Below the Radar Transcript

Episode 130: feminist economics and a just transition — with alicia Massie

Speakers: kATHY FENG, AM JOHAL, ALICIA MASSIE

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Kathy Feng  0:02
Hello, I’m Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode, host Am Johal speaks with Alicia Massie, a feminist political economist and PhD candidate in SFU’s School of Communication. In this episode they talk about the need for a feminist recovery and how to transition towards a more equitable and sustainable post-pandemic economy. I hope you enjoy the episode!

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Am Johal  0:31 
Hi there, welcome to Below the Radar. Really excited that you could join us again this week. We're with Alicia Massie this week, who is a grad student here at SFU. Welcome, Alicia. 

Alicia Massie  0:43 
Hi, thanks so much for having me. 

Am Johal  0:45 
So I’m wondering if we can begin, if you could just introduce yourself a little bit.

Alicia Massie  0:50 
Yeah, of course. I mean, I've got quite a few titles here. So I'll keep it short enough. But yeah, I'm a PhD candidate here at SFU in the School of Communication. I'm also a Progressive Economics Fellow with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. And I actually work with and as the conference organizer at SFU's Community-Engaged Research Initiative. So I kind of have a couple different hats that I like to wear. And then I'm also a community organizer in my spare time.

Am Johal  1:18 
Yeah, so many different hats. Wondering if we can begin with some of your sort of progressive economics research work. And there's a lot of conversations going on around expanding notions of what a just transition could look like. There were a lot of conversations that were happening prior to the pandemic, and certainly, within the pandemic period, as things have been slowly opening up and thinking about what the near future might look like. I'm wondering if you can share some thoughts in terms of your own research and conversations that you're having with progressive economists?

Alicia Massie  1:56 
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. Yeah, I think it's been obviously a really interesting time. The last, I'd say a year, but we're moving into two years now, has been a time where I think a lot of us have had to reevaluate what our own research looks like, what we want our research to focus on, how our research can support our communities. And then, really specifically in terms of, what does both like academic research but specifically economic- and policy-type work look like coming out of a pandemic, coming out of a world changing event like this, right? It's kind of a once in a lifetime experience for a lot of us. So for me, personally, that meant that I was always doing progressive economics work. I did my comprehensive exams in social reproduction theory, which is sort of an offshoot of feminist political economy. But in the last year or so, you know, really experiencing what COVID put everyone else through, what it put me through, what it's looked like, it meant that I had to rethink my dissertation. And I really kind of got plugged into a bunch of networks that helped me to rethink what progressive economics looks like in terms of imagining a recovery, and then also imagining, more broadly speaking, the transition for Canadian people and for the Canadian economy, because we know from the pandemic, but we also know from bigger issues that are not going away, like climate change, that we need to imagine a world that looks different. It already wasn't working for us before COVID hit. And then with everything we've seen through 2020, and 2021. We know now that the cracks are just even wider than they were before. So, for me, that has meant connecting with people and asking, what does a recovery look like? And then what does a broader transition look like? And that incorporates a lot of things that we can talk about. But to name a few, it means really looking at a care economy and saying, how do we take care of ourselves, take care of our families and take care of our communities? It means looking at what a job is. What is a good job? How can we have jobs that we like that we're happy and healthy in? But also, how can we make sure that everyone has good jobs? And then what does our actual country, community and infrastructure look like? So what are our communities? What's our transit? What is the air and the water and the food? All of these elements, I think were important to begin with and seem to have become even more visible in terms of where we're lacking, through this huge event that was the COVID-19 pandemic. So,for me, that's really meant sort of reimagining the work I do, and trying to connect with all different sorts of progressive economists and just progressive groups in general to see what we want to fight for moving forward.

Am Johal  4:32 
You know, when previous economic challenges occurred, look at 2008, the Great Recession, you know, governments tend to have this type of template where their stimulus funding, or certain forms of quantitative easing, but the stimulus money tends to go towards construction projects and those types of things that tend to flow through in particular ways, construction, jobs, etc. And they seem to be built around certain assumptions that aren't necessarily equitable in terms of how money rolls out of public institutions and the assumptions around how recovery happens and who it happens for. Wondering, in looking at some of the conversations you've been around and participating in, what might a feminist economic recovery look like, or feminist just transition look like?

Alicia Massie  5:27 
Yeah, I mean, it's a really important question, I think. And it's one that is both in a way, we have a lot of answers. And we don't have a lot of the answers. But I think some of the things that we've known for a long time, or that there are underlying issues within the Canadian economy, and within a lot of economies in, you know, the 21st century capitalist world. But a lot of those, for example, are how we value the money that our government spends. And like you said, I think when it comes to big global crises, or even just national crises, we tend to put money into certain aspects of our economy, like construction. But we know we really need to ask ourselves, like, who and what is that money gonna benefit? And I think not to say that, you know, physical infrastructure is not important. And not to say that construction is important. It absolutely is. But I think that there's a lot of ways that we could be understanding, for example, restructuring our health infrastructure that doesn't just take into account sort of like building hospitals, but also sort of embodies more of a health equity lens that asks ourselves, okay, we know that there are certain communities that are going to experience impacts of major health events like a pandemic, but also of health events like climate change, and like issues relating to water and pollution, and food deserts. And these communities are stratified in very particular ways, largely by race and gender lines. So for investing in infrastructure, that is a perhaps feminist recovery, or a feminist transition, we can maybe work all of these things in together, right. Coming out of a pandemic stronger, better, with more resilient communities, lifting people out of poverty and supporting the most vulnerable of us can also be a transition that means moving towards a more sustainable, more future-looking and a more robust, green economy. Those can actually be the same things. But a lot of the time, they don't look like investing millions or billions of dollars in the way that we've done in the past. So I think there's some really interesting work, for example, being done by Jim Stanford from the Centre for Future Work, that talks about some of these intersections into how we could look at the care economy specifically. So investing, whether it's in education, or long-term care, or just general health infrastructure, or sort of public health in general, and how this can actually be seen as green infrastructure. Because these types of things really do help to build out our communities in ways that we're going to, again, build that resilience, build that robustness into the economy itself. And we're not necessarily, you know, making new buildings or building greenhouses or windmills. But all of these things can be interconnected. But it means that we have to go into it with a fundamental understanding of things like systemic racism, and knowing that this money is going to need to go to certain areas more than other and it's going to need to focus in ways that isn't necessarily going to be the ones that we focused on in the past. And then there is always an element that I think is you know, it's not necessarily one that is easy. But it really is important. And that means taking a look at what the money that we are putting into our economy is funding in terms of jobs, because if it is funding short-term, precarious positions, it's not going to be building the type of world that I think most people, in thinking about a feminist recovery or feminist transition, would want. So far, we see in our economy that a lot of people who have benefited from the secure, unionized benefit, flush jobs have not been the most vulnerable among us. And when we are going to reimagine sort of reinvesting in an economy building for the future building for a robust economy, we need to know that construction industries, fossil fuel industry, these types of positions really do have a lot of their money focused in aspects of our Canadian population, that are not the ones that need it the most. So it also means looking really seriously, I think, at taking things like a gender-based analysis or racial equity lens, and really seriously saying, okay, we have communities that need the support more than others. How can we build out our infrastructure and build out maybe public investment and support these vulnerable communities at the same time? And for me, and I think a lot of other progressive economists, those things are not at odds. We can do both of them at the same time. But it means taking very seriously these like nitty gritty policy, things like sick leave, right? Like everybody gets sick leave, and everybody gets family leave, because it's really fundamental to making sure that people are able to go back home to care for their families, come into work the next day, that we do not have these sort of horrific pandemic events where our whole system collapses because people can't take a day off. And it means investing money in a way that is not necessarily going to be building a new bridge, but is still going to be fundamental to building out a stronger, better, more resilient Canada.

Am Johal  10:16 
There's a couple of things that come up for me as I listen to you. It's sort of this question which almost gets dealt with in, like, economics 101, but we forget it all the time, is this notion of opportunity cost. Oftentimes, when proponents of large infrastructure projects or mega events like the Olympics, they say, well, you know, if we fund X amount of dollars into it, it generates this much economic activity. But if we took that same amount that they were arguing and spent it in a different way, on social housing, or public health infrastructure, there's also spin-off economic benefits. And generally, these things are never compared together, it's sort of if you took, you know, a billion dollars, and you spent it, of course, people are going to get hired, and there are going to be spin-off effects. And in my previous life, this is over a decade ago when I worked at the BC Health Coalition, which was a labour union-funded nonprofit that was fighting privatization. And particularly in the extended health sector, when you see a pandemic, move through the system, which really gets at the weak points of the health care system, the privatized part of extended care, you see the economic impacts that are had. And as you correctly mentioned, as well, the importance of unionized jobs with benefits and having the support in place in terms of the rootedness of workers to be able to contribute to their communities and the precariousness of these positions where people have to work in multiple care homes. And in a pandemic context, you definitely saw the impacts that that had within public health. Wondering if you can speak a little bit more about the Progressive Economics Forum and other ideas that are circulating there? 

Alicia Massie  12:02 
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think you're completely right. I think. I mean, one of the big things that I'll mention, so the Progressive Economics Forum is an excellent community of folks from all different aspects of, you know, whether it's community organizing, or research-based, or public policy. And we all sort of come together to meet, you know, once a month or so and just sort of see what everyone is talking about, and what are we researching? What are we looking for? Are there gaps in our analyses? And this is, I think, really important, because Canada's a huge country, right, and there's a lot going on, and things really do vary from province to province. Like, we're in BC, but I'm not sure how much maybe you or your listeners have been paying attention to what's happening in Newfoundland, for example. But I think Newfoundland is really the bleeding edge of sort of looking at what an austerity-based recovery could look like, you know, the cuts proposed in the government-issued report called the Green Report, you know, they were drastic. I mean, we're looking at, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60% cuts to regions, or not regions, but domains like health and education. So, in terms of getting together with different folks across the country, and asking, you know, not only what is going on outside of our own communities, I think it can be really important to come together, to have solidarity and to ask ourselves, you know, how do the decisions and the research we're doing, let's say, in British Columbia, how can this be informed and influenced by research happening elsewhere in the country? Because I think it can be really easy, especially when we're researchers, to kind of lose track, you know, like Alberta is mad at Ontario and BC is mad at Quebec for some reason. And, you know, we're all over the place. So the Progressive Economics Forum is an excellent place where, personally, I learn a ton. Every time I go there, I learn something new. But I think right now, a lot of people are focused, very specifically obviously, on the turn to coming out of the pandemic and asking, you know, is there going to be an election? What would that look like? How are provinces and federal government going to handle the rollback of these really huge supports that we've seen coming down from a federal level? And how are we going to support what is still very much, you know, a fragile economy and a fragile system where people are in a lot of cases laid off, they might have been sick, they might have had family members who were sick. And we're doing really amazing on vaccines right now. But we want to obviously keep that momentum and keep things moving in a positive direction. And I mean, there's like so much that I could talk about but I'll pick on one thing because it is huge, and I want to make sure everybody knows about it, which is the proposals in Budget 2021 for what essentially amounts to a universal childcare system in Canada. And I think for those of us on the progressive side, this is life-changing, right? Like I know, people that I work with and my mother, actually, an early childhood educator, has been fighting for this her entire life. Like I, you know, walked on Parliament Hill with my mother as a child to fight for these systems. And I think as you know, we talked about the pandemic really revealed that the care economy in Canada, both in terms of long-term care, but also in terms of family support, and childcare was fundamentally inadequate. When we needed it most, it was not there. And of course, the care economy is largely supported by women and largely by underpaid precarious, racialized women. So the idea that we can finally come to a point where we're going to get a level of federal investment that is necessary to be able to establish a robust national system of childcare to support everyone, not just people with kids, but everyone. Because we know, like you were saying, the more you invest into these types of systems, they're just paying out the wazoo, right? This is not something where you pay into it. And it's only parents or only children who benefit. Everyone benefits from this. So this is something that a lot of people are really focused on, because it is extremely important. It's been something that people have been pushing for for decades. And while it's extremely exciting to see this massive investment in Budget 2021, it is not guaranteed yet, right. It's still in a proposal phase. And while we have sort of the promise of funding and a really strong commitment from the federal government, what this looks like in practice is going to be the big question, I think, for the next couple years. And for a lot of economists and policy people, you know, how is that money going to trickle down? Because it's going to be, you know, doled out provincially. And provinces all have slightly different systems. So fighting against what we would sort of, you know, we might be able to call like a cash-for-care system, which we've seen in the past, which is, you know, where instead of, let's say, paying it to childcare providers, and making sure that parents don't have to pay a high level of fees, it's just like, oh, here you go, parents, you get $100 a month, or you get $200 a month. Those types of systems generally, you know, seem to not work at all. And some really interesting work that hopefully will come out soon, is that this type of universal childcare system, and really making sure that it goes to a public system where those childcare centres are not privatized, those jobs are good, hopefully unionized, but at the very least, non-precarious, permanent, well paid with benefit positions, is absolutely going to have such a dramatic impact on the Canadian economy. And again, as we were saying, specifically to help out everyone in Canada, but really to go a long way towards addressing a group of people, racialized women in childcare jobs, who have been supporting a lot of Canada, on, unfortunately, not a lot of benefit for them. You know, they're amazing human beings. I don't know how they do it. If anybody has ever, you know, taken care of 12 four year-olds before they know how hard it is. But they're often doing it for, you know, not enough pay, not any, if, certainly not good enough benefits. And I think that this proposal is something that we focus on, we're focusing on a lot in terms of economic, progressive people in general. But thinking about what this looks like, is really, really important. And I think it's incredibly important for every Canadian to step up and say, we need this, this is amazing. But we need this in a way that it is going to be public, it is going to be a robust system, it is not going to be sort of the quick and dirty, like, oh, we got some money, we'll give parents 100 bucks, and then and then it's going to go away. We need this to be for the long term.

Am Johal  18:25 
Now, Alicia, your own research is in feminist political economy. And I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about what your own dissertation research is about?

Alicia Massie  18:37 
Yeah, totally. It's a lot of what we've been talking about already. But yeah, so I would describe myself as a feminist political economist. And the work that I do right now is I focus specifically on the just transition. So it echoes a lot of the themes that we've been talking about. And one of the things that has obviously changed for me and my dissertation work has been to bring in these ideas around just recovery and asking, okay, with this type of grand crisis, where we everyone has to reevaluate, how has the ground shifted a little bit? Because the idea of a just transition is, in broad strokes, the idea that due to climate change, due to a number of factors happening around the world, the fossil fuel economy, both in Canada, but also you know, globally, simply is not sustainable. It is not going to last forever. And the just transition asks, okay, so if we take that as a true fact that we are eventually going to need to move away from this type of fossil fuel based economy? What is that transition going to look like? How are we going to support the people currently working in that industry? How are we going to support those communities that might be entirely based upon fossil fuel resource extraction, or refinement or whatever it might be? And how do we ensure that this transition is one that doesn't leave people behind, that doesn't leave fossil fuel workers behind, that doesn't leave their communities behind. And we don't end up in a situation where, you know, we're left with a ghost town, essentially. I mean, I think a lot of people can remember, you know, when the automotive industry left the United States, for example. Those cities were left in almost a ghost city state, right? They were just a shell of their former selves. And we're still dealing with the ramifications of that decades later. So the idea of a just transition really is asking, we think that this is happening and pretty much anybody that you ask, who doesn't have a direct stake in making money off of fossil fuels will tell you, yeah, it's only a matter of time. It's only a matter of time until Canada needs to move away from a fossil fuel-based economy. So how do we ensure that that transition is going to be one that works for everyone? So, to get back to my work, what I'm working on is approaching this from a feminist perspective and saying pretty much the same questions we're asking, which is, okay, we know that in the past, when we look at an example of coal mining and coal workers, for example. We've had some really great examples of transitioning those communities out, but the way that the transition was thought about and conceptualized was super narrow. It was like, okay, we're gonna support coal miners, and only coal miners, just them, just people in the mines. And that is what I would describe as a very narrow conception of transition, right. And I think when we think about how communities work, and how economies actually work, it's never just, you know, those workers and nobody else. And when we look at resource-based towns, whether it's in British Columbia, in Saskatchewan, in Alberta, we know that those workers and those jobs support their communities in much broader ways. So understanding transition to be not just something that directly affects, you know, the largely white male population of, let's say, oil workers, but also understanding that those communities rely on a number of other workers and another number of other types of services that we also need to think about when we conceptualize transition. So in transition planning, when it's policy based, we need to, I think, build out for the community as a whole, not just those individual workers who might have been on the rigs, in the mines, etc.

Am Johal  22:13 
Now, as part of your research, you visited Fort McMurray a few times. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that part of your research?

Alicia Massie  22:23 
Yeah, I mean, Fort McMurray is a fascinating place. And it is, it's almost a world in and of itself. I mean, I don't know if anybody sort of knows where it is. But essentially, the way that you get there is you fly or you drive to Edmonton. And then you usually rent a car or you can take a bus, but then you drive for a long time. And you go straight north. And it's a big, long, straight highway with not a lot to see. And you kind of feel like you're driving to the ends of the earth. But you get there. And it is a beautiful community. It really is. I mean, the last time that I was there was, unfortunately, a few years ago now, because of the pandemic. And it was a challenging time when I was last there because it was right after the fire. Or it wasn't right after, but I think it was about a year after and they were very much still in a rebuilding phase. So hopefully everyone was aware, but there was a huge wildfire that swept through Fort McMurray. I believe it was in 2016. And it was just devastating, of course. You know, it burned structures, homes and just devastated the community. So a lot of my work has focused on Fort McMurray and on towns like it. Because again, they're kind of this, this really interesting example of, you know, what we could think of in, like, an old fashioned sense of like a quote unquote, company town, right? This community is extremely isolated geographically. There's not a lot happening around it. So when you go there, you really do get a sense that a lot of the people in that town are immersed in this economy. These oil jobs are not just the same way that you or I have a job in Vancouver. And if we lose that job, it doesn't matter. But it really matters to the people who live there, right? So the work that I was doing there at the time was with a colleague based out of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and we were focusing on precarious workers, largely Filipino women who come to Canada on temporary foreign worker visas and who work as domestic workers in family's homes. So these are often single women who have sort of come on these temporary foreign worker visas, and then are working and living in a usually white family's home to care for their children. And it was, I've been there a few times, and it's always a fascinating experience, because I describe it as really intense, right? I grew up in Quebec, and I've traveled a lot, but I'm not from Alberta. So I think it's really important for me to be respectful and not come in, as you know, this big city researcher who thinks I'm better than everybody else. I think that can be really dangerous. It can be really unethical, and I try as much as I can to not be that type of person. But meeting the type of people, you know, that you meet in Fort McMurray, they're just like everybody else. But everything is a little bit heightened in terms of intensity, you know? It's colder, it's darker in the winter, and it's lighter in the summer. And everything is a little bit farther away. And if you drive out to the oil sands, I mean, it is, the scale of it is shocking. As someone who has always seen pictures of the oil sands and read about them, and learned about them, to get in a car and drive for hours and get there and see the scale of these projects. I mean, they really are on a scale that it's difficult, I think, for us to understand when you're not standing there being a tiny little ant human beside these massive, massive buildings, and these tailing ponds that seem to just go on for acres and acres and acres, right? And the other component that I was struck by in terms of scale was the scale of the workcamps. Because again, they're very isolated, you have to drive for a long time to get out there. And a lot of the workers travel back and forth by bus system, through company bus systems. But the work camps are really far out there. And it must be you know, we've heard, of course, all the stories, whether it was through COVID, or before that, the experience of working in a place like this really has a big impact on your psyche, on your identity, on who you are and how you feel about the world. And for me, when I think about transition, I want to think about all these people. And having been to, having friends in Fort McMurray, it really helps to ground it for me in understanding the intensity of not only what having one of these jobs looks like but also maybe having one of these jobs and raising your family off of that income. And then all of a sudden, whether it's a fire, or maybe climate change or a pandemic, when that all gets taken away from you. You know, I think about the people in Fort McMurray, or in other resource based towns, and wonder if we don't plan for a transition that supports these places and ensures that Fort McMurray is not just going to disappear like a like a ghost town, but the people who love it and want to continue to live there can continue to live there. What does that look like? And how do we ensure that that's still a possibility for those people, because I think it would be devastating. I am not one of those people that wants Fort McMurray to disappear. I want it to still be there for the people who love it. And right now, I would worry about that because it is heavily, heavily reliant on one industry. And if that industry was to pick up and leave, which, these are multinational corporations they could choose to do so if they wanted to. I would really worry. I would worry for a lot of the people.

Am Johal  27:21 
I spent some time in Fort McMurray and visiting the bars, talking to people, including workers, domestic workers as well. And it is a fascinating place in the sense of what is the narrative for working class people who are there for the type of opportunity that many others have gone there as well. It's a very multicultural town, huge African community, big Muslim community, big Filipino community. And so in many ways it looks like small town or urban Canada and racially very diversified for a town of that size, that far north in the Canadian context. And you know, what is the narrative for working class people in terms of what an alternative might be to the company town that it is? And also the kind of dangerous tropes of the fossil fuel industry and the kind of messaging and rhetoric it engages in as well. And as you said that the multinationals being there, capital will move away as quickly as possible when regulation and other things are there and what's going to be left is a really big question. And when you look at the Alberta economy. I know when we were working on some writing, we were contacted by, you know, fairly centrist conservative groups that, from a fiscal point of view, were critical of the industry because of this reliance on one industry and the kind of distortions it produces on the political side. So in a strange way the critiques are not just from the progressive left or the centre, but there are economic arguments to be made about the problems that have occurred as a result of the development path that Alberta has followed. I'm wondering if there's anything else you'd like to add?

Alicia Massie  29:09 
Hmm, I mean, I think the last thing I'll say is, I mentioned it earlier. But talking about Fort McMurray, it also makes me think that there's an interesting relationship when we think about Fort McMurray between places like Fort McMurray, and Newfoundland, which I mentioned earlier. And I think that one of the really interesting things to think about transition too, is, as much as like Fort McMurray is kind of a company town and is largely supported by this single industry, it's also supported by a lot of people from out of province who fly in and who come in. And I think that when we think about both coming out of the pandemic and rebuilding for a better Canada, but also specifically thinking about transitioning out of the fossil fuel economy, there's a lot of those connections that we need to think about, that I want to think about. Because right now, for example, there have been these proposed cuts to the long-standing progressive tuition freeze for Memorial University in Newfoundland. And we're looking at potentially a doubling or maybe even a tripling of tuition costs for Newfoundland youth who want to attend university there. And this is something that really worries me, because I think that, you know, Newfoundland has had a lot of struggles and a lot of ways and their economy is not doing great. And it makes sense that the government wants to do something about it. But I think looking to transfer a burden of, let's say, provincial or public debt down onto a group of young people in a province that has long been struggling, and I would argue, will continue to struggle when we look at transitioning away from a fossil fuel based economy where, you know, if you can't get a job in Newfoundland, a lot of young people turn to places like Fort McMurray. So for me, I think another interesting example, and thing we need to worry about really is how not only if we don't think about the transition that communities like Fort McMurray could suffer. But also, communities like those in Newfoundland could also suffer. That as much as it is geographically tied to northern Alberta, there's a lot of interconnection between other communities and other provinces that are suffering as well. So I think, you know, generally speaking, progressive economists, we're not a fan of austerity. We're not a fan of huge public cuts. It has not been shown to be highly effective, or really to bring back an economy from any state. And I really worry that the cuts that are being proposed in Newfoundland right now, by transferring that debt out of the federal, or in this case, the provincial hands, which is a massive group that can kind of handle it, and putting it down onto Newfoundlander youth and saying, okay, here, you take on this debt now. That if they can't then go to places like Fort McMurray, let's say in 5-10 years and remake that money, through a fly-in job, what are we offering these people, you know? And I worry about that, because I think that there's a lot of connections there. And, again, for me, this really comes back to thinking long term, you know. Not thinking just six months into the future in terms of a recovery or a transition, but asking ourselves, how can we ensure that all Canadians are supported? The ones that work in Fort McMurray and the ones in Newfoundland, and then also the ones in the Lower Mainland, you know? And for me, it's all really connected. So I was just thinking about that and thought I'd mentioned it.

Am Johal  32:13 
Alicia, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar and look forward to working with you on the Community-Engaged Research conference in May of 2022. And wonderful to hear more about your research. 

Alicia Massie  32:26
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.

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Kathy Feng  32:31
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with our colleague, Alicia Massie. Learn more about Alicia’s work at the links in the show notes. There, you can also find a link to the full transcript of this conversation. Follow us for podcast updates at our new social handles, @sfu_voce on Twitter and Instagram, and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement on Facebook. Thanks again, and see you next time on Below the Radar.