Interview With the Expert: How to Create Inclusive Spaces in Networks
Part One of Our Conversation with Professor Joy Fitzgibbon –Interview with Micaela Tam and Christy Davis
Meet Professor Joy Fitzgibbon, a fellow and Assistant Professor of Trinity College in University of Toronto and the Associate Director of the prestigious Macmillan Trinity One Program. An expert on global health and development, Professor Fitzgibbon received her PhD in Political Science from the Munk School of Global Affairs and completed public health and clinical epidemiology courses at both University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University. She works at the intersection of international relations and public policy to explore the impact of global health networks on policy reform. Her publications include the co-authored Networks of Knowledge: Collaborative Innovation in International Learning and policy reports for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament (CCACD). Professor Fitzgibbon is truly an all-rounder!
Our wide-ranging conversation with Professor Fitzgibbon produced many profound and practical insights from an academic perspective. In the first of a three-part series, today’s feature focuses on her work as a scholar and the importance of eliminating the distance between academia and other sectors to create a shared interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary space in which all stakeholders can learn and grow from one another.
How did you become attracted to academia?
Well, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was doing my undergraduate degree and focused on military strategic concerns and doctrine. I was more attracted to security issues: the security of the person. But I’m ultimately an NGO (non-governmental organization) kid — my father was an early employee of World Vision Canada — and I would spend my childhood weekends with people visiting from overseas and listening to my dad tell stories of his visits to far flung places — Guatemala, Vietnam, Kenya, Sudan. Our home was filled with stories of people, their lives and challenges. I became concerned about the fact that in politics our definition of security was in fact the number of weapons we had pointed at each other, which I thought was a fairly narrow construction of what it means to be secure.
Still reflecting on how to move forward, I applied to med school and PhD programmes. Ultimately, I sat down with James Orbinsky, the former president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and he said “You could be serving people who are poor in all of these different areas you’re considering.” I knew I wanted to go global. I didn’t want to be working within the structures of thinking that were already in place through our legal system and domestic structure — I wanted to change the structures themselves. I decided on a PhD program of Political Science because I felt that we could reframe how we understand our problems, how we think about what politics should be and can be, how we think about what it means to be community and how to live faithfully, as stewards and with compassion. And so I could write, teach about it and learn from my students. Together we could problem solve and learn from each other.
What is a network? Are there any trends we’re seeing global health networks?
The idea of a network is that you bring together otherwise autonomous nodes, or groups who then collaborate around a shared problem and bring new resources amongst people who otherwise wouldn’t have collaborated. But they should be able to function autonomously around this ethos. This is something in network material that they haven’t paid enough attention to: the idea of the worldview. Your worldview matters. And if you can convince people of your worldview, you can influence a lot.
We are seeing transdisciplinary discourse and cross community collaboration emerging in global health policy more generally where clinical medicine, epidemiology/public health is blending with public policy, political economy and other relevant disciplines even including history and anthropology. Networks can play vital roles here in bringing diverse parties together — as is happening in global health.
With regards to academics doing this cross community, collaborative work — it is worth emphasizing that there are many who are doing so now. That is exactly what our Networks of Knowledge book explores. There are many scholars at University of Toronto who do community and policy relevant work — Professor Joseph Wong’s Reach Project is a great example. Further there is a growing move to focus on community engaged learning where we link community-learning opportunities for students with their classroom education. So while it is always challenging to cross that divide, a growing number of academics are engaging in exactly these kinds of collaborations. The result is enriched research, policy and community work. Manuel Castell’s excellent book the Rise of the Network Society ably describes the changes in social relationships that underpin these developments. Many of us are living that reality he describes.
Part of the distance between the academic community and other sectors is that academics can be perceived as theoretical and removed from the ‘real world.’ How do we turn academic research and theories into action?
As a scholar, I firmly believe this responsibility rests on the scholar. It’s not the responsibility of the community, engaged leader, NGO or network director to say, “How can I take what Professor X says and somehow find a way to apply it?” It’s up to me as a scholar to produce knowledge that’s needed in terms that are useful for you. There’s a need for a revolution in scholarly approaches. It’s very hard to translate some of this stuff, not because it’s very difficult to understand, but because academics speak in such a coded language that it’s designed to be exclusionary. We really just need to break it down. Once we get into that place, then we can have the real conversation. But I think that most scholars need to start with organisations and people that are actually doing the work.
I recommend that organizations like Asia P3 Hub come into or create spaces to engage scholars in conversations as well. Start by identifying what you need and ask scholars if they have anything to bring to the table. What happens is scholars like me begin to think, “Ok, hold on, there’s a lot of pragmatic questions under which are very deep and theoretical interesting philosophical issues that I can totally explore together with these people from a totally different discipline.”
My philosophy is to start with real world problems and work backwards. It’s not only knowledge transfer from scholars to the real world, but it’s also the knowledge transfer from other experts to us.
You mentioned exclusionary language, and sometimes many of us don’t think about the fact that our language is exclusionary. How do you simplify complex concepts and ideas to create an inclusive space?
I’ve had a few interesting experiences with this, first because I teach a course in the Trinity One Medicine and Global Health Stream. These students are science students — they’re in labs all day and I spend my day reading books and interacting in political circles. In the beginning of the class this year, I talked about a “state” (meaning a government or a country) and after class a student took me aside and asked, “When you’re talking about a state, what do you mean? In science we mean X.” It hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to elaborate on a definition of what a state means. So, being aware of our blind spots helps to facilitate an inclusive space.
Second, because I do a lot of transdisciplinary work, I spend a lot of time with doctors who are frustrated with politics and who do not know a lot about history. Thus I spend a lot of my time trying to speak very plainly to them, not dumbing down, but taking away all the clutter. Let’s say we’re trying to figure out what to do when governments get their health policies wrong and people are dying from preventable deaths. I start using language like “stupid deaths,” a more colloquial language to facilitate ease of conversation. Relationships in those discussions are also critical, because people have to feel safe to ask you questions. There’s this whole idea of humility and candour, a kind of disarming candour, and as academics we don’t do this very well. In professional life, I think we’re all inclined to put our most assured front forward instead of saying, “oops, I totally missed this.” Language we use is so very important.
In the same way, doctors bring knowledge to the table that I need as a policy analyst. There is need for interdisciplinary and transdiciplinary work. It is discussion, understanding and problem solving across both disciplines and communities. There are some doctors who are increasingly crossing those disciplinary boundaries and do so in the context of rich historical, economic, political and cultural knowledge. Partners in Health is an excellent example of a group that combines clinical medicine, public health, anthropology, political economy, theology and social action.
Sometimes these arguments are very complex because they haven’t been boiled down to essentials. In other words, it’s not only a language problem: it’s also a thinking problem. Maybe as academics we need to worry more about the quality, rather than the quantity, of the materials we produce. One of the ways we know if the quality of our materials is good is by giving it to someone in the field, or someone who has no training in the area — and checking if they understand and can use what we have published. Academics need to join and be exposed to real world frontline networks to fully understand contexts and self-correct as necessary. Good scholarly work should be truth telling. We should be accurately representing people’s stories. And we’re really just telling stories, whether they be about something happening in a lab, or about providing clean water to a high-risk population that’s not had access to it before. Framing our work in terms of stories helps lose the jargon as well.
If we’re people for social justice, people for human rights, people who stand for the dignity of people who’ve been ignored, then our knowledge is not neutral. It can cause harm or it can help. But we are public individuals with a responsibility to the public and we need to figure out how to help people. Framing the problem simply and taking the time to understand the actual context of the problem are necessary steps for scholars to create an inclusive space.
Want to read more? Click here to see our commentary on this conversation, and tune in to our next newsletter for more of Professor Fitzgibbon!
