41: Tim Blackmore on the problems in our society and how we're slowly progressing for the better
Hi everybody, and thank you for listening to episode 41 of the Learn With Lels podcast.
On this episode, I spoke with Tim Blackmore, my former professor from Western University who teaches in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies.
In our conversation, Tim and I talked about:
issues in our society—specifically, we touched a bit on gender and race issues;
his media theory class and how it’s impacted how I understand myself and my upbringing;
why “people are always so offended nowadays”; and
how our systems are broken, but are slowly changing to become more inclusive.
When I took Tim’s class about five years ago, I was like, “What the hell is going on?” Having had a science background, I never took the time to really think about issues like racism or sexism or homophobia. But, as I said to Tim in this conversation, as a woman and a minority in a predominantly White community, while I was often confused in his class, a lot of the teachings really resonated with me as well.
I left Tim’s class just questioning everything and looking at our world differently. And I feel like that curiosity is part of the reason why I started this podcast—to better understand others and myself and our society, and to help people do the same.
I did a lot of listening in this episode, as I do since I have a lot to learn—this is Learn With Lels, after all. But I just want to say that if you listen to this and you’re at all confused by what Tim talks about, that’s totally OK. I was too when I was first introduced to these kinds of sociological conversations. But I think that if you’re open to listening and learning, in time you’ll start to get a better understanding of our world, the progress that’s been made, the progress that’s to come, and the work that’ll be needed to make our world a better place.
So thank you so much for taking the time to listen, and I hope that you learn and enjoy.
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