Dr. Karthik V. Sarma

And as you said, David, we all fall victim to it.

One of the things that I've learned, I'm sure Peter is the same as we've been designing this course and doing the research around it is that, you know, we fall victim to this all the time.

And it's giving us tools to help engage better with with our with our partners.

Yeah, I mean, to start, start by looking at yourself and I said, I said before, as we were researching, we found that we were committing a lot of these, these democratic sins.

I spent a lot of last summer touring around the province of Alberta, talking with municipal officials and their staff who meet with folks online, meet with folks at the doorstep.

And we cataloged 34 different what we're calling pitfalls or pathologies of democratic discourse, things that range from, you know, ad hominem attacks to gaslighting to, you know, reductionist thinking and dichotomous thinking and so on.

And as we went through and discussed with them, we said, how much of this do you see?

And they said quite often, how much of this do you think is a problem?

Right.

And some people say, well, it's just the nature of political debate and discourse.

And it's not really a big problem if it's an ad hominem attack.

Then you talk to others, particularly members of marginalized groups and women, people in visible minority communities, or Edmonton city councillors who were the victims of a terrorist attack not too long ago.

And they say, look, there's a path that we start down when we start letting some of these things go.

And so part of what we do in this course and the broader Common Ground Toolkit that we're developing through our research team is to give people those self-diagnostic tools, right, to recognize things.

when we're doing things that aren't exactly contributing positively to the conversation.

I got to tell you, since we started this course, you'll notice that my own social media commentary has slowed down quite a bit because I'm checking myself.

My drafts folder is a treasure trove for people to analyze what could be tribalist behavior.

Yeah, I mean, it's not about always building common ground, right?

And some of our colleagues south of the border have, when they give talks or deliver courses like this, they often get criticized.

One of them is Anand Giridharadas, who says, one time he was confronted by an audience member who said, what do you expect us to do, just go up and hug a Nazi?