The title of this year's Murray Lecture is Water as Teacher: What water can teach us about hope in hard times

What can water teach us about hope? Biomimicry is the design of structures and systems based on natural processes, and this approach might just offer the insights that education needs in times of crisis. In this distinguished lecture, educator and author Dr. Kari Grain extends the ideas from her book Critical Hope to explore what the behaviours of water can teach us when our most important efforts in education are blocked by obstacles and interruptions. In an era of austerity, political polarization, and fatigue from ongoing crises, many people who are committed to social change efforts face a damming of their life’s work. By observing four habits of water, Grain invites us to reimagine how hope itself can move: Bending, pooling in deep places, going underground, and persisting. In this reflection, critical hope offers an alternative to toxic positivity, shifting from an emotion that we either have or lack, to a complex relationship that we navigate continually. When it embodies the habits of water, critical hope is a practice of relentless incrementalism, discernment, and creativity, fluid enough to forge new pathways forward. 

This year's distinguished speaker is Dr. Kari Grain.  Dr. Grain is the author of Critical Hope and teaches at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Education, where she leads the Master’s in Adult Learning and Global Change (ALGC) Program. Her scholarship in experiential education, anti-racism, climate action, and community engagement has been featured in peer-reviewed journals, books, and podcasts. At the nucleus of Grain’s body of work is the belief that education has the potential to be a vibrant pathway toward systemic change; and vital to that process of transformation is an attunement to relational, creative, and vulnerable ways of being in the world with others. Kari is the co-editor of a forthcoming (2025) volume on Community Engaged Research (CER) with University of Toronto Press. Kari lives on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. 

The Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope in the Academy was established in 2023 to celebrate Shannon's receipt of the Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy will take place on Monday, November 3, at 3:30 pm in SDU Main Building, Room 117.