Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Rackeb Tesfaye, Knowledge Mobilization Lead and Senior Scientist at the Bridge Research Consortium, Simon Fraser University

As Canadian federal election candidates prepared for their final debate in April 2025, youth across the country were preparing for collaborative conversations around timely and potentially divisive issues for the National Ethics Bowl at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg.

Ethics Bowl Canada is a non-profit organization that hosts competitions where high school and university students explore complex ethical issues through respectful dialogue in teams.

Rather than trying to undermine their opponents’ arguments, as in traditional debates, Ethics Bowl competitors win by engaging constructively, responding positively to reasonable criticism and refining or amending their views.

Polarization and engaging with disagreement

The Public Policy Forum’s 2023 report Far and Widening: The Rise of Polarization in Canada documented serious issues around how young people think about their futures. It highlighted that, among young people’s concerns like pandemics, climate emergencies and a declining economy, their deepest fear for Canada’s future is growing political and ideological polarization.

The erosion of trust in institutions like government, industry and media contributes to people seeking alternative sources of information.

Alternative sources sometimes contribute to healthy social empowerment and democratic participation. But we are also living with cascading misinformation — sometimes sewn by groups seeking to destabilize society — with harmful effects. Through algorithmic filtering we’ve seen a growth of ideological echo chambers.

Philosophers like John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and Seyla Benhabib have long proposed that engaging with diverse and sometimes contrary points of view is part of what legitimizes democracy.

Conflict and disagreement are healthy parts of a democracy. But these need to be engaged with productively.

How the Ethics Bowl works

The Ethics Bowl is a “gamified” way of engaging in deliberative dialogue about civic issues. More than 1,500 high school and university students now participate in Ethics Bowls each year.

Ethics Bowl teams conduct research on cases created by philosophers and subject matter experts, and then form their opinions and arguments on them. Teams of three to five students then participate first in regional competitions, where they present their arguments, listen to other arguments, provide comments and respond to feedback.

A panel of judges (including philosophers, subject matter experts and community members) scores the teams. Their rubric rewards acknowledging nuance, refining positions and being respectful. Regional winners then compete nationally.

Evidence shows thinking and talking about ethics alone can be a driver for social change. The Ethics Bowl is also an intervention that allows participants to develop their civic discussion skills.

Research shows that engaging in this kind of dialogue can help participants acquire civic virtues, such as tolerance, respect for diverse viewpoints and willingness to engage in conversation.

Vaccines as a timely topic

While the legitimization of anti-vaccine rhetoric continues in the United States, Canada is not immune to divisiveness around vaccines.

Since the pandemic, Canada has seen a rise in vaccine hesitancy, a resurgence of measles and a shift in COVID-19 vaccine accessibility.

Among young people in Canada, vaccination is now one of the most polarizing topics of discussion.

To support young people reflecting upon ethical tensions around vaccines, Ethics Bowl Canada partnered with the Bridge Research Consortium (BRC), a national consortium of social scientists and humanity scholars. BRC scholars have a broad range of expertise to support public trust and equitable access to new vaccines.

Vaccine case studies

BRC Bioethicists developed timely case studies for the National Ethics Bowl:

• One case deals with family disagreements around vaccine mandates.

• Another case centres on navigating the use of preventative health measures on farms, including preventive vaccinations for farmers and the culling of animals, if an avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak leads to a pandemic. This case was inspired by the first confirmed positive case of H5N1 on an ostrich farm in British Columbia, which made worldwide headlines.

Participants in the National Ethics Bowl found these cases the most challenging in the competition. One participant said:

“Public health is not something we often think about.”

A graphic illustration visually captured the many themes and reflections emerging from six teams discussions, and a version with links to the case studies is available on the Ethics Bowl website.

Engaging in civil dialogues is a transformative experience for students. As one teacher explained:

“These discussions matter. This type of dialogue has the power to change individuals.”

They also contribute to a sense of belonging. One high school student shared:

“Being around people who care about real world issues feels good.”

An educational model to train scientists

Scientists have also been caught in the crosshairs of political partisanship on vaccines. Despite a decline of trust in many institutions, scientists are still trusted sources of information by the public globally.

As evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, confidence in and the adoption of immune-based innovations moves at the speed of trust. Yet, rather than a loss of trust, scientists are losing influence to other information sources.

The need for scientists to strengthen trust and resonate with the public among the sea of other voices was addressed by a second mini Ethics Bowl with science graduate students in Montréal in June 2025. Before the event, 86 per cent of the science graduate students indicated they rarely or sometimes discussed the ethical implications of their work.

Student participants were part of RAMP-UP, a Québec-based research initiative developing reliable, scalable and adaptable biomanufacturing processes to produce vaccines and immunotherapies ahead of a future health emergency.

This mini ethics bowl was a teaching and learning tool to support students’ deeper engagement with the moral and ethical implications of their work, and to instil more socially informed science engagement.

Science researchers deliberate ethical concepts

As part of the full day of the mini Ethics Bowl training, students were introduced to ethical and philosophical concepts and engaged with experts in multiple disciplines. They competed in an Ethics Bowl with their peers discussing the above described vaccine-related case studies.

As captured in an illustration of events, not only did students feel stimulated and learn new knowledge, they came away calling for more integration of the social sciences and humanities in their education.

They also reflected on other ethical tensions in their work — like pharmaceutical companies profiting from their research.

We recommend this novel model of learning be introduced into curricula for scientists working on polarizing topics like immunology.

How to engage in productive dialogue

From election periods to holiday dinners with family, here is a blueprint for how people can collectively engage in productive dialogues:

1. Disagreement isn’t a failure: Instead of viewing someone disagreeing with you as having failed in some way (perhaps by being irrational), view them as an intellectual equal. Rational processes can result in more extreme (farther in content from other opinions) and radical (more strongly held) opinions. The processes that produce more extreme and radical opinions can also work on you.

2. Listen and try to understand: Be curious about, and interested in, interpreting what your conversation partner is saying with empathy. This can allow you to evaluate their points more fairly. Empathizing might allow you to better understand where others are coming from.

3. Set realistic expectations: People rarely change their minds during a conversation. But if sustained conversation focuses on practical issues, as opposed to foundational values, parties change their minds more often while reflecting between conversations.

Cem Erkli, program co-ordinator for Ethics Bowl Canada, and Pierre-Jean Alarco, knowledge mobilization officer for RAMP-UP, co-authored this story.

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Immunity and Society is a new series from The Conversation Canada that presents new vaccine discoveries and immune-based innovations that are changing how we understand and protect human health. Through a partnership with the Bridge Research Consortium, these articles — written by experts in Canada at the forefront of immunology, biomanufacturing, social science and humanities — explore the latest developments and their impacts.

Rackeb Tesfaye receives funding from the Bridge Research Consortium (BRC), part of Canada’s Immuno-Engineering and Biomanufacturing Hub, which in turn is funded by the Canada Biomedical Research Fund, Canada Foundation for Innovation and the BC Knowledge Development Fund.

Nicolas Fillion is chair of the board of Ethics Bowl Canada.

– ref. More dialogue, less debate: At an ‘Ethics Bowl,’ students learn to handle tough conversations – https://theconversation.com/more-dialogue-less-debate-at-an-ethics-bowl-students-learn-to-handle-tough-conversations-271822

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Deanna Needell, Professor of Mathematics, UBC. Co-Director Programs, Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, University of British Columbia

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. In fact, each reader of this article could have multiple AI apps operating on the very device displaying this piece. The image at the top of this article is also generated by AI.

Despite this, many mechanisms governing AI behaviour remain poorly understood, even to top AI experts. This leads to an AI race built upon costly scaling, both environmentally and financially, that is also dangerously unreliable.

Progress therefore depends not on escalating this race, but on understanding the principles underpinning AI. Mathematics lies at the heart of AI and investment in these mathematical foundations is the critical key to becoming a true global AI leader.

How AI shapes daily life

AI has rapidly become part of everyday life, not only in talking home devices and fun social media generation, but also in ways so seamless that many people don’t even notice its presence.

It provides the recommendations we see when browsing online and quietly optimizes everything from transit routes to home energy use.

Critical services rely on AI because it’s used in medical diagnosis, banking fraud detection, drug discovery, criminal sentencing, governmental services and health predictions, all areas where inaccurate outputs may have devastating consequences.

Problems, issues

Despite AI’s widespread use, serious and widely documented issues continue to showcase concerns around fairness, reliability and sustainability. Biases embedded in data and models can propagate discriminatory outcomes, from facial detection methods that perform well only on light skin tones to predictive tools that systematically disadvantage underrepresented groups.

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Beyond bias: Equity, diversity and inclusion must drive AI implementation in the workplace

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These failures continue to be reported and range from racist outputs of ChatGPT and other chatbots to imaging tools that misidentify Barack Obama as white and biased criminal sentencing algorithms.

At the same time, the environmental and financial costs of deploying large-scale AI systems are growing at an extremely rapid pace.

If this trajectory continues, it will not only prove environmentally unsustainable, it will also concentrate access to these powerful AI tools to a few wealthy and influential entities with access to vast capital and massive infrastructure.

Why mathematics?

To address issues with a system, whether it’s fixing a car or ensuring reliability in an AI system, it’s crucial to understand how it works. A mechanic cannot fix or even diagnose why a car isn’t operating correctly without understanding how the engine works.

The “engine” for AI is mathematics. In the 1950s, scientists used ideas from logic and probability to teach computers how to make simple decisions. As technology advanced, so did the math, and tools from optimization, linear algebra, geometry, statistics and other mathematical disciplines became the backbone of what are now modern AI systems.

These methods are certainly modelled after aspects of the human brain, but despite the nomenclature of “neural networks” and “machine learning,” these systems are essentially giant math engines that carry out vast amounts of mathematical operations with parameters that were optimized using massive amounts of data.

This means improving AI is not just about continuously building bigger computers and using more data; it’s about deepening our understanding of the complex math that governs these systems. By recognizing how fundamentally mathematical AI really is, we can improve its fairness, reliability and sustainable scalability as it becomes an even larger part of everyday life.

Canada’s path forward

So what should Canada do next? Invest in the parts of AI that turn power into dependability. That means funding the science that makes AI systems predictable, auditable and efficient, so hospitals, banks, utilities and public agencies can adopt AI with confidence.

This is not a call for bigger servers; it’s a call for better science, where mathematics is the core scientific engine.

Canada already has a national platform to advance this work: the mathematical sciences institutes the (Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, The Centre de recherches mathématiques, Atlantic Association for Research in the Mathematical Sciences, Banff International Research Station connect researchers across provinces and disciplines, convene collaborative programs and link academia with the public sector.

Together with Canada’s AI institutes (Mila, Vector, Amii) and CIFAR, this ecosystem strengthens both foundational and translational AI nationwide.

Canada’s standing in AI was built on decades of foundational research, work that preceded today’s large models and made them possible. Reinforcing that foundation would allow Canada to lead the next stage of AI development: models that are efficient rather than wasteful, transparent rather than opaque and trustworthy rather than brittle. Investing in mathematical research is not only scientifically essential, it is strategically wise and will strengthen national sovereignty.

The payoff is straightforward: AI that costs less to run, fails less often and earns more public trust. Canada can lead here, not by winning a computing power arms race, but by setting the scientific bar for how AI should work when lives, livelihoods and public resources are at stake.

Deanna Needell has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (US).

Kristine Bauer receives funding from NSERC to support her research program in pure mathematics. She is affiliated with the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences.

Ozgur Yilmaz receives funding from NSERC and PIMS.

– ref. How can Canada become a global AI powerhouse? By investing in mathematics – https://theconversation.com/how-can-canada-become-a-global-ai-powerhouse-by-investing-in-mathematics-271796

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Taylor Snowden, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Neuroscience, Université de Montréal

If you scroll through TikTok or Instagram long enough, you’ll inevitably stumble across the line: “Your frontal lobe isn’t fully developed yet.” It’s become neuroscience’s go-to explanation for bad decisions, like ordering an extra drink at the bar or texting an ex you swore not to.

The frontal lobe plays a central role in higher level functions like planning, decision-making and judgment.

It’s easy to find comfort in the idea that there’s a biological excuse for why we sometimes feel unstable, impulsive or like a work in progress. Life in your 20s and early 30s is unpredictable, and the idea that your brain simply isn’t done developing can be oddly reassuring.

But the idea that the brain, particularly the frontal lobe, stops developing at 25 is a pervasive misconception in psychology and neuroscience. Like many myths, the “age 25” idea is rooted in real scientific findings, but it’s an oversimplification of a much longer and more complex process.

In reality, new research suggests this development actually extends into our 30s. This new understanding changes how we view adulthood and suggests that 25 was never meant to be the finish line in the first place.

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No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

Read more from Quarter Life:

• Why Gen Z and millennial consumers feel disillusioned — and how they can drive real change

• Moving abroad in your 20s can leave you with two identities – here’s how to cope

• How your brain keeps falling for the latest beauty fads – and what you can do about it

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Where did the ‘age 25’ myth come from?

The magic number stems from brain imaging studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In one 1999 tudy, researchers tracked brain changes through repeated scans in children and teens. They analyzed grey matter, which consists of cell bodies and can be thought of as the “thinking” component of the brain.

Researchers found that during the teenage years, grey matter goes through a process called pruning. Early in life, the brain builds an enormous number of neural connections. As we age, it gradually trims back the ones that are used less often, strengthening those that remain.

This early work highlighted that grey matter volume growth and loss is key for brain development.

In influential follow-up work led by neuroscientist Nitin Gogtay, participants as young as four had their brains scanned every two years. The researchers found that within the frontal lobe, regions mature from back to front.

More primal regions, like areas responsible for voluntary muscle movement, develop first, while more advanced regions that are important for decision-making, emotional regulation and social behaviour had not fully matured by the final brain scans around age 20.

Since the data stopped at age 20, researchers couldn’t say precisely when development finished. The age of 25 became the best estimation for the assumed endpoint, and eventually became enshrined in the cultural consciousness.

What newer research reveals

Since those early studies, neuroscience has moved on considerably. Rather than looking at individual regions in isolation, researchers now study how efficiently different parts of the brain communicate with one another.

A recent major study assessed efficiency of brain networks, essentially how the brain is wired, through white matter topology. White matter is made up of long nerve fibres that link different parts of the brain and spinal cord, allowing electrical signals to travel back and forth.

Researchers analyzed scans from more than 4,200 people from infancy to 90 years old and found several key periods of development including one from age nine to 32, which they coined the “adolescent” period.

For anyone well into adulthood, it may feel jarring to be told that your brain is still an “adolescent,” but this term really just signifies that your brain is in a stage of key changes.

Based on this study, it seems that during brain adolescence, the brain is balancing two key processes: segregation and integration. Segregation involves building neighbourhoods of related thoughts. Integration involves building highways to connect those neighbourhoods. The research suggests this construction doesn’t stabilize into an “adult” pattern until the early 30s.

The study also found that “small worldness” (a measure of network efficiency) was the largest predictor for identifying brain age in this group. Think of this like a transit system. Some routes require stops and transfers. Increasing “small worldness” is like adding express lanes. Essentially, more complex thoughts now have more efficient paths throughout the brain.

However, this construction doesn’t last forever. After around the age of 32, there is a literal turning point where these developmental trends switch directions. The brain stops prioritizing these “expressways” and shifts back to segregation to lock in the pathways our brains use most.

In other words, your teens and 20s are spent connecting the brain, and your 30s are about settling down and maintaining your most used routes.

Making the most of a brain under construction

If our brains are still under construction throughout our 20s, how do we make sure we are building the best possible structure? One answer lies in boosting neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to rewire itself.

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What is brain plasticity and why is it so important?

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While the brain remains changeable throughout life, the window from age nine to 32 represents a prime opportunity for structural growth. Research suggests there are many ways to support neuroplasticity.

High-intensity aerobic exercise, learning new languages and taking on cognitively demanding hobbies like chess can bolster your brain’s neuroplastic abilities, while things like chronic stress can hinder it. If you want a high-performance brain in your 30s, it helps to challenge it in your 20s, but it’s never too late to start.

There is no magical switch that turns on at age 25, or even 32 for that matter. Like your brain, you’re in a decades-long construction project. Stop waiting for the moment you become an adult and start making active choices about how to support this project. Make mistakes, but know that the concrete hasn’t set quite yet.

Taylor Snowden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. No, your brain doesn’t suddenly ‘fully develop’ at 25. Here’s what the neuroscience actually shows – https://theconversation.com/no-your-brain-doesnt-suddenly-fully-develop-at-25-heres-what-the-neuroscience-actually-shows-271826

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Fatme Abdallah, PhD Candidate, English and Writing Studies, Western University

Writer and lawyer Saeed Teebi released an Instagram video on Sept. 30, 2025, announcing the publication of his new book, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times.

In the video, Teebi acknowledged that while his book publication day should have been a happy one, he grappled with celebrating a moment of success while accounting for and living with “everything that is going on in Palestine.”

As a researcher of Palestinian prison literature who has been tracking the intermittent hostage exchanges between Israel and Gaza during the recent ceasefire agreement, Teebi’s struggle to articulate his feelings seemed familiar.

It echoed the experiences of Palestinians released from prison who could not celebrate their newfound freedom while their homeland was still under siege.

As Teebi narrates in his book, both sets of grandparents were survivors of the 1948 Nakba when when more than 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the mass exodus that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel.

As Teebi writes, they moved on a “tour of degradation through various Arab states” before they “stumbled” to Kuwait in the 1950s, where Teebi was born and lived as a child. At age 12, the family was stranded in California during a family trip when Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait. Teebi and his family lived for a time in the United States before coming to Canada when he was a youth.

The book is Teebi’s personal and political efforts to come to terms with the failures and powers of language to narrate a Palestinian story that can stand for itself, free of the constraints that attempt to silence it.

A story ‘against narrative’

Just days before the book’s publication, a United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory officially labelled Israel’s actions a genocide after a staggering death toll in Gaza.

Teebi’s witnessing of what he calls “an unending corpse exhibition” against the world’s latent, often ineffectual responses brought him to the realization that until that point, his identity and history had been confined by the “little prisons everywhere” made from language.

For someone who describes himself as having “an abiding faith in language,” the “dark times” Teebi refers to in the title of his book were ones of reckoning: the language to name Palestinian experience broadly and mass death in Gaza had irrevocably failed to stop genocide.

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Flawed notions of objectivity are hampering Canadian newsrooms when it comes to Gaza

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Teebi notes how amid the reluctance of western media and governments to use the term “genocide,” even as some genocide scholars saw evidence of this phenomenon as early as late 2023, Palestinians were forced to “haggle” over vocabulary rather than mobilizing diplomatic pressure to prevent “massacres” from happening.

In so doing, the book draws a clear analogy between Israeli practices of apartheid and related censorship of language which Teebi terms “linguistic apartheid.” This echoes Palestinian literature’s concern with resisting discourse that dispossesses Palestinians of their land-based identities.

‘Prisons of what we can and can’t say’

Teebi, like journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, is concerned with how conventional narratives can be used to justify ethnic cleansing.

In Coates’ book The Message, which partly reports on his summer 2023 visit to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, he writes that western language about Palestine has elevated “factual complexity” over morality or justice. The end goal was “to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer.”

Teebi writes that there have been long-existing “prisons of what we can and can’t say” about Palestine that repressed any attempt to engage in historical or political debate. Some of these “prisons,” he notes, were enforced by an “abundance of caution” on the part of his late migrant father, a doctor who expressed an “obsessive drive to rebuild” after the family was displaced from Kuwait.

Such “prisons” were a response to, and buttressed by, the dominance of an Israeli-centric narrative of Israel’s founding in the West, which has made it so that every Palestinian story appears as a counternarrative that “carries the whiff of subversiveness.”

A Palestinian story must inevitably carve space against the presiding mythology of a land without people for a people without a land.

Between real and linguistic prisons

As I read the book in preparation for an interview with Teebi at a launch at Western University on Nov. 10 — where he was the 2024-25 writer-in-residence — I was struck by how deeply prison imagery shaped his memoir.

Prisons targeting Palestinians operate materially in Occupied Palestine, but often only discursively, or linguistically, in the West.

Teebi acknowledges that the former “are [much] worse prisons”, yet his book is nonetheless a response to the linguistic prisons that obscure Palestinian stories behind claims of neutrality, proportionality or legality:

“When every popular conception of you is that of someone in chains, you begin to feel the chains even if they aren’t physically there. You narrate yourself not in spite of the chains, but around them.”

Between witnessing and imagining

When Palestinian American writer Sarah Aziza wrote the article “The Work of the Witness,” now included in the anthology The Best American Essays of 2025, it had only been three months into the genocide in Gaza.

I had then been convinced of the power and necessity of witnessing.

Yet as lands and bodies in Gaza were devastated, I increasingly believed witnessing offered no solution.

I was both gratified and dismayed that Teebi seemed to agree when, in You Will Not Kill Our Imagination, he wrote that witnessing is “the hoariest of writerly clichés.”

While Teebi’s book attempts to define “the effects of the genocide on Palestinian art and imagination,” it is also a reflection of how people in exile might resist the prisons imposed by a society dominated by anti-Palestinian narratives.

For Teebi, this entails embracing the “engine” of imagination — telling a Palestinian story that refuses the confines of counter-narrative.

A Palestinian story that must be told

Most important of all, Teebi tells a personal and political narrative, unqualified and unapologetic, a testament to the defiance of a Palestinian story that insists on being told.

In a number of talks, Teebi states that he had never intended to write a memoir: being so personal imposed upon him both honesty and vulnerability. Yet the moment compelled him to challenge the societal constraints that had kept his identity in check and to affirm, openly, deliberately and imaginatively, his Palestinian identity: he had broken free from the metaphoric prisons reining in his imagination.

When I suggested this to him in our interview, he laughed, saying: “If you want to call me a prison breaker, I’ll take it.”

Task of writer-in-exile

The writer-in-exile, Teebi insists, must do more than bear witness, a task carried out more forcefully by those living through this genocide. The exile who writes owes something to the stories of their loved ones who have lived, fought for and honoured an increasingly precarious future.

And so the exile who writes must witness ethically by committing, without hesitation, to this future; the exile who writes must imagine dismantling the prisons that bind their language; the exile who writes must imagine fiercely, granting themselves unrestrained freedom to speak, act and live.

I will end with these words by Mahmoud Darwish:

“Prison deprives one of the sight of a tree and the sea. Freedom is the imagination capable of recalling them both in prison, making the invisible visible. No, that is what poetry does. Poetry, then, is an act of freedom.”

To merely witness prison, argues Teebi, is not to resist it; one must instead imagine beyond its constraints in the exercise of freedom.

That, for Teebi, is the quintessential work of the writer: to imagine a future beyond the societal and linguistic prisons that exile enforces.

Fatme Abdallah receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

– ref. Author Saeed Teebi writes beyond exile in his memoir of Palestine and writing in dark times – https://theconversation.com/author-saeed-teebi-writes-beyond-exile-in-his-memoir-of-palestine-and-writing-in-dark-times-270130