In this episode, Émilie invites us to explore the tension between convention and creativity. She delves into how visual storytelling can challenge conventions and serve as a medium for tracing belonging and history. Sharing about the creative inspiration behind, The Universe of Terms: Religion and Visual Metaphor, she reveals how visual elements carry power, shaping our perceptions of justice, community, and identity.

Link to The Universe of Terms: Religion and Visual Metaphor — Co-authored by Emilie

Transcript

Emilie

To get at the essence of something, sometimes you really have to demolish the systems behind it, or you have to think about how we break them down so that we know what we’re wielding. But often that’s not necessarily enough to really fundamentally change them, so it’s this question of acknowledgement versus action.

Ceasar

So, Emily, welcome. So good to have you here. I don’t even remember, how do we meet? How did it end up that we actually first met?

Emilie

We met, I think, in the halls of Building 9, and then we also had Hildreth England in Commons.

Ceasar

That’s what it was, Hildreth.

Emilie

who sent me from Paris as she was going to Malmo to say hi to you as I was coming to Boston. Yes.

Ceasar

that’s what it was. And Hildreth and I worked together at the Media Lab. And so that was the connection. And we started talking. And Emilie told me about this book she had been working on. I had done. It was done by the time. It was done. And then I said, you know, it’s so fascinating because I told about the work we were trying to do in this season. You know, as we were really trying to explore these notions of faith, spirituality, religion, and just notions of belief and disbelief. But really, how do people bring those into their conversations in the public space? And then Emily told me about the work they were doing on this book, which was, you know, this really looking at these terms of it just in our lives that have real meaning across religions and to really investigate them. For our audience, the sad thing is, as we’re sitting here talking about the things, you won’t be able to see what we’re talking about. However, we will have a link at the end of this to the book that you can actually get and you can follow along.

Ayushi

Ooh, buy a coffee. Yes. Yes, buy a coffee. (Laughter)

Ceasar

Sounds great. So Emily, tell us, what got you started on this project?

Emilie

So the project itself now in book form is called the universe of terms, religion and visual metaphor that was just published this past November by Indiana university press. Congratulations. And this project really interestingly began around an initial exploration that wasn’t even the book that it is now or even the digital project that had originated from. I was working on these questions of memory and, and nostalgia and, and traces of war in Beirut, Lebanon. As kind of an exploration of how do we trace belonging and memory through aesthetics? So through film, through literature, through photography, and how do we try to create a history around that? And how do we try to visualize it? So this initial project that I began on was really thinking about, okay, how do we, how do we integrate these questions of trauma and memory through artistic practice? So I was looking at others artistic practice and then translating that into a visual, basically a visual essay where I wrote an essay, but it was in book form with illustrations that were trying to bring out the themes that I thought came out even more so than just the words on, on a page. And as a result of that, I went to see my now coauthor Mona Oraby who at the time was a professor of law jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst college. And her focus was, well, she, she taught a lot with visual imagery in her, in her classroom. So she brought in a lot of graphic novels, a lot of books that were also on contested memory, on trauma, on belief, on belonging in post-war Lebanon, but also in the Middle East after the Arab Spring. And she was thinking a lot about these questions of politics and memory and religion and democracies and how these things integrate into, you know, broader systems of understanding. And so I won’t speak to her research beyond what I remember also from our conversations, but this sort of sprouted an initial exploration that then, allowed us to start working together on a project that she had been editing on the imminent frame, which is a social science research council sort of sponsored platform. And that project itself was called the universe of terms. And the idea behind a universe of terms is to create content. The imminent frame itself had been started, had started to get recognized by the scholars of religion, a department which I’m not even from, which I want to know. I do urban studies. I did architectural studies. I actually studied Russian. And I kind of fell into the study of religion accidentally thanks to Mona. And she brought me into this world because I was interested in these questions of belief and understanding and political identity, which I was also seeing in these other contexts. This platform had existed and then they created a universe of terms. And the whole aspect of it was to say, okay, we have these critical terms of religion, which is actually coming from a book written by Mark Taylor over at Columbia university.

Emilie

And that’s a very, it’s like a, it’s kind of like the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy. It’s like, this is a word and this is its academic definition. And here explorations done by folks and it’s, it’s more encyclopedic. This effort on the, on the sort of born online project was to say, okay, well, what are terms of in the study of religion that sort of spark interest or could be of interest. So it was a curated number of words. And then how can we get different scholars from across the study of religion? So it’s not necessarily someone who’s just a scholar of religion, but someone who’s working on media, who’s working on economics and all of these things intersecting with religion in some way or belief in some way to write to these. And how can that be in the form of like a 1000 word essay, for example, that’s, and so this is to her, to Mona’s credit, this is really the editorial process that she started. And my job coming in was to sort of render that graphically. So render these interrelationships graphically. And that was the challenge that I was given as both a curious person who was taken on, I became her RA for this project and became the illustrator. And that was really my task was how can you create a visual lexicon, some form of illustration that would allow these words to speak to each other and thus allow also these very different topics to come to life in a different way. And so in the book, every single chapter starts with the word. And then there’s the first image that is on the left-hand side. And that image is the original posters that were made to sort of illustrate these concepts. And they have four little, um, it’s a star, a hand, a doll or body and a leaf. And what the idea was to create different objects that could flow through the words. So when without prompting, you would be sort of creating visual associations between words that otherwise aren’t necessarily in conversation. And so that was kind of the Genesis and sort of initial prompting that really began the project. And then, and then in itself, the project is this result of really fascinating collaboration exchange. So in a lot of ways, the, even though maybe the graphic design style is mine, that I started with, cause it was what I created as a student, then the, you know, the things that you see on the pages are also the by product of these really long extended conversations, these back and forths that Mona and I had as we were creating the book to say, okay, well, what does it mean to represent Nafs? Which in Islam is, I can’t even explain it, but it’s like the multiple levels of the soul, the embodiment. How do you even think about that? Do we try to think about that? What are the ways that you draw into that? And so these questions of representation and sort of our built in negotiated, renegotiated throughout the book. And the book in itself is almost like a sort of nonlinear path through that, that process itself. So.

Ayushi

Wow. Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. That is such a cool project genesis and outcome of the project too. Could you, can I ask like more about this? Yeah, you do whatever you want to do.

Emilie

So I’m going to ask if you have a favorite term. Yeah, my favorite term is modernity. Not necessarily because of its connotations in a general conversation or what it can imply, but because that chapter in itself was such a fun exploration of what it looks like to take. This whole book is also an exploration of what does it look like to take pre-existing academic work and translate it into something that can be a reimagining of what we already have. Because I think sometimes in academic study, we focus a lot on how do I find the entry point that makes me the original? And in this case, it was to say, no, how do we create conversation beyond the words that we’ve been given and with the words that we already have? Because there’s so much already to be said. And what does it mean to highlight these things? And what are the points of interest that we want to highlight that aren’t necessarily a thesis statement? Because I think there’s so much in a writing that is illustrative, it is rich, it is informative in ways that go beyond just what am I trying to give you in my thesis statement or something like that, right? So we were thinking in this idea of also how do we challenge the convention of prose with visuals? And so modernity was one of the first chapters that we created, so it’s kind of near and dear to my heart in that it really structured the thinking for the rest of the book. But then also, most of that chapter is based off of an essay in the Universe of Terms project online by Nancy Levine. And in that essay, she had quoted, so her essay is an essay of quotes, which was also in itself a sort of vindication of academic form. And then what we did is we quoted her essay of quotes, which was kind of this secondary vindication of academic prose. And then the illustrations themselves became very fun because we started breaking down the sentences that she quoted. So the illustration started to be a sentence fragment that was split by commas, that then those commas would dictate the image that was put. And so really thinking almost to the level of a sentence, what you can get out of it in imagery. And as we go later, what I find funny is in the book, as you go later, it gets even more colorful. But in fact, the most colorful parts of the book actually ended up being some of the first parts of the book. And so this idea of we introduced the sort of vividness and richness a little bit towards the end, but we’re also building towards this idea of how are we doing this reckoning when we’re thinking about belief and community and justice and all of this through this lens of religion, but understanding that religion is this underlying sort of set of principles that we’re bringing to a table, whether that’s religion in the sort of sense of the traditional forms that we would understand it as or belief systems as in the values and moralities that we carry amongst us, which can also be informed by so many things. So yeah, so modernity is one of my favorites, mostly because it was such a catalyst for the rest.

Ceasar

When I opened up the book online, I was reading through it and going through it, and I came to the first part on spirit, right? And the graphic with the birds, I don’t know if it’s a moon or a sun or whatever it is. You’re not going to tell me, I know. I would love for you to talk about this. And then on the next page, there’s this statement, which I find so interesting because of how we often think about spirit and what it means and the play on the words, which you do a little later on, talking about all the different ways it becomes about. But this notion, and I want to read this, so I’m going to…

Ayushi

I have a favorite section of this book, too, that I just found.

Ceasar

It says, “whatever spirit is, and the term has many meanings, you usually have to get rid of some other encumbering things in order to get at it. The spirit of spirit, if you will, is demolition.”

Ayushi

I love that.

Ceasar

I love it. How did you get there?

Emilie

to the structure of the book, the whole book, everything is a quote of someone else’s. And this quote is from Emily Ogden, and we wanted to start with this because we felt like it set up also so much of the rest of the framework for the book, which is to say, what are the normative bounds with which we are working in? How are these bounds inherited from traditions that are often themselves laden with power structures that we have not necessarily been able to break down because they are the things which we use to be able to speak our words, right? And especially in academia, but not just academia, we see this so often. And actually, so on the next page, and I think it’s two pages later, it says, there’s a quote that says on page eight, the moth skates through the damaged web demolition actually works this time, which is also to sort of, so this is the image that with it, and it, and it’s kind of a nod to say, to get at the essence of something, sometimes you really have to demolish the systems behind it, or you have to think about how we break them down so that we know what we’re wielding. But often, that’s not necessarily enough to really fundamentally change them. So it’s this question of acknowledgement versus action, which I think is also so fundamental. What I find has now become much more public discourse, but is obviously so part of a general discourse on justice and equality that has been going on for centuries. And so this question of also what does it mean to name that demolition versus actually seeing it happen, and this sort of back and forth that we’re playing with, because in a sense, it’s still limited to the structure of a book. And I think we were very aware that all of the prompting we could do would never take it out of the pages that it’s contained in.

Ayushi

I have to read my other favorite section. I think this question of acknowledgement versus action is so interesting, right? I mean, one of the things that we’ve been thinking quite a bit about and thinking this season already is just, you know, if the goal here is to be able to shed the mask or the various hats that we feel like we need to wear and revealing sort of the unspoken, right? That guides maybe our approach to a conversation, our approach to how we can get to others, you know, is consideration of that reveal. Acknowledgement, in other words, sufficient to allow people from different backgrounds to engage with each other. Or is there some kind of tangible action that can be taken that needs to be taken, right? Like bringing in, we’ve asked questions around like, you know, when did you feel reverence most recently? we’ve been asking that question throughout the season. And the point of it being like, does the act of acknowledging it, right, or the action to kind of place it with the tree you last walked by, I’m making that up, right? Like, what allows for people to drop their shoulders and come to a conversation where they may not agree with the other person on the other side?

Emilie

It does, it really resonates with me because sometimes I think, and this is not to say books make a difference, but I think sometimes it’s interesting when you’re given a narrative and you’re able to engage narrative in ways that sometimes if we come to a conversation and we don’t even know what we have in front of us and there’s a sort of sense that we haven’t been prompted to maybe put our shoulders down. I’ve had a couple conversations recently with folks that I thought I knew I did not agree with necessarily politically or on a value basis for some things and then they just surprised me because they said I read a book and it changed my thinking and it brought me to a new understanding. So I’m not saying that books are the only answer, I think there’s a lot of social engagement and conversations that are also fundamental, but I am with you. I am wondering also what that looks like especially if we’re in spaces like Cambridge, Massachusetts, sometimes it’s a little hard to find folks who maybe don’t always agree with us fundamentally just because of how people gravitate towards certain spaces and places and so it’s a meandering that I myself have no answer to, but I think it’s really interesting.

Ayushi

It’s a practice and a muscle associated to it, right? Like I think at some point it’s only you can only get so far reading about yoga at some point you have to actually like go try doing a downward dog you know and like feel what that feels like in your body to get comfortable with that motion and I think similarly like a lot of us are practiced with certain motions or practiced like you said speaking with those that might agree with us and we’re less maybe just practiced in doing whatever the opposite that looks like

Emilie

Yeah. And I think even showing up into a space and feeling like, I don’t know, I think it is a practice. It’s like, how do we, especially if we’re coming from very different places or very different understandings of what is around us, it’s also knowing to hear fully without necessarily feeling like you need to convince the other that they need to be where you are, but then also having the willingness to listen and see someone for what they are and what they bring and the complexities of that. So there are frameworks of sort of engagement and considerations that allow us to sort of lean towards these more humane understandings of what it means to believe in one another and also believe in the space that we hold to one another. I think that’s also so much a part of it.

Ayushi

I love that. And the inverse is true too. You can have the same belief system manifest in like very different frameworks. Exactly. Two people who believe the same thing can come at the same conversation very differently based on their interpretation. Right. I found my favorite passage. This one really hit. “Naming a border is a way to rectify and absolve us. It’s a way to give credence to our own inaction and to do so without shame. A border can do the job of asserting the limits of our ethical obligation where we are bound miraculously, arbitrarily, not.” I find that so brilliant and so cheeky. This gets into conversations of religion, reverence, and the state for me, which is a really big, like we haven’t named it explicitly. That’s true. But we’re in a particular context. We’ve interviewed people only from this country and only with this country’s versions or interpretations of certain belief systems. And that border does absolve us arbitrarily of certain things. That border does allow us to not have shame and allows us to take an action. And I will use the word take here. Take an action. No, I think that’s good.

Ceasar

That’s right.

Ayushi

Yeah, and I think part of what this whole season started with was this conversation around why can’t people across the aisle engage respectfully? The public’s muscle for democracy in this context, in the U.S. context, is so fraught, and the part we haven’t named ever is the border. It’s the U.S. It’s the U.S. context where this public muscle for democracy is so weak or ill-formed, maybe dysfunctional by design.

Emilie

or fragmented by its own borders, its own internal borders. Yeah, right, internal borders. I think about this all the time. I think this is kind of where it’s funny. As an illustrator, this book was a certain exercise. But then also as a planner, as someone who thinks about spatial politics, who thinks about the renderings of those spatial politics, thinks about the implications of those spatial politics, that’s where this practice of drawing was so essential. Because when I’m thinking about even this in a U.S. context, when we’re thinking about… I mean, this book is written in a U.S. context. We acknowledge it because we ourselves are working in a U.S. context. We ourselves are experiencing… This book was written in the direct months after the murder of George Floyd, COVID, 2020, the California wildfires. I mean, we were seeing this kind of an implosion of what we felt was already an implosion in the United States. An implosion that was well-merited in some ways, because it’s a revelation. When we’re talking about reverence, you can also feel reverence from a revelation that is entirely tragic. That is somewhat part of the genesis of this book in terms of why we wanted to make it in a form that was more about questions than it was about answers. And it was more about naming these, again, frameworks, these boundaries of our thinking, of our language, of our interrelation, or interrelations in the plural, because it felt so palpable. It was thick in the air, whether it was from smog on the west coast or from the feeling of complete and utter disbelief, in this case, of all that is still so present despite these ongoing fights and all of these things that are still so present, and which is also why we chose to include Toni Morrison in the end of the book, because this idea of re-memory is so there, so part of… Yeah, this question of, can we ever fully be absolved of this governance that is around us, and this governance that is also interhuman, not just the structural, institutional, because we can only blame so much on the structural and the institutional, though it does play a huge role, and gerrymandering is real. Gerrymandering is real, for borders.

Ceasar

You mentioned at the very beginning how you got into this, and yourself being a planner, studying planning and work like that. My question for you is, how do you see this? What’s the relevance of this to that work?

Emilie

I can’t think without images. And I don’t mean that in like, I need an archival image to prompt my thinking, but I can’t think without mind mapping, without creating borders and boundaries for my own thoughts, for my own concepts. And so in a lot of ways, this project, though it is not in a discipline that I would claim my own and nor would I ever, you know, I would never claim that I am an expert in this field. But I think what was a beautiful exercise and a great trust that Mona gave me in being co-author with her is that I could explore what I felt was so relevant to all these other questions that I’m asking from planning, which in planning, we’re thinking about community, we’re thinking about political identity, we’re thinking about space. We’re thinking about, for me, it was also about the, I think I spoke to this a little bit before, but about the ways in which we see community structure, the ways in which we see power, the ways in which we see law manifest in spatial context, in through physical objects. For me, what I’ve always been fascinated by is how we can read through physical objects, sometimes the structures that otherwise we can’t name. And so in a lot of ways, illustrating can do this, a very similar thing, right? So if we know how to read architectures of power, and I mean this, like sometimes, I mean, there’s really interesting, like legal geography work on, you know, reading the power of the courthouse and the structure, like how the structure of the courthouse or of the court legal complex also is a way of translating how the legal system works because of where someone needs to be transferred. And it can be very physical, but it can also be about, you know, where people are placed or all these things. So there’s a visual element to it, and there’s also a power analysis to it. And this project, and it’s a universe of terms as a book, felt like this really difficult and fruitful exercise of how do we draw out meaning from these structures that we’re seeing, from these rhetorical structures, from these normative structures, from these cultural values, and how do we think about translating them in visual form so that they can be legible? And what does it mean to make them legible? Because does making them legible reduce them? Is it reductive? Is it additive? Is it expansive? And so one of the things that we chose not to do in the book was to render humans. We don’t have a human, like a person represented. We have very specific, the only, I would say, realistic object in the entire book are objects that have been classified as art, some of which are contested because they are religious objects. But those are the only realistic things almost true to life-looking objects that we’ve included in the book because we did not want to get into this question of… So again, this idea of translation, and I see this in a room planning all the time.

Emilie

What do you map? What do you say? What is the information that is relevant? Who is the audience for that information? Is it expansive? Is it reductive? What is the narrative that you’re building? Who is included? Who is excluded rather is the word. So in the way that I think, I also see that as a continuity into the work that I’m doing as a planner, even if maybe the study of religion is not what I carry forth.

Ceasar

Well, I think that’s, in some sense, that’s the whole point of this whole season is that this conversation is in all of us, you know? And it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to be a theologian, a steady religion to have this conversation because this is live. We are dealing with it all the time. We just may not know how to name it, how to take it apart. I was thinking about the section, I don’t know who the quote was from on the economy, and about, you know, about economies not being about things, but about restraints, which I think is fascinating to think about, you know, and then to think about, you think about this in the context of a public conversation, right, you’re doing a dialogue with a set of people who live in an area and you’re trying to do a policy around resource allocation to do something, how people’s notions of constraint playing out in that conversation the way they don’t, they’re not even aware.

Emilie

Well, maybe what I can do is describe even the image, that first image that’s in the economy chapter. And so the first image in that economy chapter is a doll or a body or whatever you would like it to be, contained within a box that is being grabbed by hands that are both blended into the background, so hands that are coming out of the same color as the background and then hands that are separate from the background that are also grabbing at it. And that in itself was from a quote that was describing basically someone’s first experience of economy as when they were a child, their parents had said initially that they could have a doll and then they realized that they couldn’t give it to her. And so she experienced this idea of the doll being pulled away from her. And that, so again, to your point on the very personal experiences of constraint affecting our understanding of economy, both, I mean, honestly, economy is such an expansive word. And what does it even mean half the time for folks is a real question. Yeah, I’ll turn to the page and let you, this is the image. And the quote is, “economy is not about money or things. Economy is the practice of constraint towards money and towards things. Economy is a synonym for denial, for constraint, for restraint.”

Ceasar

There’s so many places I want to go. And I’m just saying, this is going to sound very strange. Because one of the things we talked about early on in doing the seasons, we were thinking about, oh, you know, we’re actually connected to a planning school. Does this have anything to do with planning? Obviously, it does. One of the people who was working with us early on, Babak, was talking a lot about how these issues kind of relate in the context of planning. The thing for me, I’m wondering is, how do you bring this into the education of planners? How do you bring this kind of… It’s a great question. And is it important to, you know? I kind of think it is, but how do you do that, right? How, in the context, I’m… So everyone listening to, I’m going to do some inside MIT Department of Urban Study planning talk for a second. But students who come into that program have a one-year sequence of courses, two courses called Gateway, where they get introduced to lots of different things that relate to planning. But it’s making me wonder, as we go through this whole series, listening to you, Emily, is about gateway into what and from what. Should we be having gateway really be about an opening of self into certain kinds of things, and understanding in order to be a planner? And then how do people grapple with these kinds of issues as they face, you know, a myriad of things? None of which we can give them a full experience around. You can’t do that. You can’t put everything in front of them and say, this is how you do this, this is how you do that. All we can do is really, in some sense, tell them about some tools we know we have, show them some experiences of how people have applied those tools. But do we do it from the standpoint of really understanding, not the rational discourse around why some made the choices they did, but what was underneath that, right? You know, what is the belief system that allows you to kind of go there and create that, right? Or to say, this is more important than that. Because I think that’s the dialogue we’re having in this country. I think we’re having it in the world, right? How do you prepare people to do that? And why do we hand that over to theologians and to religious schools as opposed to say, no, this is, all of us have to have this. All of us need a way to understand and converse in this.

Ayushi

a border where we love specializations, Caesar. It’s all about productivity. It’s about specialization. No, I’m kidding. But I mean, can I just add to that question before you respond? I mean, that’s such a good question about Gateway and such a great way to think about Gateway. I mean, one of the first things that come to mind actually, as you were saying that, is I remember, you know, we had these readings. This is probably going to be more present for you, but we had these readings. I remember, I don’t know if they’re still around, where we read about why certain geographies were settled and why certain geographies were less settled and where density sort of cropped up and where density wasn’t as prevalent. There’s a lot of literature on this. I know we read quite a bit of it, but I refuse to believe there wasn’t some sort of personal belief system that was also driving people beyond just access to water. You know what I mean? Like, come on. And we don’t talk about it. Another example is thinking about all the planners we read. We read about, the first thing that comes to mind is like, Likuhu Sia did a lot of different plans that ended up populating even parts of my parents’ home country of India and parts of Punjab, right? And to your point, there are in the visual of the courthouse or of the city. There are power dynamics baked into it. And those power dynamics didn’t just like come up because he jumped a bit overnight, right? They were coming from some sort of belief system that he carried. And why did I never read about the belief systems? Why did I just study his urban plans as like blueprints for the cities he designed? Why did I never get to read about like what he grew up reading as a kid and what story, bedtime stories his parents told him? I know that sounds silly and I don’t mean to be reductive, but like, you know.

Emilie

To that point, I think I came to urban planning from the study of, from Russian studies, but my studies was Russian architecture and Russian urban planning. The thing is, in some ways, just to talk about sort of the background to also kind of thinking through Gateway, but more broadly, what I found so interesting about this sort of comprehensive thing that I had that was Russian studies, which we can all have conversations about the current state of affairs, but I think at this point, what I really appreciated about the way that I learned and was approaching this geographic space was that I was reading the literature, I was reading the history, I was talking about the political actors, the political systems, I was talking about the changes in belief systems, I was talking about the ways in which geographies were fundamentally moved and changed in order to actualize someone’s ideological belief. And then, working on specifically the urban side of things, I was doing a retracing of public housing and the deliverance of it, so these delayed timescales of the arrival of the Soviet promise and how that also shaped different parts of the country and how distance defined the absence or presence of that ideological system in a given timeframe and the layering of that. And so, there was sort of a holisticness to understanding what was behind the physical and what was influencing the physical. And there is an aspect of there’s a reason why things are near rivers and part of that is that mobility was defined by rivers, agriculture defined by rivers, things like that. And at the same time, why people stay, why people don’t leave, what becomes the boundedness of community becomes really interesting. And I think in urban planning when we’re learning, and I think part of it is also some people are transitioning from jobs that have never done the work of urban planning before, and that’s perfectly fine. And so, we’re doing also a sort of coalescing of different understandings and interpretations. And yet, there’s also a question of, okay, how do we address scale? How do we address the particularities of a place? And how do we think also about these insertions? Why input and job is so present and what were the political underpinnings that’s allowed that? What were the receptions of those things that happened then? How is it accepted now? How has that shifted? Why has that shifted? Is it passivity? No, but is it also that people live lives that don’t necessarily include a constant reflection on the physical state of their environment all the time? I don’t know. So, I hear that. And I also think about to this question sort of trying to return to this initial question of how do we insert belief in our learning or how do we use it as a way to frame where we’re coming from? And I think part of it is, and that’s a question that I think is eternal of how do we seek out possibilities for us to assert kind of where we stand on a topic and then also accept that we can change where we stand.

Emilie

And that’s, I think sometimes the most difficult part is the acceptance that it is actually most likely beneficial to change your mind and that your mind will change and that, but that feeling like you have to maybe publicly assert or have a definitive version of that in a given state of time can be very daunting. And I think, you know, we don’t need to make commentaries necessarily about MIT, urban planning education. And I think more broadly speaking, more opportunities for there to be spaces of assertion that are also not an assertion that is definitive, but rather an assertion that is the point of the start of conversation, which I think if you think about a lot of religious texts, like I, you know, the Talmud is basically just ongoing conversation, right? Like it’s all these rabbinical scholars who are having a conversation. And I’m not saying I, but it just, the idea is that some of the most foundational texts of religion are also based on this idea of having a different opinion and how that’s shifted and then how that informs interpretations onwards and upwards and downwards and across. So that’s my, that’s my thought around those two sort of questions that came together.

Ceasar

And we want to thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It was a pleasure. This has been wonderful. So happy to join you both. And folks, check the show notes for the link. You’re in for a real treat. A real treat. And we’ll see you soon. Thank you.

Emilie

Thank you!

Ayushi

Thank you all so much for listening to that episode of season three of We Who Engage. This conversation would not have been possible without sound production and editing by Dave Lashansky and Jeff DeWine. A huge thank you also to our team who supported us throughout COVID. Eli Epperson, Ana Perez, Nick Sprague, Mo Bradford, and Patricia Uregas.

Ceasar

Yes, and we also have to send a big thank you to the Silverberg family for their support for our launch event, which we’ve never done before. A belief in disbelief that was held at the MIT Museum who really stood out for us to give us that space under short notice. And we also have to give a really big shout out to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning who’s been a supporter of this work from the very beginning and will continue to do so.

Ayushi

Thank you all for listening.

Ceasar

Thank you.