Jennifer Jill Fellows: Happy 2025, everyone, and welcome back to another season of Cyborg Goddess. I’m your host, Jennifer Jill Fellows, and I don’t know about all of you, but the first half of 2025 has, for me, felt pretty tense. Anger and anxiety and grief seem to be running high everywhere I look. And my society feels more divided than ever. Trade wars and actual war dominate news headlines. And some days all I want is just a little peace. But as we will learn today, peace isn’t just the opposite of war, and it isn’t just a rest. Peace is work. Peace is a skill that we have to cultivate and develop. And while many technologies seem almost intentionally designed to discourage us from developing peace literacy, there may also be a way of using technology to help us practice peace. As my guest, doctor Shari Clough, will explain today.
JJF: Doctor Sharyn Clough is a professor at Oregon State University. She is also the director of the Phronesis lab and curriculum coordinator for the Peace Literacy Institute. Her research examines the complex ways science and politics are interwoven. And she also investigates the importance of basic peace skills and how best to practice peace as we navigate polarizing science policy debates. And today, she’s here to talk to me about how we might be able to use technology in the service of developing our peace literacy. Hi, Shari. Welcome to the show.
Sharyn Clough: Thanks so much. Jill, it’s great to be here.
JJF: Before we begin, I just like to acknowledge that digital space is fundamentally physical. It’s not an ephemeral cloud that exists alongside our physical reality, but is literally physical. Servers, cables, satellites, and other infrastructure occupy physical spaces. And so, today, as I record Cyborg Goddess, I acknowledge that I am occupying the unceded territory of the Coast Salish people of the Qiqéyt Nation, one of the smallest Indigenous nations in British Columbia and the only one without a dedicated land base. And can you tell us where you’re located today, Shari?
SC: Thank you for this opportunity, Jill. So, I’m Canadian. As you know, I was born in Prince George, British Columbia and did some of my education in Calgary Alberta and then back for my PhD at Simon Fraser University in Canada, but I moved as far back as 1995 to the United States. And so, I’ve been watching from afar, with some of the truth and reconciliation movements in Canada. And also, you know, grappling with these issues in the United States and belatedly I’m embarrassed to say. So, I’m white. I do not have indigenous ancestry, and that has allowed me to succeed while still being largely ignorant of some of the past that so affects where I’m at today. And so, I’ll share I work at Oregon State University now in Corvalis, Oregon, which is situated right between Portland, Oregon and Eugene, Oregon. And I had no idea. It’s a land grant university, which I’d heard that phrase, but not until recently did I really understand what the history of that meant being at a land grant. So land grant universities like Oregon State were brought into being by a series of Land Grant College Acts beginning during the US Civil War in 1862, and the first was the Morril Act named after a government representative named Morril and that Act was expanded in 1890. And according to the terms of these acts, federal land was granted to each of the states. Initially only the Northern states, but eventually expanded to all. And the Act had two main goals. The first was to promote this is a quote “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” In other words, to build agriculture and engineering programs to help new white settlers in job training. The second goal was to “promote military training,” most often in the form of reserve officer training corps or ROTC programs. And that’s because the federal government needed a standing army. And so, right from the get go, engineering was tied up with military pursuits. So, by the mid 20th century, Oregon State University had the largest ROTC program west of the Mississippi and was called the West Point of the West. And so both of these goals to promote the liberal and practical education of white settlers and to promote military training, these are relevant to our discussion, will become relevant to our discussions today when we talk about peace literacy, the land and resources available to me where I’m sitting as we’re talking, were taken from Indigenous peoples often through force, often by militaries trained in land grant colleges without appeal to treaty-making between nations, or as more often the case, in violation of these treaties. Indeed, the land granted to Oregon State University by the federal government was originally under the stewardship of the Ampinefu or Mary’s River Band of the Kalapuya people. And the land was ceded to the US government through the Kalapuya Treaty, that’s the Treaty of Dayton Oregon in 1855. Though the treaty conditions were controversial enough to the Kalapuya people that they did not, in fact, leave the land ceded in the treaty, and they were forcibly removed to what are now the Grande Ronde and Siletz reservations. And while their numbers are diminished by disease and design, their descendants can be counted among the contemporary members of the Confederated tribes of the Grande Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. And I should say, Oregon State University is trying to make some steps towards reconciliation. And one of the things they’ve very recently done is they’ve always had a representative at OSU who’s responsible for negotiations with the state of Oregon. And they now have a representative at OSU who’s responsible for negotiations with various Indigenous nations. I know there’s some folks who are skeptical about the usefulness of these kind of declarations. I think certainly if that’s all we’re going to do is perform a declaration, that’s not enough and might actually be worse. But the peace literacy work that I’m doing is offered in response to and in solidarity with the Indigenous folks whose land it is that I’m working on. So, I think it’s worth acknowledging.
JJF: So, I’d like to begin by asking you if you can tell me a little bit about how you became interested in philosophy because I know you a little bit, Shari. We’ve met. We’re friends, but you didn’t start out studying philosophy in college, if I remember correctly, right? So how did this happen?
SC: Oh, thanks, Jill. That’s right. I didn’t start out, my parents were, as parents are still today and maybe even more so worried about, you know, they wanted me to get a job.
JJF: Right.
SC: And I don’t think I really knew what philosophy was, and it wasn’t really on my radar. So, I started in psychology. And at some point, I guess the idea would be that I would become a clinical psychologist, although I came to really be annoyed by those of my colleagues who were interested in clinical psychology. They were they all kind of, like, dressing as Diana Troy on Star Trek, you know?
JJF; She had the best hair, though.
SC: Yeah. Oh, oh, come on. I don’t know. I, of course, have benefited greatly from clinical psychologists ever since. But when I look back at the cohort, I was surrounded with. . . So despite myself, despite the fact I didn’t know much about philosophy, as I was studying both social psychology and neuropsychology, so two ends of the spectrum, you know, what are the social forces that influence our decisions? And what are the neurophysiological forces that influence our decisions? I became more interested in how the psychologists were setting up their experiments. Like, they had these really cool questions they wanted to answer. And then by the time they designed the experiment, and they were usually using rats as model organisms, those interesting questions became reduced to these really mechanical kind of setups that, all the interesting stuff was lost, you know? And so I became interested in what happened in that process of going from an interesting question down to how that question gets framed and set up in experimental design. And so, they didn’t have a lot of room for asking those methodological questions. I was at the University of Calgary in the undergraduate psychology program at the time. So it turned out that, in the religious studies program. I sort of forget how I found out about this. They had a psychology and sociology of religion kind of track you could do for a master’s degree. Yeah. They called it the nature and function of the religious experience. So there were folks studying, you know, Eastern traditions. We might call those Karmic traditions now, and folks studying Western traditions. Like we would maybe now say Abrahamic traditions. And then folks studying the nature and function of the religious experience. And I was in that latter track out of an interest in ways in which religious experiences were studied. They seem to be kind of, like, a good exemplar of ways in which some of those interesting psychological questions, say they were about religion and religious experience would just get completely reduced. All the interesting stuff stripped away down to this fairly mechanical process to study them that just seemed to. . . the conclusions that they reached, if they were true, the more accurate the conclusions were, the more trivial they were, you know? So religion was sort of just a stand in at that point for, you know, good case studies of where it seemed things were going off the rails as far as the scientific study and methodology and setup were concerned. So, I studied that for my master’s degree, and by the time I finished my thesis, one of the people on my committee who was a psychologist with a philosophy background, said, I think you actually, you’re interested really in pragmatism and philosophy of science. And I went, What the hell is philosophy of science? So, I sort of started looking into philosophy of science. And this is now in the mid 80s, late 87 is when I graduated from my master’s degree. And Sandra Harding had just published this book called The Science Question and Feminism. And there was this flurry of very influential research within feminist philosophical quarters and some feminist scientists themselves. Also trying to figure out what was it about scientific method that was sort of hell bent on reducing interesting things to uninteresting things? So one of the hypotheses that was being considered at the time for why it was that science was so routinely reductive, at least as practiced in, let’s say, the global North and West, was that there might be something about the gender associations with masculinity that influenced the way that scientific method was being articulated and that notions of objectivity of holding yourself at a distance from the thing being studied was itself kind of a masculine trait. And that distance between you as the scientist and the thing being studied was actually the place that allowed for and disrupted the more intimate connections that might make scientific experimentation more interesting and revealing of all kinds of nuanced relationships that were being stripped away when you had this objective distance, and that there might be something about truth itself or certain notions of truth that were somehow tied up in a masculine kind of gender identity formation. And so this was informed by some psycho analytic work that had been done. And so I was briefly for about six months as I was, you know, when my colleague shared with me after my master’s degree that you really need to go on to do a PhD. Yeah, you really need to do philosophy of science. And at that point, I also had started a little business. I was sewing my own clothes, and anyway, that wasn’t going anywhere. So, I was going to have to do a PhD. And so, briefly, I was interested in this question of: was the problem with psychology as I had been encountering it that, you know, there was this masculine kind of world view at work. And I was compelled by that for about six months. And that was enough to kind of head me to Simon Fraser University and start talking to some folks in Women’s Studies there. And Simon Fraser, there were very few places that had Women’s Studies programs. There was one at Simon Fraser, and there was one in I think at Queens, maybe. You know, this is like, like before the Internet. This is when you’re still looking for, like, pamphlets in the counselor’s office, you know, that kind of thing. Career counselor’s office. So, I was interested in philosophy of science now and ended up deciding to go to Simon Fraser University. And their philosophy program didn’t have a PhD program. I don’t know if their women’s studies program did either, but they did have the capacity at the university level to allow what they call these interdisciplinary PhD programs that were offered through the Department of special arrangements.
JJF: Oh, my gosh. That’s a great title.
SC: And they actually try to actively discourage you from doing this because it is such a bureaucratic nightmare. And I think it actually prepared me for academia quite well to just navigate six years of ridiculous bureaucratic hurdles trying to tie together three different departments philosophy, history, and women’s studies. And to discourage you, they would even tell you, you know, your diploma is gonna say that you have a PhD from the Department of Special Arrangements.
JJF: But that makes you sound like James Bond. Like, that’s so cool.
SC: I was undaunted. So that’s how I came to be in philosophy and then got a job in philosophy of science and had to teach logic, which, of course, I had never taken in my psychology undergraduate degree. So, luckily, yeah, I did I did a couple of years of catch up. I will admit here, and I’ve admitted it occasionally, but one of the nice things about not having done undergraduate work in philosophy, and certainly, I should be clear for my PhD, I had to do a ton of catch up in philosophy. But I never no one forced me to sit down and read any Kant. So I feel that’s a good thing. I mean, I got the general idea.
JJF: What we’re here to talk about today is where your areas of interest and research have gone since finding your way into a philosophy position at Oregon State, because you now work, as we said, in Peace Literacy.
SC: Right.
JJF: And so I think that a lot of people, when you hear the word peace, you think of peace as simply like the absence of war. But you’ve argued that this isn’t really what peace is at all. Peace isn’t just kind of a rest or passive. So can you talk to me a little bit about what peace is in your conception and also maybe how you became interested in peace literacy?
SC: So I was looking at different scientific projects where feminist had made interventions, and I had made some interventions in different scientific research projects where the research was empirically stronger as a result of that intervention. Okay. So that was like 20 years of banging that drum. And then suddenly find myself, the 2016 presidential election had just happened, and Hillary Clinton did not win as every liberal academic in the US had predicted. So for all of your listeners there, who are told that liberal academics have these great sort of powers of persuasion. . .
JF: This master agenda.
SC: Not so much. And yeah, so Donald Trump was elected, and a colleague of mine in the History of Science program at Oregon State University, she’s been interested in nuclear war and nuclear weapons and the sort of physical and biological effects of the entire fuel chain from where different elements of nuclear weapons are mined and to their production, to their deployment, to the fall out. And all of that, of course, is wrapped up in Indigenous land. No surprise. Uh. And she was interested in peace, as well, as you can imagine, and had gone to here and I think gone to a workshop with this guy named Paul K Chappell. Who was a veteran and had studied at West Point. Anyway, she went to this workshop, was really impressed with his perspective, and he had this notion that peace was actually a literacy. And so she asked him to come speak, in Corvalis. There was a public talk he gave in an evening, and then the next day, like, a three or four hour workshop, and I attended that as well. I had nothing else going on. I was pretty depressed from, you know, just for your listeners, the election did not go the way I wanted it to go in case that isn’t obvious. And it was a real like the hell? What did why did many folks did not see that coming? There was a certain kind of hubris at work, a lack of what we would call in philosophy, epistemic humility. We were very sure of ourselves, I think. Anyway, I had nothing else going on, and this flyer goes around that my colleague, Linda Richards was posting and circulating about bringing Paul Chappell, Paul K Chappell. I guess there’s some other Paul Chappell’s out there.
JJF: Yeah, I’ll put a link in the show notes.
SC: Thank you. Yeah. That he was coming to talk about peace literacy. And the idea that peace might be a literacy was like, ’cause, like you, I’ve been, you know, yeah, peace, it’s a goal. It’s a thing we all want. But I even taught courses with high school students in peace and social justice mostly because those sort of went together, like, you know, peanut butter and jam, but we just focused on the social justice side. That was where my, that was where my angle was, you know, feminism and anti-racist work and the peace stuff, I just sort of assumed would go along.
JJF: You know, once we get the social justice.
SC: Right.
JJF: We will have the peace.
SC: That’s right. It’ll all just happen. Come on. So the idea that there might actually be a skill set.
JJF: So that’s what peace literacy means, then? It means there’s a skill set. Is that it?
SC: Yeah, like, like literacy and reading and writing. You might actually have to learn an alphabet. Then you might actually have to learn how to put those letters together into phonemes and then think about the way those phonemes go.
JJF: You might have to practice it.
SC: Yes. And we might have to start teaching it. From preschool onwards. And so I was compelled by the idea. And so then Chappell’s, you know, lecturing about these different skills. And there are things like they’re all stuff we know is good. You know, like empathy. And he talked about treating people with respect, which I was like, all for, of course, except for a whole swath of people now that I had no respect for. But I also didn’t really I didn’t really know what it meant. Like, I hated when people just, you know, they would post these rules for, like, “Here’s what we’re going to have,” and I have to have this slightly valley girl voice that’s very disrespectful. Okay, now I’ll go full on. “We’re going to, like, have these rules for, like, how the classroom is gonna go, and everyone’s gonna sign off on these rules. Okay, we’re going to treat each other with respect.” And I said, What the hell does that even mean? I mean, what does that mean? So he did a really good job. I was like, he said, Well, here’s three things we might mean by respect. We’re actually going to listen to each other with some empathy. We’re going to try our best not to be hypocritical, right? Like, lead by example, so that I mean, we are all hypocrisy detectors, and the first indication that someone’s being hypocritical that they’re saying one thing and doing another, we just dismiss everything they say, even when the stuff they’re saying is really good.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: So we have to lead by example, and so he really broke down what respect means in terms of skill building or attributes that one ought to need to train for that these aren’t just even when we all realize that they’re, we all nod our heads in agreement that those are really important. That’s actually not enough because they don’t come easily, and for a variety of reasons. So we probably need to take them quite seriously as a literacy as something we need to train for. And so I was just super impressed. And it led me to kind of do an inventory, like that night of like, Okay, well, what kind of peace skills had I brought to my social justice work? You know, in the last 20, 25 years leading up to this devastating election. And especially in the six months, year to six months prior to the election, what skills had I brought to my work to try and not have the election go the way it did? I mean, of course, I’m not doing that in the class, but on my own as a private citizen, what kinds of skills did I bring? And I could think of two of them. You know, I had moral outrage and sarcasm. That’s it. That was it! I mean, maybe as a philosopher, I had, like, some conceptual ability to diagnose problems, whatever. Yeah. But mostly, I had moral outrage and sarcasm, and I had. . . important skills, to be sure. But I had. . . when they’re your only skills and you’re dipping into them all the time, then you’re kind of exhausted and not as effective as you might be at advocating for the things you want to advocate for. And if you want change in the world, you’re going to need a bigger skill set.
JJF: Right.
SC: So that’s how I got into peace literacy, and I pretty much immediately was like, Well, are there lessons? Are there, you know? And he’s like, Well, you know, he’s been talking to a number of teachers over the last decade, and they send him lessons based on some of the books he’s written, and I’m like, Well, we need to get those online, and so developed a website, and, you know, now we have this fairly robust program from pre K through, you know, we got curriculum all the way for university, and lifelong learning, Jill.
JJF: Right.
SC: So we have some online courses for adult learners in the continuing education wing of things as well.
JJF: So I will link to all that.
SC: Excellent.
JJF: Because, no, I think it’s really interesting. Prior to talking to you and I’ve met Paul briefly about this work, I definitely thought that, like, you get the social justice in place, and then you get the peace. Like, you know, it’s like peace is, like, the reward, not necessarily something you have to cultivate or practice.
SC: Yeah.
JJF: And so I thought that this idea was really, really interesting. And the idea of how important it is to show respect to people, which is hard when, like, you’re hurt or you do have moral outrage, right? When somebody especially when it feels like someone else has disrespected you, or that things are going in ways that you view as being incredibly morally detrimental for yourself, for your community or whatever, it’s really hard to practice some of these skills. Like, this is not, these are not easy skills to cultivate, especially in tumultuous times. I guess, is what I want to say.
SC: Yeah, well articulated. I mean, I want to be clear here. No one’s expecting anyone to be like a Saint or something. And especially for adult learners, not only do we have to learn these new skills, we got to unlearn a whole ton of other stuff. So it’s a big lift, and that’s why it’s better to start with kids. But we also have to make interventions at basically every education level or we’re not going to get anywhere. So, yeah, you don’t have to be a Saint. So self-compassion plays a large role because, of course, if you start beating yourself up for failing to do these things, you become less effective. So here’s the pragmatism. Again, this is all strategy. The fact that Paul has this military background is like, Look, what is our goal? If our goal is to try and win people over hearts and minds, then you have to think about, how would you like to be treated? I mean, it’s just so basic and stupid. But, oh, my gosh, if I’m talking to someone who’s being disrespectful to me, they’re not listening to me, it gets my backup, and I’m not in a place where I’m going to listen to them. So, you know, there might be a little bit of faking it till you make it. Some of the practicing of it can feel kind of artificial at first, but it’s like when you first start any kind of project, it feels awkward and your heart might not be in it. But, yeah, you’re going to fail often. And so you have to have a lot of compassion so that you’ll be more effective if you get, yeah caught up in the guilt thing, and also, you need a team because not all of us are gonna be on all the time, and we shouldn’t expect it. So you need, like, a tag team folks.
JJF: So you can give license to sarcasm today.
SC: Exactly, yes.
JJF: I’m going to do this part.
SC: But also, there might be there might be particular relationships that you’re just for a variety of reasons, not gonna be particularly good at intervening in, and someone else might have to. Like, our families, we actually might not be the best people to have these really difficult conversations with family members. It’s a lot easier in some contexts to practice these skills with strangers, than it is with intimates. But ultimately, if the people with whom we’re intimate, we can, you know, help each other along, then that’s all to the good. Yeah.
JJF: Okay. So you’ve talked about the importance of respect. But another thing I remember you writing about is the importance of empathy when it comes to both practicing peace, but also understanding, like, belief formations. And in particular, you draw on some of the work from Helen De Cruz which is called believing to belong. So can you talk about that with me and why it’s important for people who are practicing peace, developing literacy skills to think about the ways in which our beliefs are formed? So this is where we kind of mix together ethics and epistemics or knowledge, I think.
SC: Yeah, I appreciate the question. So empathy here, both for ourselves and others in the context of belief formation is also tied up with having some humility about how we came to form our beliefs. Like, just the story I told you about how I came to my feminist activism and teaching that I do, it’s pretty accidental sort of history. Um, certain people gave me certain books to read. I listened to certain lectures, and I found myself in a particular place. I need to have some empathy for those folks who didn’t read those books and didn’t have those particular mentors, and didn’t. . . I don’t mean feel sorry for them, but I mean, just acknowledge that someone who’s resistant to certain feminist ideas, for example, it might not be that they’re evil people. It might be that they have just not had the series of life experiences that have brought you to where you’re at. And so also recognize, you know, as I started, it might not be that you’re morally awesome, also. It might be a series of accidents that have led you epistemically to this great place.
JJF: Right. So all of our beliefs are kind of contextual and accidental and circumstantial.
SC: Well, many of them are. Yeah, yeah. And we can then like my introduction to peace literacy, pretty accidental. But once I’ve got it, now it’s my responsibility to do something with it, and there’s more intentional, discerning kind of work going on. But where would I be if I hadn’t stumbled into that theater to hear Paul K Chappell on that one night after the election on a rainy night in downtown Corvalis, I don’t know where I’d be. So, so, that’s in the literature is called having some Ideological Mercy. Like, it’s a weird term for it, but extending mercy, empathy to both understanding the contingent factors that led you to where you’re at and the contingent factors that might have led them to where they’re at. And once you’ve established that, it kind of deflates a lot of the moral ARGH. You know, and, okay. Well, how did we get here? And another feature that sort of deflates our sense of self righteous anger, maybe, and there’s a lot of things to be angry and righteously so about. I don’t want to downplay that, but there are times where that righteous anger is going to get in the way of social change.
JJF: It’s not practical to go back to the pragmatism, right? It’s not always practical.
SC: I mean, and there’s lots of really good work on when the anger is really important. But there’s also times where it gets in the way, and so you have to have some discernment to know which times or when. So there’s times when it’s getting in the way, it’s also helpful to think about not only the contingency and the accidents of history and biography that led you to hold your beliefs, and similarly, for the accidents in history and contingency that led your combatant to hold their beliefs, but also to recognize, and this is a more humility piece, again, some humbleness about some of the reasons for why you have the beliefs you do are um not just sort of accidents of history, but they also have are wrapped up with what Chappell calls our non-physical needs that we don’t get talked about enough, but as soon as we articulate them, duh, so like our need for belonging, our need for self-worth, our need for nurturing relationships, our need for explanations, our need to express ourselves, there’s a ton of needs that once you articulate them, you realize they’re driving your behavior in more ways than you might have thought. And Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is not helpful here. So the idea that our need for belonging might drive our belief formation it’s humbling.
JJF: Especially for philosophers.
SC: Yeah. Oh, I know. There’s not enough humble philosophers in the world. I seldom am one of them. Anyway, so, so, Helen De Cruz talks about believing to belong. She starts out by talking reminding us of these experiments run by Asch, where they had some folks, like, say, a group of five, and one person was the subject of the experiment. Some of the ethics around this have shifted appropriately over the years, but back in the day, subject, and then for folks who were in on the experiment, and they’re in a room and there’s a projection on the wall of two different lengths of line. And one line is clearly shorter than the other. And each person is asked which line is longer, A or B? Or are they the same length? The subject of the experiment is the last person. The first four all say B is longer, let’s say, but clearly B is shorter. They all say B is longer.
JJF: Mm hm.
SC: So the subjects are looking at the other people who’ve just said the line B is longer, it’s clear that A is longer, let’s say, in this experiment. They’re just befuddled. But they finally will routinely say B is longer. And so there are interesting questions. Initially, this was pitched as peer pressure kind of stuff. And I should say, when I was growing up, no one ever talked about my need for belonging, but they did often talk about my. . . how I should resist peer pressure. And so anytime I felt in myself a need to, you know, belong to a community, I kind of became suspicious of it, you know? Which sort of explains why I got a PhD in philosophy, which is the most isolating experience you can go through and alienating. But I do have a need for belonging. I need to belong, and I just hadn’t nurtured that need and so who knows how stunted my growth is as a result of that need not being met well. But thinking about that experiment, not in terms of peer pressure, which was how it was initially described, but as Helen De Cruz sort of articulates it more gently, I think, epistemic gentleness and kindness here is you’re not being pressured into it. It’s that you your need for belonging to this ersatz community that has just formed is more important in that moment than saying which line is longer, you know, like, so so in some ways, that isn’t so much how you come. . . that experiment isn’t so much about how you come to form a belief that B is longer. I’m pretty sure all of the subjects of that experiment believed that A was longer, but they said that B was longer. So it’s not so much, in that case, about how their beliefs were formed, but about how their utterances were changed as a result of their not wanting to disrupt, so this is another thing for peace literacy and also ties into the fact that Chappell has military training, we humans, for the most part, have a real fear of human aggression directed at us, and we will avoid it at all costs. It’s phobic, in a way. In some ways, it’s a realistic fear. In other ways, it’s a bit phobic where we will be fearful where we shouldn’t be.
JJF: So one thing about me is that I am now a vegetarian and have been for quite a while. And when I first made the decision to be a vegetarian, this was difficult for my Alberta rancher family to understand. Because it did feel like I was espousing a belief that meant I no longer could belong to this community. Like a huge part of my family is a legacy of ranchers and cattle herders and farmers on the Alberta Prairies. So, there is very much this sense of identity and sense of belonging that comes with eating red meat, basically.
SC: Yeah.
JJF: And so there was It’s fine now. My mom and I are great. But there was kind of this confusion. I wouldn’t even call it a tension. It didn’t rise to that level, but I feel a bit of a pull to, like, at least while I’m home, I have to, like, eat the steak so that I belong in the community, if that makes sense. Yes. And so that’s kind of I feel like a smaller example of what you’re talking about. And of course, these things can get bigger and more polarized, depending on how necessary the belief is to social cohesion or to communal identity or these kind of things.
SC: Yeah, beautifully put. And you and I both grew up in Calgary and I thought when you were telling that story, you were going to talk about, about why is it, then that sometimes people do adopt political, ethical views that do set them apart from their community and because it is so difficult because our need for belonging is really strong. I think it’s good to be reminded that we can get that need met in different ways, and that those needs will be stronger or weaker, depending on our developmental history, or you know, other needs might be other sorts of needs might be pulling on us in those moments.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: You can just see now through this lens, everyone’s struggling with just how much they’re going to sacrifice a need to belong and with whom?
JJF: So I think this all gets especially complicated in some other work that you’ve done, which is when we’re looking at new developments in medical technology. So we can take the roll out of MMR vaccines more generally or more specifically the COVID 19 vaccine, which some iterations of it are MMR vaccine and how certain segments of the population were vaccine hesitant and what kind of frictions or tensions this caused in communities. So how are some of the insights you’ve talked about helpful here or how can we practice peace here?
SC: Thank you. I was helped in my thinking about this by fellow Canadian Maya Goldenberg. She does work in philosophy of biomedicine and ethics and social epistemology. And she was very interested in, in vaccine hesitancy, what she came to call vaccine hesitancy as opposed to vaccine denial.
JJF: Or like anti vax, which I’ve heard.
SC: Anti vaxxers. Right. Yeah, which resulted in a book that I just happened to literally have on my bookshelf right next to me. So it’s called Vaccine Hesitancy, Public Trust, Expertise and the War on Science. So I had been reading her research leading up to this book, which made quite clear that folks that I had been lumping into the anti vax camp were actually surprise, surprise, it’s a much more, um, it’s not as cohesive a group as those of us who were annoyed by them. We always tend to over simplify our. . . the folks with whom we disagree. So, you know, all of us can tend to oversimplify and diminish the differences between a group of folks with whom we disagree. So as I was reading Maya Goldenberg’s work, she wanted to look at a group of folks in what I had been and many of us called an anti vax camp who, who actually had come to their vaccine hesitancy to use a more nuanced term for this particular group of folks, for very different reasons than I had assumed. So, you know, the standard sort of response was that people who don’t want, and let’s be clear, this is usually people who don’t want to vaccinate their children. This is sort of where the crux of this comes down, which is sort of different from the COVID example. But for the schedule of vaccines that are recommended for children and in some cases, mandated for children, if they’re going to attend public school, folks who didn’t want their kids to have those vaccines, you know, I and other liberal folks might have been calling them anti vaxxers and that their main problem was they didn’t understand the science of vaccines. And if only they understood the science of vaccine, the scales would fall from their eyes, and, you know, everything would be fine. And she wanted to point out that when you actually interview folks, you get, as I said, a wide variety of positions here. And one of them, and it was a sizeable chunk, and a lot of this research had been done in the UK, but it certainly holds in the US and Canada as well. A sizable chunk of these parents, it’s not that they didn’t know the science. It’s that they actually wanted more science. They wanted, because the science is all statistical, you know, the odds of this vaccine hurting your kid are very small. It’s like, well, actually, can you tell me? You know, will this vaccine hurt my child? They actually want more science brought to bear on the particular cases. And, you know, this is a time where parents are being encouraged to advocate for their children, to do their own research and come to the doctor’s appointments, you know, with lots of information, they’re tracking their kids allergies to all kinds of things. Like, can you give me more specific scientific research about the case for my kid?
JJF: Right.
SC: And so it’s a very different kind of need that they have, and it’s not that they’re resisting science. They actually want more science done in very particular ways, which is a reasonable thing to want, I think. Then there’s the folks from populations and histories where science as an institution, and medicine as an institution, has actively been used to harm them.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: And governments have been complicit with these different institutions in ways that have harmed them. So in the US context, of course, the easiest sort, of, to point at because of the dramatic nature of the case is the Tuskegee experiments where, you know, Black men who had syphilis, even once it was known in medical communities that antibiotics would address the symptoms of syphilis and cure it, that medical professionals in Tuskegee, Alabama, decided that what they were going to do with a group of Black men who had syphilis was not treat them with known medicines that would have helped to document the course of the disease and just see how it messed up their lives, the lives of the women who they were married to and their children. And the syphilis was sometimes spread through these communities. And this was an exchange for medical treatment more broadly. And so, there was some coercion involved in getting the men to sign on to this, insofar as they did, this experiment. What shocked me is that it only stopped because of a whistle blower in their early 70s. Otherwise, who knows if it wouldn’t have just continued. So this is just one of many examples of, where Black communities in the US context can often be, not always, of course, but can be suspicious of whether or not medical professionals have their best interests at heart.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: So here we have cases where the resistance to vaccines might actually be kind of reasonable relative to a history so that what these folks don’t need is a ton of more science thrown at them. What they need is serious interventions to help build trust, like, real trust. Which also goes back to the question of empathy and epistemic humility and belief formation that most of us don’t actually know the empirical details of any of the science that we rely on. Do I know how these vaccines work? No. But, you know, no one who’s told me I should get one has ever been actively trying to harm me. But what if they had?
JJF: Yeah.
SC: So a little more empathy there. And then just to go to the COVID vaccine, I have only belatedly come to attend to what’s known as the opioid crisis or epidemic in the US context, but I know it’s also up in Canada as well.
JJF: Yes, it is.
SC: So now I’ve been catching up on all the documentaries and the dramatized versions of all of these things that have been going on since late 1990s and the duplicity, you know, of these big pharmaceutical companies and their embeddedness and the ways in which they’ve been encouraged or at least not actively discouraged by governmental institutions designed to protect people and the ways in which opioids have just, not just killed folks who have become addicted to them, but completely destroyed communities. I mean, in really predictable ways that you could see coming and has been just so sobering and heartbreaking for me, 15 steps removed, watching a documentary about it, let alone being in the communities where this is just ravaging and continues. Nothing has changed.
JJF: So then why would you trust Big Pharma, right?
SC: Exactly. Oh, well, don’t worry. Here, take this new COVID vaccine. Are you kidding me? I would I mean, and this might be there probably is a cycle of anger here that I’m going through, like, or a cycle of grief? A cycle of grief here, about a lack of trust in really basic sorts of institutions of health and the FDA and so as I’m grieving, I’m just thinking aloud here now. As I’m grieving the disruption of my trust in those, I’m super angry. I’m super angry, belatedly. And I’m not even, you know, thankfully, caught up in any real direct way with that. So imagine the millions and millions and millions of people who are and are now just being told without any work done to rebuild that trust, to just take the COVID vaccine. Everything will be fine. So, I do want folks to take the COVID vaccine.
JJF: Yes. This is a pro vaccine podcast.
SC: Yeah. It is. But I also recognize that for folks who are resistant to it, a lot of work needs to be done to rebuild trust, and that work isn’t happening. And until it happens, we should not be surprised that there will continue to be resistance.
JJF: And this work would be this kind of peace literacy work. It wouldn’t just be about necessarily giving people information or sound bites. But the idea of, like, meeting people where they are, identifying why they’re hesitant or resistant because there are a myriad of different reasons why, understanding where they’re coming from, having empathy, and trying to rebuild trust so that there can be, like, a community again.
SC: And admitting to them that however, it might come up, that the ways in which you’ve come to be okay with vaccines is not because you’ve got some objective analysis of the epidemiology or
JJF: I found the form of the truth.
SC: Yeah. It’s not that. It’s because you have trust in the folks who hand it over to you. So building those bridges, that’s the work that needs to be done. And I think peace literacy is a name for the kinds of skills that we need to have to do that work, and we better get on it or we’re going to be in big trouble. I think we are already in big trouble, so there’s lots of work that can still be done to, even though we’re in big trouble, there’s work to be done to make it to keep it from being worse. It can get worse. It can get worse.
JJF: But it can get better.
SC: But it can get better, Jill. Thank you.
JJF: Okay, so we’re stepping into speculative territory now.
SC: Oh.
JJF: I know you haven’t done a lot of research into how this would all play out online, but I know you’ve seen some of how it plays out online. But I’m hoping that we can play with some of the ideas that you’ve given about believing to belong and community and empathy and all this kind of stuff. And think about how peace literacy might help us understand the impact of social media that started really becoming quite popular in the early 2000s and has now kind of taken over our lives.
SC: Yeah. Well, there’s lots ways we could go here and so I’ll just pick one theme, but I don’t want listeners to think that this is the only explanation that peace literacy can offer as a framework here. But one is, again, coming out of an understanding of military history and how militaries build communities to do terrible things. But why is it that militaries at their best are better at community building to get people to do stuff they would not otherwise than any of us in peace communities are? Anyway. So one of the things that peace literacy looks at are different ways in which in order for us to be violent with each other, especially lethally violent with each other, unless we’re already kind of wrecked, for those of us who aren’t completely wrecked, traumatized and. . . we usually have to be. . . there’s a number of conditions that have to be actively sort of manipulated for us to be okay with or be moved to lethal violence. And a lot of those involve dehumanization techniques. And some of the evidence for this is, you know, that there has been no, no campaigns for war that haven’t involved active dehumanization of enemy combatants. And that’s important data for us to pay attention to that it’s very hard for us to do violence to each other if we haven’t already had some dehumanization brainwashing, I guess, to use a colloquial term.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: Why does that matter for peace literacy? Because some of those dehumanization techniques actually are all around us. So, when you can think about dehumanization techniques is different kinds of distancing. So, the more distant you are in psychologically or with respect to social media, mechanically, distant you are, the easier it is in certain circumstances when certain topics are coming up and things are kind of getting heated for you to respond with more aggression than you might otherwise. So, the use of mechanical distancing can help explain why it’s easier on soldiers’ mental health to drop bombs on enemy combatants than it is to stab them with a bayonet.
JJF: Right.
SC: Soldiers who were fixing bayonets to their rifles were just destroyed. I mean, psychologically, just, uh, and Jane Addams learned this as she was actually interviewing soldiers, well, and military leaders beginning of World War I, all throughout Europe, talking about the different kinds of alcohol that they, and drugs that they would give to soldiers to help them get through or put them in a state of mind where bayonet charges would even be possible.
JJF: Right.
SC: So, mechanical distance, the more mechanical distance we have from folks with whom we’re having a conflict, the easier it is for us to become much more aggressive than we would have otherwise. And it’s why, you know, we have instances of road rage more than we have instances of sidewalk rage.
JJF: Right.
SC: And so now then translating that to social media when you can’t see someone’s face, when you can’t see their humanity and empathy gets harder to muster, and it becomes much easier to. . . almost these exaggerated kind of aggressive posturing that can go on, which can then become habitual. This is also part of the pragmatist sort of thinking around peace literacy, these are skills. And if not skills, then habits of mind. And I think social media can really encourage really unhealthy habits of mind.
JJF: Like, dehumanizing habits of mind.
SC: Yeah. Yeah.
JJF: And yeah, I see what you’re saying like, close combat or even a close argument. Like there’s obviously the military context where it’s close combat, and, like, it’s harder to dehumanize another person if they’re like, physically right in front of you. If you can see them and hear them and smell them and all that stuff.
SC: Yeah.
JJF: The same thing, if you’re having an argument with another person, it’s not impossible. I’ve seen people get aggressive when they’re in a physical space with somebody else. But I do think there are ways in which people are more willing to say and incite certain things online that they wouldn’t do if they were facing their opponent, I guess, like, physically. Or even verbally on the phone might be different than what you’re willing to type, for example. So this idea of mechanical distance and the way in which mechanical distance may encourage us or facilitate dehumanizing, I think that’s deeply concerning.
SC: Mhmmm.
JF: Especially if we’re having more and more of our interactions with this mechanical distance kind of already built in. Right. It made me think of so I saw a talk from Safiya Noble last a couple of months ago. She came and gave a talk joint sponsored by Simon Fraser University and Douglas College. And she was talking about kind of all the ways in which algorithms and social media and Google search and stuff dehumanize particularly, she was looking at Black women, but a whole host of marginalized people in general, the ways in which they reinforce certain dominant stereotypes and biases. And somebody asked her, like, how do we get out of this?
SC: Mmm.
JJF: And her response was, we have to prioritize human connection, like at all cost, at all cost. And we can do this online, but we have to actively do it because the tools that we’re working with don’t necessarily always facilitate us doing this, right? Like Twitter or X is not built for prioritizing human connection. Facebook, even though they say it’s about connection, it’s not built to prioritize human connection. And I just found that answer, like, in some ways, again, it’s like everything you’ve been saying. It’s so simple. But it felt very profound at the same time.
SC: Yeah.
JJF: So yeah.
JJF: Well, so I would say, I mean, what I’m calling peace literacy, what Paul K Chappell calls peace literacy is, you know, a name for a set of views that are all out there. And it’s just organizing them into a framework that offers sort of a series of explanations we might not have. . . it takes a ton of human data that we’re all familiar with and reminds us that it’s data. Like, Oh, there’s stuff about humans we ought to know and be responsible to. If we know this about the dehumanizing capacity that comes with social media, that should ultimately drive our policy. It should drive how we train our kids. Are we teaching kids about how to respond to any of this in K through 12? Paul tells a story about talking to a principal who. . . this is about five years ago now. . . but principals like, God, what do we do about smartphones? Paul’s like, Okay, you’re asking that question 13 years too late. You know, he talked about how, you know, when he was, back when he was in the military, they were all issued Blackberries, great Canadian technology. But all the soldiers became completely addicted to them. They could not . . . they came to be called Crack Berries, which, you know, was actually a term of, a well known term. And so, if so-called disciplined adult soldiers were not able to manage mentally and psychologically the role of these phones in their lives, how are we expecting you know, kids to? And, you know, telling the kids to just not use those phones is that’s all I’m seeing people do. We have a phone policy, which means you’re gonna put your phone away. Okay.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: That’ll handle some hours of the day. But especially given their need for belonging and expression and nurturing relationships and all of that, these, social media is providing kids with all. . . meeting those needs, not in the healthiest ways, but we can’t just take that stuff away without acknowledging the needs that are being met by that.
JJF: Yeah, yeah.
JJF: So, I know that the Peace Literacy Institute is using VR technology right now. Can you talk a little bit about this?
SC: Yeah. So this is, we’re using it based on predictions that Paul is making about where the technology’s going, and he’s, he’s usually right about the stuff based on, you know, really, really careful research. And I should just say he was the only person I knew retroactively, who predicted in late 2015 that Donald Trump was going to be the president. He was also the only one I knew who was actually listening to Donald Trump’s speeches. He was like, Is anyone actually paying attention to the ways audiences are responding to him? Because he’s meeting some important needs here that are not being met elsewhere. And if we don’t get that and try to meet those needs in other ways, he’s going to be elected president. And maybe for two terms. He now says, I didn’t say consecutive
JJF: Oh No.
SC: But anyway. And so I just offer that is he does a lot of research about human psychology and user interfaces and technologies and has been paying attention to the ways VR has been from its earliest instances, but especially from 2016 onwards, has been developing and anticipating ways in which it’s going to scratch a lot of itches. And it will force a crisis that will force a reckoning. So, it’s a dangerous game we’re playing here at the Peace Literacy Institute to use, to use the very technology that we think also has a potential for a great deal of destruction.
JJF: Okay.
SC: So it’s super powerful and the very reason that it’s super powerful means that it’s an amazing teaching tool. So, we talk about embodiment. You know what does that mean? But when you’re in those spaces, first of all, you can actually look at the other person. Like, you and I can’t actually look into each other’s eyes over Zoom.
JJF: Right.
SC: So, you can look at and actually interact with. So, in a weird way, you know, it’s, uh, lots of naysayers and like, it’s not real. Well, yeah, okay. But it’s bizarrely unmediated, and then lots of ways heavily mediated. You can have physiological reactions in VR, you know, if you’re suddenly, you know, in the North Pole, you will feel colder. If you’re walking out over on a thin plank, over a Manhattan skyline, your hands will get soaking wet. I mean, we all know the psychology. It doesn’t take much actually.
JJF: So, it feels real?
SC: Oh, yeah. I mean, and your brain is filling it all in. It doesn’t actually we don’t have to give our brain a lot of cues before it goes, Oh, I know what’s happening here. This is bad. Or, oh, this is a human, right? Oh, this is a person. And so it provides connection that folks might not realize. And I think, you know, some healthy connection, obviously, I don’t know how much time we want to talk about the potentials for pretty negative connection, but perhaps, certainly healthier connections than most other social media currently available potential for that. Potential. But it’s also like, well, let me give you an example. One of the ways we talk about aggression in our peace literacy curriculum is to use the metaphor of aggression is like the heat that comes off a fire. And we often get, you know, the heat is, you know, very distracting, but we really ought to pay attention to the fire. What is the distress causing that aggression that no one who’s behaving aggressively is feeling good and, you know. . .
JJF: Like, dealing with the heat won’t put out the fire.
SC: Yeah.
JJF: You have to actually go to the fire.
SC: So dealing with what is the distress underlying underlying the aggression? And, you know, we don’t do direct delivery to kids in schools very often, but occasionally we have, and we keep track of this stuff. And we ask them what kinds of distress cause you, or people you know if you don’t want to talk about yourself, to behave aggressively? And within a second, they come up with a list that’s basically the same list that we gather at every single classroom. We have it on a bookmark now. It’s like they’ll use, they might use slightly different words depending on their vocabulary, but they’re like, disrespect.
JJF: Mm hmm.
SC: Fear, grief, anxiety, stress. And there’s some physical things, you know, hunger.
JJF: Sleep, lack of sleep?
SC: Yeah, lack of sleep, being too hot, injustice, abandonment. I mean, the list is so consistent and so like each time these kids are ticking off these kinds of distress that have caused them or people they know, to behave aggressively, it’s just like, Oh, Oh, there it all. We all know. . .
JJF: It’s very familiar.
SC: Yeah, and we know this. And yet, we’re just telling people, stop being a stop fighting.
JJF: Right. But what if we dealt with the anxiety or the loneliness or gave someone, like, a chocolate bar if they’re hungry?
SC: I should say the same Linda Richards who brought Paul K Chappell to Corvalis where we cross paths faithfully, she does work with, you know, violence interrupters at, and I mean, folks by now will probably have heard these, but, you know, in 2016, it was kind of new to me that, you know, they wear these orange vests and they go around and they have bottles of water and granola bars. That’s what they’re handing out, you know.
JJF: Right.
SC: And the face to face interaction and the de-escalation.
JJF: How do we do this with VR?
SC: Yeah, so. Okay, so that’s, you know, we got the fires and the heat. Well, now take students into a virtual, they’re on a raft. And the raft. . .
JJF: A Virtual raft.
SC: Yeah. Yeah they’re avatars. They’re on a raft. And they’re sailing on this raft to the Island of aggression, and they’re sailing across the cosmic ocean, right? And we go through this fog, which sort of symbolizes our metaphor, rich rich metaphor, how little we know about ourselves. And as you’re going through the fog, you just feel it on your skin, you know? And you feel the motion of the raft, and everyone’s excited. And you pull up on the beach of the Island of aggression, and there’s this big, huge red planet. And this is Mars, you know, Aries and talk a little bit about Aries and mythology and Greek mythology. It’s kind of astonishing, but a lot of this was figured out, you know, and articulated, and especially military history, again, because you’ve got to deal with all of this stuff in ancient Greek traditions in classical Chinese period in the Indian subcontinent, all the classic texts that come out of there talk about all of the ways to manage human aggression and where it comes from and how to think about it. And then you see, there’s these mountains in front of you and you see these plumes of heat, you know, kind of like the way when you can see heat coming off of a hot highway, it’s sort of like. . .
JJF: Like the ripple?
SC: Yeah, good. I’m making ripples with my hands. You can see three different plumes, we talk about three different main kinds of aggression, so you see these plumes of heat. And then there’s this very beguiling entrance underneath the mountain. So we see the heat, and we’re going to figure out what causes it. Where is that heat started? So we’re going to go find the fire. And so then you go down physically down, down, down, down, down into the depths of this mountain to this massive wall of fire. I mean, it is like four stories high because this is what you can do in VR.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: You’re very tiny. The wall of fire rather, is just huge, like three or four stories, and it’s overwhelming, and you can almost feel it, the heat coming off of you. And then we have this really cool technology where students are able to take a little pen at each. . . There’s these stations in front of this massive wall of fire. And now they write in the air a kind of distress that would cause this fire. And so they write down fear and grief and anxiety and stress and embarrassment and shame. Oh. Oh. They write all this stuff unprompted, right? This is just the same every single time. And each time they write it in air, that writing is all fiery, and it turns into a ball of fire ’cause this is what you can do in VR. So, you finish a sentence. It turns into a ball of fire. You take that ball of fire, you throw it at the firewall, and then, boom, the word grief just lights up the wall of fire.
JJF: Whoa!
SC: And then the word stress and frustration.
JJF: That sounds so cathartic.
SC: I just got goose bumps. It’s, like, really powerful. So that lesson really sticks. You know, like, it’s a very different I mean, and this is just very baby technology.
JJF: So it sounds like you can have these, like, connection embodiment and also, like, artistic exploratory experiences in VR.
SC: Yeah, the Metaphors come to life. Yeah.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: Yeah. Limited only by your imagination and ability to design it. Yeah. And the money. It costs money.
JJF: I want to flag it because you mentioned it. Obviously, in the hands of for-profit corporations, this could be quite a dangerous technology. So, I can see why people at the Peace Literacy Institute are worried about that and also why you’re using it for something hopefully more cathartic and more beneficial and more supportive of human connection and all that kind of stuff.
SC: Yeah. But it is a place where people are going to meet their needs.
JJF: Yeah.
SC: As you know, corporations do not have our best interests at heart. And if we don’t teach people about the needs that they have, then they’re gonna be very vulnerable to having those needs manipulated in these spaces.
JJF: Yeah. And we’ve already seen this happen in social media spaces.
SC: Yeah. Yeah.
JJF: A lot of people talk about social media as like a canary in the coal mine. Like, it taught us what happens if we aren’t aware of our needs and of human drives and things like that before we go into these digital spaces. And if we hand all that over to for-profit enterprises, like now we know, right? We saw what happened.
SC: Yeah.
JJF: We need to be more mindful with the next iteration, the next big thing.
JJF: So I want to thank you so much for sharing your work with us today, Shari, and talking about peace and peace literacy. Is there anything else you’d like to leave the listeners with regarding peace literacy and/or technology?
SC: Thanks, Jill. Well, I guess sort of one interesting thing to sort of end with is I’ve talked about Greek mythology briefly. We do use Greek mythology a lot. It so offers a lot of rich resources for thinking about all these psychological dynamics that inform peace literacy frameworks. And one of the Greek gods we talk about is Nemesis. And I didn’t realize that emesis is a goddess, you know, a female form. And she’s not necessarily embodying your enemy. What she is is she’s a, um, she collects dues. So, she keeps things in balance. So, we can think about the need to up our peace literacy game here for both adults and kids as a way to pay our dues because if we don’t, if technology continues to take over our lives for good or bad, increasing our technological capacities, as those capacities increase, we need also to increase our peace literacy skill set. Uh, or else Nemesis is gonna call us to pay our dues here. And the gap between our peace literacy skill set and where we’re at with our technology, we can think of that gap as Nemesis. You know, that’s the. . . we got to close that gap, and I think we can already see the kinds of things that are going to happen if we don’t.
JJF: I want to thank Shari again for sharing her work on peace literacy with us today. And thank you, listener, for joining me for another episode of Cyborg Goddess. This podcast is created by me, Jennifer Jill Fellows, and it is part of the Harbinger Media Network. Music is by Epidemic Sound. You can follow us on X, formerly Twitter, BlueSky or follow me on Mastodon. Social media links are in the Shows. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do consider leaving us a review. It actually helps. Until next time, everyone. Bye.