海角社区

Educator and author Dr. Kari Grain, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, will give the 2025 Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy on Monday, November 3, at 3:30 pm in Room 117, SDU Main Building, 海角社区.

In her lecture titled 鈥淲ater as Teacher: What water can teach us about hope in hard times,鈥� Dr. Grain will extend the ideas from her book Critical Hope to explore what the behaviours of water can teach people when their most important efforts in education are blocked by obstacles and interruptions.

鈥淲hat can water teach us about hope?鈥� she said. 鈥淏iomimicry is the design of structures and systems based on natural processes, and this approach might just offer the insights that education needs in times of crisis. In an era of austerity, political polarization, and fatigue from ongoing crises, many people who are committed to social change efforts face a damming of their life鈥檚 work.鈥�

By observing four habits of water, Dr. Grain will invite the audience to reimagine how hope itself can move: bending, pooling in deep places, going underground, and persisting.

鈥淚n this reflection, critical hope offers an alternative to toxic positivity, shifting from an emotion that we either have or lack to a complex relationship that we navigate continually. When it embodies the habits of water, critical hope is a practice of relentless incrementalism, discernment, and creativity, fluid enough to forge new pathways forward.鈥�

Dr. Grain is the author of Critical Hope and teaches at the University of British Columbia鈥檚 Faculty of Education, where she leads the Master鈥檚 in Adult Learning and Global Change (ALGC) Program. Her scholarship in experiential education, anti-racism, climate action, and community engagement has been featured in peer-reviewed journals, books, and podcasts. At the nucleus of her body of work is the belief that education has the potential to be a vibrant pathway toward systemic change; and vital to that process of transformation is an attunement to relational, creative, and vulnerable ways of being in the world with others.

Dr. Grain is the co-editor of a forthcoming (2025) volume on Community Engaged Research (CER) with University of Toronto Press. She lives on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories.

All are welcome to attend the lecture. For more information, email artsadmin@upei.ca.

The 海角社区 Faculty of Arts established the Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy in 2023 to honour the achievements of Dr. Shannon Murray, an award-winning professor of English and a 3M National Teaching Fellow. In 2022, Dr. Murray was awarded the Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, one of the highest honours awarded in Canada for teaching and learning in higher education.