Diversifying Your Perspective

I recently did a prerecorded presentation called “Diversifying Your Perspective” for university students at the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. The poet, Titilope Sonuga, invited me to share my perspective on diversifying our worldviews. I did some deep reflecting on my personal journey with equity, diversity, and inclusion and shared some things I’ve learned and tactics that have had results for me.

So if you saw that presentation or are on the journey of learning/unlearning yourself, here’s some excellent writing and art to dig into.

Books

Here’s a list of books that taught me a lot and have stuck with me – some fiction, some non-fiction, but all have given me some new perspective and ways of thinking. Also, I’m preemptively sharing my Reading Diversely experiment results below:

• We want to read diversely, so we need to talk about publishing – my blog post with the hard numbers about my reading diversely challenge since 2016.

• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
• The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K Jemisin
• The City We Became by N.K Jemisin
• 21 Things You Didn’t Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

Self-Care

• The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz
• White Fragility by Robin Diangelo
• The Way, the Enemy, and the Key trilogy by Ryan Holiday
• You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy
• Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett
• Conflict Resolution and Healthy Relationships – a blog post I wrote after working through healthy conflict.

Podcasts

• Media Indigena
• Hurry Slowly – a longtime fave of mine for self-improvement
  • Sebene Selassie: The Delusion of Separation
• On Being
  • Robin DiAngelo and Resmaa Menakem: In Conversation
  • Eula Biss – Talking About Whiteness
• Death, Sex, and Money – a serious fave and deep on empathy.
• Unlocking Us with Brene Brown
  • Brene with Austin Channing Brown on I’m Still Here: Black Diginity in a World Made for Whiteness
• The Secret Life of Canada
• RadioLab
  • The Flag and the Fury
• 1619
• Come Through with Rebecca Carroll
  • Waubgeshig Rice Saw This Apocalypse Coming
• Chosen Family

Free Online Course

• Indigenous Canada from the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta

This should get you going! I’d love to see your recommendations in the comments :)

Also, you may have noticed this is my second collaboration with Titilope. If you are interested, here’s the link to my interview with her on my former podcast, Migration Patterns.