CIRM’s Audray Fontaine and Nik Luka on the Project’s Transformative Potential
Q&A with Audray Fontaine and Nik Luka
Written by the DSH team*
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The Data for Society Hub (DSH) team spoke with The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM)’s knowledge mobilization coordinator, Audray Fontaine, and associate director Nik Luka about the collaboration between CIRM and the DSH.
In a nutshell, what is CIRM’s mission?
Audray Fontaine [AF]: Our mission is to promote research on Montréal. It’s an endeavour that allows all disciplines and universities to come together — the Centre is, of course, at McGill, but our members and researchers come from different institutions in Montréal and from the rest of Canada, the United States, and Europe. All these people work together to find solutions to the urban challenges that Montréal is currently facing, and we try to do that in partnership with local community organizations, companies, and with the city itself. The goal is to foster partnerships between researchers and people in the community to make sure that the research being done has tangible benefits for the citizens of Montréal, as well as for other cities.
We don’t want the work that’s being done to only serve historical needs; in an ideal world, what we’re doing is bringing the University into communities of practice in useful ways.
I’d love to hear more about those benefits. CIRM uses the transfer of data to help us understand our city better, but how do you ensure that the research fostered by the Centre will tangibly serve our communities?
Nik Luka [NL]: Here’s an example that may illustrate that: I work with the City of Montréal’s central administration on their big strategic dossiers that have to do with physical transformations, like the McGill College Street renovation project. As a professor and specialist in public space, architecture, and planning, I was invited to play a role in that project, but that’s also what CIRM does.
Project managers and division leaders in the central administration and in the boroughs often say to me, “We would love to be able to connect with people in the universities who can provide us with critical perspectives and help us deepen the ways that we’re making sense of the problems that exist.” City governments [can make] a lot of assumptions, and they don’t want to make big mistakes or miss opportunities, so they approach CIRM. We’re not quite a shopfront, but we are a space or an entity that facilitates the kind of inside-outside collaborations that take place with our partners, whether that’s the local government, or more typically, nonprofit organizations and housing advocacy groups.
The DSH project is especially interesting because it’s about capacity-building. It enables different kinds of organizations — many that are smaller and who have modest resources — to say, “It would be great if we had data on evictions in Montréal. Who has that?” I think it’s a really exciting illustration of the way that the University serves society in direct ways. It’s not just in the abstract. We can hope that the knowledge and the pure and applied research within the University will find a way out into the world to help people do interesting things, but sometimes we have to directly put those things into a “taxi” and send it to somebody out there.
In the social sciences and humanities, there’s currently a very strong emphasis in funding on knowledge mobilization. There’s a social contract that is being formalized for us as researchers, and that’s again what CIRM aims to do: to enable many interesting people doing amazing, interesting things on Montréal, both at McGill and at other universities, to say, “Here’s what I’ve done. Do you find it interesting and useful?” sooner rather than later.
We don’t want the work that’s being done to only serve historical needs; in an ideal world, what we’re doing is bringing the University into communities of practice in useful ways.
CIRM is both a partner of the DSH and a project coordinator. Can you expand on what that dual responsibility looks like?
AF: As a partner, we try to emphasize the importance of research and what researchers can do to benefit organizations and our project partners, like contributing new data, developing new ways of tackling research questions, and having students do fieldwork. We want to make sure that the contributions of the University and researchers are supporting the project.
As a coordinator, it’s a bit more project management-oriented. We focus on having a vision for the project as it unfolds until 2024 — we need to have an idea of where it’s going and whether it’s still within the scope of what the partners want. We also want to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the decisions that are being made, and that the partners know what is being developed, whether it’s on the LACONDA side or the technological side with Commun Axiom.
This project helps you see the potential of solving complex urban challenges, and being part of the solution — and trying to find new solutions — is really fun and stimulating.
Can you tell me about each of your roles in this project?
AF: I am CIRM’s knowledge mobilization coordinator. My role within the Centre is to foster collaboration between researchers and communities, so I have to know the needs and interests of the City and different community organizations, which I then connect to our members’ research interests. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s super rewarding and a constant learning experience.
On the DSH side, I help Karolyne [Arseneault] evaluate the project’s progress and consider how we can present the Hub and its purpose to a broader audience. We’ll have a comic strip soon about the Hub’s different modules, which will introduce the Hub to the public, and then we’ll discuss different projects around that.
NL: I am CIRM’s associate director and I’m based in the Faculty of Engineering. My role is to enable collaborations and partnerships and to be the official executive representative, which helps free up director Pascal Brissette. I’m also responsible for research on transformative policy, design, and capacity-building, and work around community engagement, crowdsourcing, and coalition building.
Last summer, we collectively decided that it would be very useful and interesting to move to a co-direction model, and one main reason for that is because CIRM was originally — and still is — a creature of the Faculty of Arts. It’s officially based in that faculty, but by its very nature, it’s something that straddles different faculties at different universities.
So, there was a strategic aim to ensure that CIRM is anchored in more than one faculty, since the perceived importance of a given research centre can vary over time, even to the point of becoming vulnerable. We ended up creating an agreement between the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Engineering that would allow us to name an associate director [from the latter], which symbolically and functionally signals to various stakeholders across the University and the Office of the Provost that CIRM is really important. It’s not just a pet project by a group of professors from a particular unit, school, or department. It’s intended to be cross-cutting and transformative.
What challenges do you believe the DSH is facing between now and 2024?
AF: We made a promise to the city and the partners to deliver a specific technology that will allow for the sharing of data and that will regulate how you can share data in an ethical way. We have to keep that promise, and that’s a challenge in a sense because it’s something that’s never been done before on this scale. The partners also have different missions and intentions for the project, so consolidating all of that will definitely be a challenge.
NL: One of the things we mobilized for when we were organizing CIRM was to have a physical space where people could come together to have conversations, both in terms of formal events, but also in terms of having our core group of actors — our staff, our team — in a place where they would be able to bounce ideas off one another. With the retreat to working from home, it’s a lot harder to make that type of thing happen. But you know, everyone’s figuring that out.
Whenever the world gets ugly, academics tend to focus on obscure and esoteric questions — for me, the DSH is something that moves us beyond the rhetoric.
What inspires you to be a part of this project?
AF: It’s the fact that you can see the transformative potential of this project and how it could really benefit everyone. I know that might sound naive and I know that we live in a world where things are more difficult than that. I think there are [increasingly] complex problems within cities, whether they’re about the environment or food security, and the pandemic has exacerbated those challenges. But this project helps you see the potential of solving complex urban challenges, and being part of the solution — and trying to find new solutions — is really fun and stimulating.
NL: I agree. And as a professor with a stable job, I have the freedom to do interesting things, and I’m passionate about doing work that is meaningful and transformative; I feel that it’s a duty and a responsibility.
There’s a lot that can be done to improve social justice and basic things around efficiency and sustainability, and we have all of these awesomely wicked problems and opportunities that we’re facing in the 21st century. Whenever the world gets ugly, academics tend to focus on obscure and esoteric questions — for me, the DSH is something that moves us beyond the rhetoric. How do we actually make change happen? A lot of that work is not very glamorous, but it actually creates change, so [there’s inspiration] in the idea that I can somehow have a positive impact on the world.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
As of February 2023, Audray Fontaine is no longer involved with the CRIEM.
Compiled by Angelina Mazza; content editing: Karolyne Arseneault, Sara Selma Maref.
