Massey College, along with CBC and the House of Anansi Press, co-hosts the Massey Lectures, widely regarded as the most important public lectures in Canada. Established in 1961 by the CBC to honour the former Governor-General of Canada, the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, the College’s Founder and first Visitor, these annual lectures are given by a noted scholar or public figure. They are broadcast by the CBC from cities across Canada, and published at the same time by House of Anansi Press.
This year, human rights lawyer Alex Neve will explore what it takes to make human rights truly universal.
Universality is the core promise of the human rights order born out of the devastation of the Second World War and the Holocaust. These rights extend to everyone, everywhere, at all times, without exception.
But in his lectures, Neve argues that the word “universal” also screams of our profound failure to keep that promise. Too often, human rights are applied selectively, withdrawn on the whims of political leaders, or ignored altogether, he says. This is not universality’s finest hour. But it could be.
Enough small talk. Let’s get right to it: Why can’t we talk to each other anymore? What makes good communication? And how do we restore the lost art of conversation?
In contemporary society, much of our communication exists in a new dimension, the online space, and it’s changing how we regard each other and how we converse. In the digital realm, we
can be anonymous, we can make false and hurtful comments yet evade consequences in a hurried scroll of clicks and swipes. But a good conversation takes time and patience—courage, even.
We need to realize that one-half of our conversations is, in fact, listening. And aren’t the best conversationalists—like the best musicians— good listeners?
With What I Mean to Say, award-winning novelist and poet Ian Williams seeks to ignite a conversation about conversation, to confront the deterioration of civic and civil discourse, and to reconsider the act of conversing as the sincere, open exchange of thoughts and feelings. Alternately serious and playful, Williams nimbly leaps between topics of discussion and, along the way, is discursive, digressive, and endlessly generous—like any great conversationalist.
These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?
In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us.
Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society—while illuminating a path toward meaningful change. Listen to the full set of lectures, here.
Trickster is zany, ridiculous – and wise. The mythic figure in many First Nations tales is the ultimate, over-the-top, madcap lunatic. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have a blast, and to laugh ourselves silly. Ever the trickster, Tomson Highway brings his signature irreverence to an exploration of five themes central to the human condition: language, creation, sex and gender, humour, and death.
An exhilarating tour through Christian, Classical, and Cree mythologies reveals how they have given form and substance to Western thought, life, and culture. Yet Indigenous mythologies provide unique, timeless solutions to our modern problems. Tomson Highway offers generous personal anecdotes, including ones of his beloved accordion-playing father, and plentiful Trickster stories as guides through crises such as climate change, economic disparity, racial intolerance, and all-out unhappiness. Laughter is medicine. Within the endless circle of life in Indigenous mythologies, the Earth is a garden of joy unlimited. A world we must protect as the birthright of future generations. Laugh with the legendary Tomson Highway as he illuminates a healing, hilarious way forward.
Bestselling and acclaimed Canadian author Esi Edugyan will deliver the 2021 CBC Massey Lectures, exploring the relationship between art and race.
Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, as well as Edugyan’s own lived experience, her upcoming lecture series, which will also be published as a book, will examine the depiction of Black histories in works of the imagination, while challenging accepted versions of the Black experience with new perspectives.
The cover of Out of the Sun features a painting called Yoked by Colorado-based artist Ron Hicks. He is among a number of contemporary Black artists Edugyan will highlight in her lectures.
Born in Calgary, Edugyan is a two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner. First, for her 2011 novel, Half-Blood Blues, which centres on the disappearance of a young Black German jazz musician at the hands of the Nazis in occupied France.
She won again in 2018 for Washington Black, an epic work of historical fiction, which examines race and identity. Both books were also finalists for the Booker Prize.
In the 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author and renowned technology and security expert Ronald J. Deibert exposes the disturbing influence and impact of the internet on politics, the economy, the environment, and humanity.
Digital technologies have given rise to a new machine-based civilization that is increasingly linked to a growing number of social and political maladies. Accountability is weak and insecurity is endemic, creating disturbing opportunities for exploitation.
Drawing from the cutting-edge research of the Citizen Lab, the world-renowned digital security research group which he founded and directs, Ronald J. Deibert exposes the impacts of this communications ecosystem on civil society. He tracks a mostly unregulated surveillance industry, innovations in technologies of remote control, superpower policing practices, dark PR firms, and highly profitable hack-for-hire services feeding off rivers of poorly secured personal data. Deibert also unearths how dependence on social media and its expanding universe of consumer electronics creates immense pressure on the natural environment. In order to combat authoritarian practices, environmental degradation, and rampant electronic consumerism, he urges restraints on tech platforms and governments to reclaim the internet for civil society.
Ron Deibert is professor of Political Science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab undertakes interdisciplinary research at the intersection of global security, information and communications technologies, and human rights. The research outputs of the Citizen Lab are routinely covered in global media, including more than two dozen reports that received exclusive front-page coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other global media over the last decade. Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet,as well as numerous books, chapters, articles, and reports on internet censorship, surveillance, and cybersecurity.
Award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong is this year’s CBC Massey Lecturer.
In her 25 years covering stories in conflict zones, Armstrong has been relentlessly advocating for women, exposing abuse and oppression. She was the first journalist to bring the story of Afghan women living under the Taliban to the world.
Through her lectures, Armstrong argues that improving the status of the women is crucial to our collective surviving — and thriving. The facts are beyond dispute: when women get an education, all of society benefits; when they get better healthcare, everyone lives longer.
In many ways, it has never been a better time to be a woman: a fundamental shift has been taking place all around us, and we’re all better off. Yet the promise of genuine equality still eludes half the world’s population.
By looking at the past, Armstrong examines the many roles women have played in society, and the social developments for women over millennia across many benchmarks: in sex, religion, culture, politics, and economics. What we learn is that gender inequality comes at too high a cost for all of us, and that the only way forward for all of us, men as well as women, is for women to become truly equal with men.
SALLY ARMSTRONG is sometimes called “the war correspondent for the world’s women.” She’s also known as “La Talibanista.” She’s a journalist who covers zones of conflict. Her beat is to find out what happens to women and girls.
An award winning author, journalist and human rights activist she’s a four-time winner of the Amnesty International Canada media award; she holds ten honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Armstrong was the first journalist to bring the story of the women of Afghanistan to the world and is relentless when it comes to exposing the abuse of women whether on an American university campus or a village in a war zone.
Michele Landsberg, author of Writing the Revolution describes her this way: “Striding into Taliban-held Afghanistan with a chador over her six-foot frame, playing high-fives with a traumatized child rape survivor in the Congolese jungle, marching with the defiant grandmothers in Swaziland, she explores the darkest reaches of women’s experience and brings back astonishing news of hope, challenge and change. From Tahrir Square to LA, Armstrong discovers that the sisters are doing it for themselves—and revolutionizing the world.” Michele Landsberg, author of Writing the Revolution
TANYA TALAGA is the acclaimed author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which was the winner of the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction, and it was CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and a national bestseller. For more than twenty years she has been a journalist at the Toronto Star, and has been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism. She was also named the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy. Talaga is of Polish and Indigenous descent. Her great-grandmother, Liz Gauthier, was a residential school survivor. Her great-grandfather, Russell Bowen, was an Ojibwe trapper and labourer. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her mother was raised in Raith and Graham, Ontario. She lives in Toronto with her two teenage children.
The 2017 CBC Massey Lectures are an essential analysis of the major human rights struggles of our times by internationally renowned human rights lawyer and former UN prosecutor Payam Akhavan.
A work of memoir, history, and a call to action, In Search of a Better World,the 2017 CBC Massey Lectures, are a powerful and essential work on the major human rights struggles of our times. In February of 2017, Amnesty International released their Annual Report for 2016 to 2017, concluding that the “us versus them” rhetoric increasingly employed by politicians is endangering human rights the world over. Renowned UN prosecutor and human rights scholar Payam Akhavan has encountered the grim realities of contemporary genocide throughout his life and career.
He argues that deceptive utopias, political cynicism, and public apathy have given rise to major human rights abuses: from the religious persecution of Iranian Bahá’ís that shaped his personal life, to the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, and the rise of contemporary phenomena such as the Islamic State. But he also reflects on the inspiring resilience of the human spirit and the reality of our inextricable interdependence to liberate us, whether from hateful ideologies that deny the humanity of others or an empty consumerist culture that worships greed and self-indulgence. A timely, essential, and passionate work of memoir and history, In Search of a Better World is a tour de force by an internationally renowned human rights lawyer.
PAYAM AKHAVAN is a Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, a Member of the International Court of Arbitration, and a former UN prosecutor at The Hague. He has served with the UN in conflict zones around the world, including Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Timor Leste, and as legal counsel in landmark cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States. Born in Tehran, Iran, Payam Akhavan migrated to Canada with his family in his childhood.
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