How 60 years of Massey Lectures can guide us for the next 60
From the 1967 talks by Martin Luther King Jr. to Ron Deibert's 2020 reflections on the internet, IDEAS producers have been digging through the CBC Massey Lectures archives. The result of their intellectual treasure hunt is a series of conversations with — and about — past Massey lecturers to mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, a partner in the CBC Massey Lectures.
TANYA TALAGA
In 2018, award-winning journalist Tanya Talaga, presented the CBC Massey Lectures series, entitled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward in which she explored the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.
For Talaga, that cultural genocide has led to a forced disconnection from land and language by Indigenous peoples. Her lectures focused on the present-day need for Indigenous self-determination in social, cultural and political arenas.
Tanya Talaga sits down with IDEAS producer Naheed Mustafa to reflect back on her lectures and how the stories of Indigenous peoples offer lessons for Canada today.
RANDY BOYAGODA ON JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
In the 1993 CBC Massey Lectures entitled Democracy on Trial, American political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain addressed the question: is democracy as we know it in danger? Her concern was that smaller, often 'aggrieved' group interests were increasingly threatening our understanding of ourselves as free citizens.
Author, critic, and University of Toronto professor Randy Boyagoda and IDEAS producer Sean Foley revisit Elshtain's lectures — and find them both prescient, and problematic.
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
Twenty-four years ago, Massey lecturer Michael Ignatieff delivered five talks that explored the powerful rise of the language of 'rights' in Canada and other industrialized nations from the 1960s through the end of the 1990s. Michael Ignatieff sits down with former IDEAS host Paul Kennedy to reflect on his talks — and how the rights revolution continues to shape politics today, often in unexpected ways.
RON DEIBERT
JENNIFER WELSH
Born in Regina, educated at Oxford, Jennifer Welsh has worked in the field of International Relations and Political Science across Europe and in Canada, most recently at McGill University in Montreal. Her 2016 Massey Lectures were called The Return of History — a wake up call to those of us who may have felt a little too optimistic about the future after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Executive Producer Greg Kelly interviewed Jennifer Welsh before an audience at Massey College, about wealth, authoritarianism, and what it was like to see the wall come down back in 1989.
WADE DAVIS
Anthropologist Wade Davis has smoked toad, drunk ayahuasca, and figured out the zombie cocktail of drugs that feign death. He's the author of 23 books, including the 2009 CBC Massey Lectures, The Wayfinders taking the reader, and the listener, on a journey through the wonders of the natural world, as they are seen and experienced by Indigenous peoples. He revisits his Massey Lectures with IDEAS producer Philip Coulter.
PAYAM AKHAVAN
In 2017, Canadian human rights lawyer Payam Akhavan delivered the Massey Lectures, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey. The lectures recount how some of his most formative experiences — his family's flight from Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, his work for UN Tribunals prosecuting those responsible for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the early 1990s and for the Rwandan genocide of 1994 — galvanized his commitment to pursuing justice for the victims of human rights abuses. Akhavan speaks to IDEAS producer Chris Wodskou on how the themes explored in his lectures have taken on even more relevance in the today's divided, conflict-ridden world.
URSULA FRANKLIN
Technology is much more than a tool; it's a system, according to physicist and peace activist Ursula Franklin argued — one so powerful that it can shape our mindset, our society and our politics. Her observations were prescient when she delivered her Massey Lecture in 1989 and they are all the more relevant today. Ursula Franklin's friend and collaborator University of Toronto Professor Jane Freeman reflects on the power of Franklin's message.
