Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode nineteen of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com.
Dr. Kirsten Kramar is one of Canada's leading criminologists. She explores very difficult issues like infanticide and improper use of power, such as happened with the Ontario Coroner's fabrication of evidence. She takes her role as a disseminator of knowledge and teacher very seriously, yet she feels that more could be done to support knowledge mobilization. This interview was conduced both in Ottawa and over the phone from Toronto. (Her infant daughter – Evie – was with Kirsten and she decided that her mother should pay more attention to her. ) Canada has great infrastructure to produce research information but more can be done to support exchanges between sectors – perhaps via the use of knowledge brokers, perhaps through changes in culture, perhaps through teaching students to be better knowledge consumers. Enjoy this fascinating conversation of one academic's journey to make her work more available for decision-making. Peter: I'm here in Ottawa with Dr. Kirsten Kramar who's actually from Winnipeg. Good to see you Kirsten. Why don't you introduce yourself, say a little bit about who you are and the type of work that you do? Kirsten: My name is Kirsten Kramar. I teach sociology at the University of Winnipeg. I'm trained as a criminologist. My work is really in the field of the sociology of law, in particular looking at the sociology of criminal law and I do research in the area of both in infanticide, forensic science, coroner's inquests and sociological theory. Peter: The reason I wanted to talk to you was that I heard you on CBC and I think it was Anna Maria Tremonti was interviewing you about some very controversial topics. Could you let people know what that was about? What those interviews were about?
Kirsten: The first interview was about the safe haven movement in the United States and the question of providing safe havens for abandoned…so that people could abandon babies safely rather than commit infanticide or kill them and the question is whether or not that sort of thing prevents infanticide or can address the question of infanticide.
I was interviewed because I am a Canadian expert on infanticide and I'm often asked what is the solution or what can be done to prevent infanticide and the safe haven is often one of the examples that's given of something that can be done. In the interview though, one of the points I made was that the safe haven movement is more about trying to save babies and prevent abortions than it is to support women and mothers. Right? So it the face of it, it seems like a really good idea but if you think more clearly and carefully about the causes or the root causes of infanticide, it turns out that what on the surface looks like a really good idea, doesn't address the problem at all. Peter: One of the things that I thought was particularly interesting in that interview was that, here you are a university professor, dealing with very complex issues that are controversial, that lots of people have opinions about them and I think that the opinions run the full range of society. But part of what you were suggesting was here we have research knowledge and here's how it's applied and here are the results of that application and you were doing it in a very clear, actionable way. Would you agree with that?
Kirsten: Yes.
Peter: But I think that's quite rare. When I hear a lot of interviews or I hear a lot of people who engage with complex issues they say, “It's too complex and we don't know what to do”. Whereas what you're saying is that if we look at it from a perspective, we can actually take actions. Kirsten: Ya, I think that that's true – you can take action but…and you also need to be aware that people will often say or a journalist will often say, “Okay well what's the solution for the crime problem?” And I'll say to them, “Well you need to be a bit more specific. There is no solution to the crime problem. You need to understand what types of crimes you're talking about, what types of people you're talking about, environment, location, all of those kinds of things.” And that takes a little while right? Like you have to slow down a little bit. You kind of have to be prepared to think about things a little more carefully, talk about them for a little longer and kind of think through solutions that address the problem that you're asking the question about. So being able to match your approach to the problem is very, very important and I think that maybe journalists, academics, policy makers have a tendency to think that…well they have a tendency to manage bigger populations I think, rather than think about it in terms of managing smaller populations because when you think about managing bigger populations, the knowledge gets spread thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner and it helps fewer and fewer and fewer people because the management style is to try and manage large populations.
Peter: Okay, that's actually a perspective that I has not come up in any of these interviews and perhaps we can talk about how the management of smaller populations relates to this concept – this growing concept around knowledge exchange, knowledge mobilization. These interviews are done for the Canadian Council on Learning and one way that they think about knowledge exchange is bringing people and evidence together to influence behavior.
Kirsten: Right.
Peter: Could you put that within the context of perhaps some of the issues that you're dealing with? Kirsten: Well, I'm a university professor so I teach students and what I try to do is bring…I bring a certain amount of knowledge to the students but I also try and teach them how to access knowledge in order to change, not just behavior but also the way that they think about things. And I think – I believe that if you can change the way people think, you'll be able to change the way that they behave. I think that they have to be able to have a particular idea and be convinced by the idea before they are going to change their behavior and I'm always trying to connect, when I teach anyway, I'm always trying to connect the examples I give about research and the knowledge that we're talking about to action and to behavior? So what does this mean? So for example if you have…if you're voting for someone in your riding and they're going on the news and they're saying, “We need to attack the crime rate by putting more people in prison.” I say to my student, “Will you vote for that person?” Think about it in those terms because you can make an impact on how we respond to crime by not voting for that person because they don't know what they're talking about. They're not making…they're not being a political actor using knowledge; they're being a political actor in a different kind of way. They're trying to manipulate the system to curry favor with voters because they think that's what people want to hear. And to a certain extent that has been what people want to hear right? So you have to change that. It's within your capacity as a university student to make some kind of a difference. Peter: What if you…because some of your work doesn't just stay in the University, it also goes in to policies, goes in to the bureaucracy of various agencies that affect the way that they interact around the evidence. How do you… Kirsten: Maybe, I'm not so sure… Peter: Maybe… Kirsten: I'm not so sure that it does. I'm always asked to do interviews when infanticide is committed because I published a book on infanticide so I'm considered a Canadian expert on infanticide and I think that people come to me because they assume that the peer review process works well and that if I've managed to publish this book, I might have something to contribute and say. So I often go on…I'm interviewed by journalists and go on the radio and it's sort of after that happens that I get called back again and again and again so it's kind of like a snowball effect and I think it's because I can speak clearly on the radio, I can communicate what I think are probably some very complex ideas in not necessarily a simple format, I think there's still relatively sophisticated ideas. I'm able to communicate that in a way that works for radio. So they end up phoning me back and it works in that sense that I'm able to communicate academic knowledge to the broader public. So maybe I just have a little bit of a unique skill and that I'm able to do that and I work hard at being able to do that. I practice at doing that, I don't just walk into an interview unprepared, I will take notes, I'll think about the kinds of questions and the kinds of issues that I want to talk about. I'm not necessarily going to let the interviewer direct the interview so I think about what I want the public to know from my work and I communicate that. Peter: Okay.
Can you imagine a system…you said that you're not quite sure you're your research actually gets in to policy making. Kirsten: No I don't think it really does. Peter: So why do you think that there's such a push on the Academy to have everybody's research be policy relevant or to…if that's not particularly your job or it's not what you focus on? Kirsten: I think that first of all it depends on the kind of research. I think that there's a push towards evidence-based medicine – that kind of stuff, but governments only want to fund research that they think can affect Canadian society immediately. They want it to be policy relevant immediately and the truth is that research isn't always policy relevant immediately. I don't think that policy makers are especially good at reading academic work critically, I don't think that they're especially good at differentiating between good research projects and bad research projects – I may be wrong there. I also think that there's a kind of distain for academics; we don't really think that they have anything to contribute and it just…the research just doesn't get taken up in the wider circles. Peter: Okay but there's a contradiction the sense of the public discussion that's happened around the issues that you deal with. That…you just said that whenever there's a case of infanticide in Canada, you get called because you are an expert on infanticide and so it's not that your work is policy relevant all the time but when you need to know about infanticide, you're the person to call? Kirsten: I'm the person to call ya. Peter: Right so how… Kirsten: But that's different…it's different having a journalist phone me, than it is having a policy person phone me. Peter: Okay.
Kirsten: Nobody in the Department of Justice has ever phoned me up to say, “I'd like to fix the infanticide law in Canada and write policy on the prosecution process.” I don't think they're ever going to do that. Peter: There's no incentives to do it - would you say? Or why do you think they won't do it? Kirsten: They don't work for incentives I don't think. I don't think they work for incentives but there is no incentive to do it, that's right. There's no incentive for them to do it, there's no political capital to be gained. Peter: Okay.
Part of what I've heard in other interviews and it was interesting especially with the interview with Ben Levin who had been a Deputy Minister and is also an academic. He said that the polity – the political part of government and the policy part, the bureaucratic part of government function in two very different ways. And the academic world functions in another different way and that there's perhaps… Kirsten: That's a good point. Peter: And there's two models of how there may be intersections between them. One is spending time together; that people get to know one another but that's a very expensive thing to do. The other option is to have people that are dedicated to transferring or translating knowledge – who act as knowledge brokers – who would take say, your work at the University of Winnipeg and would go to the Department of Justice and say, “You know you guys really need to look at this work.” Do you think that that's a reasonable…? Kirsten: That's a fantastic and reasonable idea. Peter: So can you imagine what that would look like? Say at the University of Winnipeg. How could the University of Winnipeg have the equivalent of a technology transfer office - for the Natural Sciences and Engineering - for the Social Sciences and Humanities? Can you imagine what that would look like?
Kirsten: I can imagine it would look like a separate office, staffed by a director with a number of policy people working beneath them in combination with some academics who are doing research. I imagine that it could look something like that and knowledge could be mobilized from that. But if you don't have a desk and you don't have a phone and you don't have a room to do it in, which my institution does not, there's absolutely no way that that sort of thing can happen. Peter: So it has to be built in as a piece of infrastructure?
Kirsten: Has to be built in as a piece of infrastructure, yes.
Peter: Part of… I think another part of this perhaps is cultural in a sense that what the Canadian Council on Learning is trying to do is create a culture of lifelong learning and we don't necessarily think of policy makers engaged in lifelong learning right? They more or less have an expertise beforehand but I think that what knowledge brokers could do is assist that process of gaining access to new findings, to new perspectives. What do you think are some of the key elements for that culture change of the interaction between these various sectors?
Kirsten: Oh that's a tough one Peter. I know that academics are supposed to do that anyway as a matter of course right? Academics are meant to be lifelong learners and continue to expand their knowledge base and produce new research. In reality I don't think that that happens. I think again, it requires a certain kind of infrastructure, it requires a kind of commitment on the part of government for the time to do that sort of thing. Sabbaticals – people used to be able to take sabbaticals to do that sort of thing and they are no longer the sort of thing that is seen as a legitimate way to spend your time.
Peter: You're an academic and you're trained in sociology…or criminology. Kirsten: Criminology.
Peter: So you have a view of evidence. When you hear the word evidence and you mentioned evidence-based medicine and evidence-based practice, what do you think about in terms of evidence?
Kirsten: I think about research based evidence. I think about argument and persuasion. I think about the kinds of claims that are being made in relation to the kinds of evidence being looked at whether it's a text or another research study or a report or a coroner's report or a police report or those kinds of things. So it's a question of how is that evidence interpreted and is it being interpreted in a particularly skillful manner? Peter: So let's talk about a point in time when that evidence wasn't interpreted. There's an enormous controversy with regards to the Coroner in Ontario now, who had evidence but interpreted it in a way that was incorrect. Kirsten: Well yes and no. He actually didn't have evidence, he fabricated evidence. Peter: Okay.
Kirsten: And I think that's one of the issues is that evidence was fabricated and it was also misinterpreted – the evidence itself was misinterpreted. I think is more about established networks of power and the way in which the criminal justice system pushes for prosecutions no matter what and there was no one overseeing what he was doing and even if they were, they didn't really care about the evidence because they weren't interested in evidence, they were only interested in prosecuting people for homicide and getting convictions. Peter: So that was a case…that was an example where decisions were being made regardless of the evidence?
Kirsten: Absolutely.
Peter: Okay.
That's actually part of the push around evidence-based practice or evidence-based medicine is that decisions get made regardless of whether the evidence is there or not? Kirsten: Right - Ya.
Peter: Part of what I've been trying to think through is, what is the infrastructure to do that? And there's…or what are the incentives to do that? And that's a…can you think through perhaps some of the…? Kirsten: Well using the example of the Coroner's office, I think you have to hold individuals accountable. You have to hold individuals accountable for the decisions that they make and in my own experience, both in the University and with this case of the Coroner's office, I don't see a whole lot of accountability. I don't see a lot of people being held responsible for the kinds of decisions that are being made. Universities are essentially self-governing institutions and nobody has a boss.
Nobody is overseeing what's happening. There's nobody that oversees what's happening in government, there's nobody that oversees what's happening in the University and ultimately all of these bad decisions get made without the evidence to support them and no one's accountable for the bad decision once it's made. That's my own personal experience working in a university setting. Peter: I'm still in Ottawa but Kirsten is now in Toronto. We decided to take a break in the interview because there were more pressing needs dictated by Evie - right?
Kirsten: Right.
Peter: So you're now in Toronto and I wanted to pull up…to start over from where we were talking about in terms of infrastructure to support your work. You're a university professor, you teach students and you help them think so that they can act better into the future and you inform the public through various channels through the media. You publish papers that are disseminated among your colleagues. You engage in all sorts of communication and knowledge exchange yet you're stymied a little bit in terms of supports. If you were to think about infrastructure to support knowledge exchange/knowledge mobilization, given the type of work that you do what would that infrastructure look like?
Kirsten: Well you know it's an interesting question because there's a lot that I can do myself with the technology that's available to me or the technology that I have through the university but you know part of it is that universities invest very conservatively in knowledge mobilization. They kind of tend to leave it to the individual to kind of do all that work themselves. So in terms of a commitment from the institution, really what it would take is more support I think at the departmental level. So for example if we wanted to have a really rocking sociology department website, which I myself have taken on as a faculty member, it would be really useful to me if we had someone at the university who wasn't spread so thin. There's a point person to set these things up and they post the information on how to do it but in the end it sort of comes back to me to do it and I don't really think that that's the best use of my talents. Do you know what I mean? I'm a fairly smart person, I'm not afraid of technology, I can figure all of those things out but really the resources that the university has should be used a little better rather than expect faculty or just the people who are willing to do it, to do that kind of knowledge mobilization. I think that they should be thinking creatively about how they can use the available resources that they have and maybe make some different kinds of investments in support for faculty at the departmental level.
Peter: So that it becomes…that knowledge mobilization becomes a regular part of what a university does – not just an add-on or something that's off to the side? Kirsten: Exactly or something that's done kind of okay, in your spare time can you set up this website for us because lots and lots of faculty members do that kind on an individual basis but imagine if you did it more systemically? How much more information you can get out there and let people know the value of what sociologists do.
Peter: Okay.
Perhaps this touches a little bit on your reference to greater…the need for greater accountability and responsibility. How can you make the Academy more accountable or how can you make reporters more accountable to make…more responsible in terms of their use of information, of getting the right facts, of going to the places that they are available? How do you change the behavior so that the best knowledge that we have available is actually what enters into the conversation on a regular basis?
Kirsten: Well I think that oddly enough, the structure is there for that. The structure exists for accountability; it's really a question of what's the enforcement mechanism? If people aren't behaving in a transparent manner, if they're not acting in the ways in which we would expect professionals to act in the workplace, what's the mechanism that says to them no you can't do that. And I think that – you know part of this we've talked about already - it's about transparency. If things are more transparent and you can kind of see what's available and what kinds of resources the university has that aren't being used then there's kinds of questions are asked about well why don't you spend more time accessing your resources? Peter: I'm going to ask that impossible question that I get groans from people when I ask but I'm going to ask you to look into the future. You're in the middle of your career, you have, unless you decide to retire early, you have 20-30 years ahead of you in terms of the type of work that you're doing… Kirsten: …or do something else – quit my job and do something else? Peter: …do something else – absolutely. In the next 10 years where do you think knowledge mobilization/knowledge exchange is going to be?
Kirsten: Ya, I could groan about that too. I don't know because it's so difficult to teach students how to be knowledge consumers. They don't seem to be able to differentiate between knowledge and information. They don't seem to see knowledge as something that empowers them. They sort of just want the quickest thing that they can get access to in order to complete their assignment so that they can get an A or a B and then they can get the credit and then they can move on.
The value of knowledge seems to me in my experience to be diminishing. So I would hope that that…you know I hope that's not the case and that's sort of why think I have a personal responsibility and a professional responsibility when reporters call me to speak to them so that the knowledge that I have or the knowledge that's available in the wider society is talked about. Peter: Okay so it's really about getting the best of what we know in to the places where we know people are going to be making decisions and that becomes normal? Kirsten: Ya, exactly Peter: Kirsten it is always a pleasure to talk to you. I want to thank you Kirsten: Oh thank you so much Peter. Peter: It's been great and I hope Evie gets over her cold Kirsten: Yes thank you.
