical because one thing i'll tell you why i'm raising this

question because one issue that i'm faced with every year is my students saying to me emir you pick on police you talk about how police is as an institution is racist sexes classes whatever How about the education system how about the healthcare system how about the prison system why don't you pick on them and my answer always is well it's a policing class if this class was on the healthcare system as a critical researcher i'm critical of the left i'm critical of the right i'm just a critical person but then again i've worried that that

might come across to my students as i just disagree with everything you know You tell me something i disagree with it that's what we mean sort of but there is a difference between kind of being you know a good conterrarian a good critical person and just being a smart ass or disagrees with everything that people say how do you guys make that distinction i i think it's hard i think this is something i confronted quite early on even as an undergraduate um and i think i tended to be A bit of a smart ass from

the get-go like i i and i think that's why i did well in university is because i already i came into it already kind of just by default disagreeing with every position and wanting to sort of critically uh detangle things and sort of break them down into their component parts and and and prove that they were wrong Or kind of that sort of thing and i think i see students do that and they often have good intentions but then they kind of uh you know miss the forest through the trees like they kind of are

so focused on i'm gonna i'm gonna break down this idea or i'm gonna disagree with this that they kind of lose sight of the larger maybe theoretical or Conceptual picture that we've gotta you know walk away with some conclusions but this in criminology i mean this was like sort of i think to some extent still uh uh a dilemma within the discipline is that nothing works kind of i remember even in the like early 2000s reading stuff as an undergrad about i think there was even there were at least a few articles i Think there

might have been a book about like nothing works and it was sort of this absolutely and i think that's where you have people like edwin sher i don't i don't know if you're familiar with him he's a radical non-interventionist he's written about this idea for example i think particularly when it relates to youth justice that and and certainly i've seen other articles and scholars who have kind of Presented to some extent some projections based on statistics and different analyses where the argument is like no policy that we've really tried has been particularly effective and there's

lots of reasons why that might be the case but um that actually if we just didn't intervene at all we would be better off so for example it's kind of on the most radical End of that spectrum is the idea of uh like um an abolitionist perspective when it comes to prison or incarceration of any kind and the argument put forward is that depending on the metrics you use to measure outcomes so if you say like on an economic along economic metrics if you abolished uh you know prisons you could say the sort of net

benefit to Uh a government's economy or even to just the economy in general would be positive and then if you measured it along for example safe metrics related to safety in the community i think i've seen pretty compelling arguments that the the consequences of incarcerating large numbers of young men actually leads to uh Worse outcomes in terms of things like community you know collective efficacy for example that actually outweigh um any benefit you might gain in terms of safety specifically from removing for example violent offenders from a community um and there's been a lot of

debates along the same uh you know ways of thinking With respect to for example fathers being incarcerated and whether or not the presence of a criminal parent is better or worse than no parent at all and so these are i mean this is when we say critical thinking like that's those are hard questions to answer and they require very nuanced critical analysis of lots of different pieces of evidence so if we're talking about things like Defunding the police or abolishing you know incarceration i think there are really compelling arguments for those things but then i've

seen compelling arguments against those things and i think part of what being a critical scholar means is that you look at both or maybe not just two it's not just binary there could be many many different perspectives and you try and assess all of the Evidence on the table and see if there's some way to reconcile the differences and sometimes contradictions and to me that's what being a critical thinker and a critical scholar is isn't just that you say everything's trash you say okay we have a goal and the goal might be um you know

a more peaceful society to name something very kind of like grandiose But then you say well based on what we know what are some actual things some some policies we could implement or some trajectories we could take that move us in that direction and that's a that requires critical thought like i again i i don't think it's like some radical thing to be a critical thinker i think you're just evaluating evidence and you're trying to reconcile Uh incongruence between the evidence yeah i mean so much of people's like i mean critical thought at the end

of the day it's just trying to um you know kind of basically as as academics to a degree we are in kind of the business of sort of myth busting in terms of like popular knowledge understandings of crime policing so on and so forth Um you know most people's understanding is based on kind of a series of kind of faulty sort of common sense assumptions uh you know i think most public opinion surveys would suggest uh most individuals have a very warped un understanding of crime people think crime rates are rising they're not they've been

falling since the 1990s that's pretty much you know universal throughout the developed world Uh people also tend to assume that if you just hire more police that's gonna bring down the crime rate evidence you know and this kind of goes to the heart of what you're speaking about when you said you know the sort of nothing works perspectives uh there doesn't seem to be much of um you know direct benefit in having kind of a more expansive sort of police presence per se Um so yeah i think at the end of the day and this

isn't just true for criminology if you're a sociologist talking about things like you know why certain people are impoverished so on and so forth you'd be raising these same sorts of concerns uh most of people's knowledge is not based on uh you know academic research it's based on uh claims that have been made within the media claims that have been made by Politicians or their neighbors or increasingly somebody on facebook you know twitter you know so on uh which may be pushing a variety of agendas that cut against kind of the spirit of the academic

enterprise so you know at the end of the day uh being a critical thinker is is trying to kind of you know sort of i guess you know as in elegant as this sounds trying to kind of Cut through sort of the rhetoric that's out there uh that most people are exposed to on a daily basis and and you know again trying to kind of work with and triangulate multiple sources of evidence trying to you know develop a more kind of broad kind of holistic view of what's what's going on and you know and and

to be fair even doing that Academics you know are in pretty significant disagreement about a lot of these topics as as well and that has everything to do with kind of theoretical perspectives that they're bringing to the table what specific evidence they're looking at you know so on and and so forth so i think one thing that that it can be a little frustrating for folks um you know either as undergraduate Students or graduate students is you know that you know when i was in undergrad thinking that i was going to get kind of a

final definitive answer from my professors and one thing that you learned very quickly is that the ground that we're trying to stand on and survey is constantly shifting it's almost sort of quicksand in terms of we're trying to study this you know very complex systems The social social world social reality that itself is in continual flux and and kind of transformation so you know we can kind of strive to to get kind of an accurate view of what's going on but that view is going to be um you know um you know our our conclusions

are ultimately kind of fleeting and ephemeral because the very thing that we're studying is constantly evolving And and changing and that's another thing that really sets the social scientists apart from sort of the hard you know scientists the laws of gravity you know at least on earth or you know fixed uh but kind of the laws of how society operate there are no laws uh it's it's in somewhat of a sort of chaotic state i guess um you know law is immutable culture is mutable evolving you know so on and And so forth so um

i mean being a critical thinker is is basically appreciating the fact that there's no kind of hard truth with a capital t because you know the world is is in this constant state of of kind of ongoing development and so on and that there aren't necessarily easy answers to a lot of these you know problems unfortunately um yeah yeah i mean i think that's why When we again going back to like methodology if we think about the dimension of time in our research it's one of the hardest things to capture and sort of make sense

of in terms of longitudinality um certainly across i mean that's why you know these longitudinal cohort studies are kind of like the the dream uh approach but they're expensive and they're Notoriously hard to kind of conduct and we don't we don't i would say based on within our discipline i think we see to some extent fewer and fewer of these like big longitudinal cohort studies i'm not sure why i think it could relate to like funding trends and things like that but it's that's another thing that i think students kind of would benefit from Recognizing

is that we also are critical of the the sources of evidence that so for example as a qualitative scholar and and person who teaches qualitative methods i spend a lot of time talking about uh evaluating um methods and sort of teasing out the sort of uh i guess flaws in one's own evidence um and that's i mean if you look at like quantitative research in Um criminology and i think probably the social sciences in general the amount of variance that's explained by the average model is like most students are pretty shocked by how low it

is um so i think when you're explaining like 20 of the variance and that would be considered probably you know decent or if not good um one way to look at that is that you've Got about you know the variables on hand and the way you've kind of measured the relationship between the variables and the the independent and the dependent variable um you know eighty percent of what's happening in that phenomenon you can't explain with your model i think that that's where students kind of say okay then like can't i just bring in my own

Experiences isn't that just as good and you say well no imagine if you know if if we can only explain 20 of the variance and we've got you know 16 000 cases then imagine how much of the variance you're gonna explain with your own one experience i i think that's kind of a reality that and it speaks to what you said james where we we're kind of constantly trying to to Reassess and kind of keep up with this this malleable the malleable nature of uh laws and culture and all these things um and we're doing

so with evidence that often is like five ten years old um if you look at the actual data sets that people are using so it does create this kind of constant uh state where we're trying to catch up we're trying to kind of Get a sense for what's happening now and i think that's frustrating for students too is when you assign an article even if it was published in 2020 and they're saying well like the one question i always get from students is um you know well do you think this would be different if they

looked at data now like i assign an article that looks at um lyrics they're looking at sort of um Particular themes emerging in rap lyrics and students will say well those rap songs are five years old what if they looked at rap songs now like well that's a good question and then you can talk about that and those are sort of um i think the kind of questions you should ask but i don't think you should necessarily reinvent the will every five years and say we're gonna Throw out the baby with the bathwater and we

need new theories we need new methods because then not only are you trying to catch up but you're trying to rebuild and i think that's the problem a lot of students run into is they say the data's old so all the methods and theories and everything are old too i don't i don't think that's necessarily the right approach to take And uh sort of one thing that's one common theme in what you guys were talking about and maybe sort of we can talk about this as the second last thing we're gonna talk about and we

can talk a little bit about how to study i guess uh or you know how we would have gone about it uh one thing that you guys have mentioned that both james alluded to This notion of sort of truth with a capital t and you know stephen's talking about kind of this malleability of culture this is sort of this social constructionists approach to studying the world right and most of us as social science sociologists at least are trained social constructionists unless if you come very from very particular uh background a lot of us have been

Trained in this socially constructed notion and you know i'm a big advocate of it but the problem that i have sometimes is sort of making the distinction for students between a discussion of social constructionist paradigm and this sort of relativistic discus sort of notion that seems to exist in undergrad that you know well everything is just my experience Everything is just relative since everything is socially constructed then it's not real then you know who cares you know if when you say something like for example should we stop female genital mutilation someone puts up their hand

and go well that seems very culturally insensitive what if he reconstructed our head as you know female circumcision now we don't have a problem with it who are we to tell some other culture that Your act is whatever the adjective is how do we kind of how do you guys draw those lines how do you guys draw the line between yeah it's socially constructed everything is socially constructed but i can tell you that this is bad whereas in certain things i can say well although we don't do it this way i guess other cultures are

doing it that way and both are legitimate Or you know it doesn't have to be a culture from outside of our country right it can be various subcultures within our country who do it in a particular way so how do you guys draw those boundaries of legitimacy i guess in a socially constructed world hmm i can take a shot at it while you think james so yeah yeah go ahead i got something right i have a couple things to say but i can I can marinate on the first section okay yeah i mean i think

part of it is there's philosophically there's a distinction between social constructionism and anti-foundationalism so the idea that you come in and you say we're sort of rejecting any foundations that cut across time and place is probably Kind of like a fallacy um maybe not a fallacy i think there is a you know some philosophers have made a case for anti-foundationalism uh but i don't think that's what social constructionists are making a case for so uh i i think you can kind of interrogate kind of the um you know the process by which we arrive at

particular norms Or customs and and all these kind of dimensions of a society and a culture but um those you know there are some things that um cut across um cultures and and and even time um and when it comes to things like um harm and assessing like um the harm of certain behaviors i think that's where um you can you can break it down and you Can look at you know for example um you know female genital mutilation you could say well let's look at you know the harm that's being done to certain people

and we can assess that harm um and then we can weigh real harm against sort of positions that are being put forward in favor of continuing certain practices and so i Think this cuts to almost every issue like if we get around to talk about it talking about policing you could say well you know what is that can we actually assess the harm that's being done by uh for example kind of manifestations of um systematic racism um through policing um and if we assess that harm and then Because the i guess the danger is if

you become completely relativistic and you say well what is harm it's like well at some point if someone is like kneeling on your neck and killing you i think we can say as a as a as a society we agree that that's harmful to someone and that's the part of kind of social constructionism that i think students and and to some extent i think Even scholars sometimes ignore and i i'm really interested in this dimension of social constructionism is the negotiation of like the the construction part there is a process through which kind of meaning

is negotiated um and so you have people bringing different kind of conceptualizations of reality and truth to the table so this is why to some extent i'm not particularly worried About this marketplace of ideas and this plurality of truth that we're seeing right now in the public discourse on twitter and all these things because it is a process through which we arrive at some set of uh understanding or agreements about what reality is and and right now the interesting thing is we because of the internet and because of sort of the the digital nature of

this Marketplace of ideas we have more ideas out there than we ever did that people have access to so that negotiation process to arrive at sort of a standard or agreed upon social reality has become more complex because there's more information for people to process and negotiate around but i think we're still in sort of the adjustment phase like i think our technology has outpaced Uh our sort of ability to engage in that process but i think we're catching up i mean i think you see things like um the websites that fact check and sort

of uh you know um what's the what's the website where you can check yes no so you have like the emergence of things like that and you have sort of like and i i'll close by saying this and let you talk james but i mean in terms of even the political Landscape like if you look at political ads i'll use the us since that tends to be where you see a lot of the more explosive kind of rhetoric right now but if you look at political ads in like newspapers and pamphlets that were distributed from

uh you know a time in which kind of americans have kind of uh uh idealized this This notion that you know the early days of american politics were somehow more uh objective and somehow more like uh or less less nasty and there was more truth if you look at those ads from newspapers and pamphlets early on politicians were making absurdly just certifiably false claims about their competitors and themselves like this idea that somehow there's this that it's a new trend for Politicians to to to spread falsehoods is just itself false like we have evidence that

this has happened and and so you could argue that sort of the digital landscape has actually allowed for more fact-checking um the problem is again i think we have this information overload and people are just figuring out how to kind of like reconcile so many competing perspectives Okay um yeah likes to to kind of um you know add to that and i guess my my sort of contribution to this would be thinking about um you know kind of social construction um you know this idea and that i think it's it's i mean i remember back

when i was like in a deviance class as an undergrad being given this this sort of lecture by the professor But this notion that when people hear that like gender is a social construct or if you talk about like national identities that they're kind of imagined communities or that they're invented and certainly that's that's true like a lot of the things that we think of as you know being you know uh innately sort of canadian or american or you know german so on all of these kind of cultural memories and traditions Like they don't really

have like an actual basis um but the idea is that that you know even though those things are maybe invented or constructed they're still very much like meaningful and they're sort of consequences like you know gender identities still absolutely have real world effects as do kind of national identities we can think about sort of warfare military conflict you Know so on and so forth so to say that something is kind of constructed is not to dismiss the fact that it has very real world kind of consequences and implications um i think where things get a

little trickier is yeah this kind of discussion of sort of relativism for versus kind of absolutism um you know i i i tend to not get too much into sort of the normative debates within class like i don't view My role as kind of a professor is to weigh in on like what what is right and wrong what is moral and immoral tend to focus more on issues of kind of harm consequences you know so on and and so forth like i'm definitely not using the language of like evil um but at the same time

i think we can you know draw certain conclusions and say that certain things are fundamentally you Know unjust inappropriate you know and uh uh you know and so on uh that you know countries you know police services should not be able to arbitrarily you know use violence or detain people without cause so i mean i i don't know that's it's uh it's yeah it's kind of a i don't know kind of kind of can of worms that can sometimes Be difficult to address i mean there's extreme instances it's very easy to say that this is

absolutely a source of injustice in other instances that can be a little more you know difficult um so i you know there's there's absolutely those debates about kind of ethnocentrism versus you know cultural relativism but at the same time i think there are you know certain things that we can Absolutely kind of speak out against and say that is fundamentally unjust inappropriate so on um and i find sometimes we can take a position on something right and recognize that our position is temporal and contextual for example you know hamurabi laws are uh famous for having

brought in the first ideas of like individual rights and human rights and being just When you read those laws and you say okay let's implement them today there would be more unjust than laws of you know north north korea and saudi arabia uh so you know there is a contextual notion to it to them we can say you know in today's society as a humanistic approach we're not okay with police brutality now that is a position that we take that's a moral position but i think sometimes as academics we have or as Human beings we

have the right to take moral positions that are every sales and timely speaking this is what we think so the last thing i want to talk about um before we wrap this up is how should students think about sort of because you see this is one big problem that i have in class i don't know how to communicate this to my students you guys have been doing this a little bit longer Than i have so maybe you can tell me how you tell your students about this my big problem is i try to tell them

as much as facts matter and that's something that kind of has come up a couple of times you know as much as statistical factual information matters what's more important in academia in a sense is the ability to interpret those the ability to really understand A message that you know fact collecting is diamond does and a journalist can go collect facts the reason why someone gets a phd when someone gets a master's degree when someone gets a ba is so that they can make sense of those facts on a larger theoretical basis how do we how

should how would you sort of with at least uh you know hindsight give some advice to your younger self and undergrad about how to Really study for a class that's not about numbers that's not about multiple choice this is right this is wrong but it's more about an application of a theoretical of a series of theoretical perspectives to variety of social issues how would you study for it how would you read for it and how would you think about writing those papers up I ask extremely difficult questions uh i know i think i didn't work

sort of primary process at work there is the connecting of disparate ideas and and concepts i i think that's typically what if you look at much of what kind of an academic uh academic work is particularly in the social sciences is connecting disparate ideas together which kind of goes back to what i talked About earlier when you have uh what often appear to be competing pieces of evidence or even competing kind of theoretical um constructs you as a you know as a scholar your job is to make sense of those and connect them and sort

of construct a narrative or a story or a larger kind of uh explanation that can make sense of those in the same space because i i think that Goes back to the very core of what we've been talking about is you know and i think as a student looking back you often would read 10 articles and you know out of those 10 articles you would glean maybe four different perspectives that might seem on the surface to compete with one another and i would say you're as a student Maybe you know one way to impress your

professors or show that you're kind of learning to think critically or or at least think critically about the content of the class is to yes acknowledge when there are sort of competing perspectives you don't have to say oh you know um you know these two authors agree with one another if they don't but to say okay they just these are These are sort of uh uh you know um two two ideas or two conclusions that aren't the same but is there a way i can kind of explain how these two pieces of evidence can coexist

like in other words try and rather than say one of these has to be wrong for this to make sense say how can i conceive of a paradigm in which both of these things Can be right and i think if you can get to the point where you can do that almost automatically that's when you've you've started to think like a scholar and so that's kind of the advice i would give my students and i guess my younger self i i think and that process is actually pretty fun i think if you it's kind of

like a challenge it's almost like a puzzle To be able to kind of put these it's like a puzzle except the pieces don't they don't seem to fit at first and part of your job is to like you know figure out how to make the pieces fit um so yeah i think so that's kind of the analogy i would end with if you like those kind of puzzles i think you'll you'll those those those conceptual puzzles i think you do well as a As a social scientist if you don't then i would say you've got

i don't know i mean that's when you can think about you know maybe you take more of a a purely advocate role advocacy role but i mean that's we are asking our students to think that way because it is the way in which we typically function um as social scientists yeah i i guess in terms of like advice For maybe my former self or what i'd be telling somebody who's you know maybe just finished like their first or second year of university where you are taking more of the large you know lecture classes and mainly

because of the constraints that are faced in those courses you are having kind of multiple choice exams um i'd stress kind of the difference here between um you know and maybe some of those Initial classes it's not as if you're not being asked to be a critical thinker there's typically a major you know a paper that's due at the end of the term but a lot of the you know you're being evaluated based on your grasp of sort of information uh as as you kind of you know make it into kind of the third and

fourth year classes where you don't have multiple choice exams you tend to have essay-based Tests or you know maybe you don't even have tests they're just sort of paper-based assignments there it's less about information and more about like knowledge uh like you're gonna you're gonna be taking facts but you're gonna be synthesizing them you're gonna be interpreting them and that it is yeah that it is important to be able to you know think about this in terms of How can i tell kind of a coherent you know story or narrative from kind of the information

that i have how can i take that and kind of synthesize it into um kind of a valid consistent coherent sort of take or perspective on whatever this you know issue issue is um so you know being able to say things in your own words being able to kind of think Um you know to go beyond just kind of the the basic recitation of facts and technical knowledge but but being able to kind of bring that to the next you know level um and that's something that i've you know a lot a lot of students

don't struggle with that but some i i think do maybe struggle from getting from those early introductory level courses to more kind of advanced upper Division you know substantive courses um yeah uh sorry that's uh that's that's about that's that's a great advice that's a great advice uh thanks a lot guys i don't know if there is anything uh that we haven't touched on that you guys feel like we should touch on before we depart well you asked some good questions um i think in terms of i i know you're Showing this in the policing

class i think that's what you said um and we didn't we didn't really get around to talking about police too much i think um it was framed more in terms of kind of um the authority of like perspectives or or how we the how authority plays a role in sort of the process of evaluating certain realities or or supposed realities But i think in in a class i'm very in a way i would say i'm you know i don't necessarily confront like some some very controversial issues in my classes because i i tend to teach

methodology classes and certainly there are controversies within methodology that relate to some of the larger questions about you know race and class and gender and some of these things that Often draw out more heated discussions um but yeah i think i would i would i would uh just add that you know i think we're in as i said this very kind of politically and culturally charged environment um where you're just the the the reality is you're going to have you know if you're a student here and speaking to you you're going to have classmates who

just Outright disagree with you um in terms of a particular perspective and i think really what we've kind of talked around is um and this is in true professor form i would say i'm really posing more of a conundrum or a question than offering a conclusion or a solution is that i mean part of the entire you know reason that uh this kind of academic uh institution exists Is to try to um have sort of a voice a a critical reasonable voice in the midst of a larger societal structure where you have such oftentimes polarized

competing viewpoints so if you view yourself as a person who might align with a particular polarized viewpoint but as existing and Functioning within an institution that's meant to sort of be a voice of reason and sanity within that larger structure i think it can kind of help you keep your cool so to speak when confronted with competing uh positions and values that's what helps me because the reality is you sit in a faculty meeting or you sit in any sort of Meeting and you hear people say things you disagree with and part of your kind

of role as a scholar and as a student who is also a scholar is to sort of step back momentarily and then form a measured logical reasonable response to that and in some ways i would say that's almost your job as as both as a you know scholar professor student Wherever you fall within that institution but that doesn't mean you can't be passionate i mean i think that's you are a person who has certain views and certain alignments and i think uh you should probably try to be flexible insofar as when you're presented with competing

new evidence you incorporate that into your perspective but that doesn't mean that We're asking students to kind of check their perspectives at the door it's what you do with that perspective that i think is really kind of what we've talked around today yeah i i and i think to to build on that too if we're talking about kind of authority and and sort of the legitimacy of that authority this applies obviously to like an instructor in the classroom And and to a degree i mean obviously there's sort of different animals different species but also you

know would apply to sort of you know law enforcement of police in the relationship of the public for authority to be legitimate it has to be open to kind of being questioned disputed you know so on and so forth so it does me and and you know you guys as well no favors as professors To get up and and basically act as an authoritative source of information i know better than you to you do i'm always right and and you know give you know uh max weber very famous sociologist says in in one of his

writings you know the lectern is not a pulpit that we shouldn't end up giving you know sermons per se we should be trying to have kind of open you know thoughtful dialogue and room For discussion room to challenge our perspectives you know so on uh that that doesn't necessarily mean that we don't have you know there's a reason we're up leading the classroom we've received additional training you know so on and and so forth but not you know shutting down you know discussions because we know better than you that there should absolutely be Opportunities to

you know challenge authority hold it to account and and so on um just kind of to that sort of i i agree in a sense that like you know as steven was talking about sort of police the problem like uh james and i uh we both teach sort of courses on policing and one of the problems with kind of this discussion of criticism and being critical is that we Have a students who say well my dad is a police officer my mom is a police officer whatever they're good people they're not racist so why you

talk about sort of police being racist and i find that sometimes there's sort of problem that we kind of our criticism our sort of uh direct uh sort of subject is the institution of police oftentimes right Absolutely itself and for us as steven says to sort of think about legitimacy of an institution we have to recognize that there are people who have lived the life experiences in which the institution is the legitimate it's not the same institution that i'm used to it's not the same institution that some of the other students are used to and

i think that sort of becomes a critical point here in any of our Classes right to understand criticism not as us saying police is bad teachers are bad you know doctors are bad whatever the case might be parole officers are bad but rather to kind of suggest that the system within which individuals operate is so that individuals have to operate within a social context that doesn't take equity for example into account that doesn't take racial dimensions into Gender dimensions into account and that's what i find is very difficult about this discussion because for example when

i do a ride along with police or when i do interviews with police if someone says to me are these police officers good people i would say you know what they're as good of a people as any other group of people i've interviewed they have they're good People they have their bad people there are people that i really like when i sit across the interview table formula and there are people that i can't wait till the interview is done so i never have to see them again the problem becomes sort of i find sometimes are

devotions to a particular ideology and that's what i try to push my students to think why do you okay that's fine police is Fantastic why do you think police is good try to convince me of that to share those experiences and i think that's sort of what we're missing that as steven said like you know they can all agree that there is sort of uh you know there is truth is relative but we can also agree that if there is a large number of black men being killed by police In relation to the population proportions

we have a problem here on our hand now is the individual police officer racist is the institution racist these are debates that we can have in class we can no longer ignore this right yeah and i think that's that's where you kind of have to i think this is where a lot of discontent arises and i think this is why You know you you can debate a topic forever i think that's part of the the reality that we're we're living in right now is that you know criminologists and and you know well before criminology was

a discipline we've did we've been debating this topic for hundreds of years arguably um if not if not if we go back and we talk about Authority more broadly i'm talking about sort of police as they're conceived of in a in a contemporary sense um so i think there is a real um there is legitimacy in people saying we're tired of having the conversation we just want action um and i think that's where you say there's a place for that and and and that that that's a completely legitimate perspective And so protest on the street

or even some sort of radical sort of uh uh uprising against a particular system that is a particular phenomenon that's borne out of i think to some extent frustration with inaction on the part of even kind of scholars who one could argue have kind of debated these issues so long without really um you know having had the ability to Influence policy in a way that you could see real substantive outcomes and i think as an academic i often tell students they're like well why do we sit around and talk about these things if they never

amount to anything and i say well you know the hope is that we do impact policy at some point right um but oftentimes Policymakers listen to the wrong sources of information or they listen you know um but yeah i mean part of it is being comfortable with ambiguities and contradictions like because we're asking our students to sit there and and rest with the reality that you could have a parent who is a police officer And that parent is obviously a loving person presumably and has a lot of qualities you know human qualities that we value

but then at the same time resting with the other reality that you know institutionally there there is racism embedded within the institution of policing and there are racist police i mean i think that is another Reality and so you have all these things coming together and as a person and as a scholar you have to be able to i think i find with me personally and i know there's some scholars who have written about this that you will eventually run up against contradictions and short of being able to explain away those contradictions which is an

extremely difficult process people send Their entire careers trying to do that um you have to be able to rest with those contradictions so i would say to the student like i'm sure your parent is nice good person but the police are also racist like in sort of a broad sense um and we can try and figure out like part of what we're doing is trying to reconcile those two realities and and figure out You know that contradiction and say what's the answer to that what do we do with that contradiction do we just do we

you know uh abolish the police do we redis we rethink what the police look like we take you know your parents and we repurpose them for something else or we if your parent is indeed this sort of uh uh image of what we want a police Officer to be in a an anti-racist environment is that a person we sort of shift into a position of leadership like how do we come to terms with this contradiction in your personal experience versus a social kind of reality um and that's like c right mills talks about the like

you know uh Social problems and personal troubles and how we get from one to the other and how there's this kind of process it's not necessarily a smooth uh linear trajectory no absolutely absolutely all right guys thank you very much i really really appreciate if anyone has any last words uh sort of pieces of wisdom before we end stay in school yeah Gather into this yeah this is one thing i kind of i think it's important to point out to since that we as profs are having as much fun and are as anxious about what's

gonna happen in the next two terms as they are so yeah hang in there yeah and we we fully understand this is a a kind of unprecedented unsettling like period for everybody so don't don't be too hard on yourselves we Absolutely like understand the situation and if if you're struggling with anything don't hesitate to reach out like we absolutely want you guys to make it through this and and succeed this semester and just in terms of your kind of career here at ontario tech generally so important to keep in mind i'll you if for those

of you enrolled in my class you'll hear me say that in in like our other introductory lectures so Sorry for being uh repetitive uh no i think we have a vested interest right we have a vested interest in our students doing well yeah and i mean i think we're we're the first few weeks of online this is the first time that i would say 90 plus percent of the you know the professors here have taught online so you have to imagine that there's going to be a period of probably A few weeks where you know

maybe some of the videos don't come online as smoothly as you expected or maybe the quality or the nature of the videos or the engagement kind of evolves over the semester so i'm you know i think it's it's healthy and appropriate to kind of view this as to some degree experimental um and and by you know if we're still online next Semester maybe we could expect some of those some of those uh speed bumps to have been flattened out a little bit but the reality is there's going to be little little hiccups along the way

i think and the best thing to do is just acknowledge that and work together to kind of figure it out awesome thanks guys yeah just stop this