Radical Humanism in Times of Crisis, Part 3 – Is Russell Brand the Socrates of Our Time?

Interviews 1 Minute

In this video, the final of a three-part series, Dr. Todd Dufresne, Dr. Carol-Ann Farkas, and Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square discuss tricksters, comedians, Indigenous knowledge, and the role of scholarship in addressing the climate emergency and COVID-19.

*****The book shown in the video is actually Trickster Drift. I am referring to Son of a Trickster.****

Todd is a Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University (CA) and, most recently, author of The Democracy of Suffering: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Philosophy in the Anthropocene (2019). Carol-Ann is a Professor of English and the Director of Writing Programs in the School of Arts and Sciences at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS). She is the the editor of Reading the Psychosomatic in Medical and Popular Culture: Something, Nothing, Everything (Routledge 2017), and her current research focuses on the ways in which we turn to popular media to learn about, and cope with, eco-anxiety. She is currently co-authoring a chapter for The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media (2021)—“Climate Health is Human Health: Working Through Eco-Anxiety With the Written Word in Print and Digital Media”—with Bryn. Bryn is an Interdisciplinary Instructor in the Faculty of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and an editor for Epilogue magazine. She is currently co-authoring a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, as you know from above, and she is also co-editing a collected volume, Intersex and the Health and Medical Humanities (2021), with Dr. Katelyn Dykstra. Thank you so much to the very talented Johanna Hauterville for editing this video (which would have taken me my entire life)!!

Published by Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square

I received my PhD in English literature from the University of Oxford (UK) in 2017, my dissertation for which explores the prosocial potential of reading, which increases our empathy. After completing my PhD, I worked as a Special Programs & Student Records Assistant at the U of Winnipeg and later as a Research Grants Officer (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) for the Office of Research Services at the U of Manitoba (UM). I then worked as Postdoctoral Fellow (UM) under the supervision of Dr. Faubert and as a Research Affiliate with UM’s Institute for the Humanities. I have also worked as an Instructor in the Department of English and as an Interdisciplinary Instructor in the Faculty of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU). I have had articles on imagination, literature, empathy, mental health, emotional contagion, and social change published in Essays in Romanticism (2020) and Studies in the Literary Imagination (2018), and my chapter for The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, “Climate Health Is Human Health: Working Through Eco-Anxiety with the Written Word in Print and Digital Media,” co-authored with Dr. Carol-Ann Farkas (MCPHS University), will be published in early 2022. My latest project, “Books, Brains, and Benevolence: An Interdisciplinary Study of Empathy,” advocates for a radical shift from a self-focused to an other-focused society and for a renewed awareness of how intimately connected we are to one another and to our environment. I am currently a Research Affiliate with The University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities - which promotes cross-disciplinary research in the Humanities - a member of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, and an Independent Contractor with the non-profit charity organization Emergence Benefactors, which supports the science of emergence. I am the lead organizer of the interdisciplinary global forum “Redesigning Our World,” which will take place in April 2022 and enable people to come together to think collectively about the fate of our shared planet. I also co-host The Brains & Banter Podcast with an awesome group of students, academics, artists, and activists. We offer a multiplicity of perspectives on topics like the climate crisis, mental health, systemic racism, social justice, criminal justice, prison reform, higher education, spirituality, storytelling, consciousness, metaphor, music, comedy, art, activism, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and more.

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