The Conversations We Need to Have

The Conversations We Need to Have was created to move beyond surface-level awareness and create space for deeper reflection. It is about slowing down long enough to ask better questions about power, belonging, communication, harm, healing, and institutional responsibility.

Equity work often begins with awareness. This series goes further by examining how systems, norms, and histories shape everyday experiences within the university.

Meet your host

Monique Chambers (she/her), Senior Training Specialist, brings on guests who go beyond surface-level conversations on topics that impact us all. Each guest shares expertise and lived experience, offering diverse perspectives that deepen the discussion. With a thoughtful and engaging facilitation style, Monique helps unpack ideas and create space for meaningful reflection.

If you’re ready to think deeper and explore new perspectives, she’s the host to join you there.

Episode 1: We’ve Done the Training… So Why Hasn’t Anything Changed?

Equity work is everywhere on campus, from mandatory trainings to public commitments but has it led to real change?

In this opening episode, Dr. Christopher Stuart Taylor, AVP, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism, takes a bold and honest look at the limits of traditional equity and anti-racism efforts. Together, we ask the tough questions: What’s truly shifting? Who is accountable? And how do we move beyond box-checking to meaningful cultural and systemic transformation?

Grounded in the University of Waterloo experience, this conversation sets the tone for the season, naming the discomfort, fatigue, and skepticism around equity work while creating space for real dialogue, learning, and impact.

Episode 1: Let's reflect

As you listen to this conversation, where do you notice a gap between what your institution. Department, team says about equity and what people may experience day to day?
What examples come to mind where equity work looked active and visible, but did not seem to lead to deeper or lasting change?

As this episode unfolds, what would meaningful accountability for equity work look like in your own department, team, or institution?

the conversations we need to have episode 1 cover

Episode 2: Sacred, Displaced, and Free – Black Identity in Diaspora

This episode explores the complexity of diasporic identity and what it means to belong when identity is shaped across culture, migration, memory, and spirit.

In conversation with Aina-Nia Ayodele, Leadership Coach and Wisdom Teacher, we examine how institutions often approach Blackness as a singular experience, overlooking the layered realities of diasporic communities. This conversation pushes us to think more deeply about how identity is formed and carried—through language, ritual, spirituality, and lived experience—and how those elements shape how people navigate systems that were not designed with them in mind.

Together, we consider what gets lost when complexity is flattened, and what becomes possible when institutions begin to recognize identity as something dynamic, historical, and deeply rooted. This is a conversation about belonging, power, and the work required to move beyond surface-level inclusion.

Episode 2: Let's reflect

Where have you seen Blackness framed too narrowly, without room for the complexity of diasporic identity?

How might belonging feel different for someone whose identity has been shaped across multiple cultural, historical, and spiritual worlds?

What would need to shift in our institutions for Black identity to be engaged with more depth, care, and complexity?

Episode 3: Radical Joy, Righteous Rage: Staying Human in Justice Work

This episode explores what it means to remain fully human in justice work, especially in spaces that often reward restraint, performance, and emotional control with Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae, Canada Research Chair, in Race, Gender and Performance and an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.

Through the lens of scholarship, artistry, and public engagement, the conversation examines how joy, rage, grief, laughter, and creative expression reveal truths that analysis alone cannot. Centering the experiences of Black women, this episode asks what is lost when people are denied the full range of their humanity, what righteous rage makes visible that institutions would rather soften, and how joy itself can function as resistance, freedom, and imagination. Ultimately, the conversation invites us to consider what it would take to build institutional spaces where people do not have to suppress their humanity to pursue justice.

Episode 3: Let's reflect

As you listen to this conversation, where do you notice people being expected to manage or suppress parts of their humanity in order to be seen as credible, professional, or safe?
What emotions seem to be welcomed in justice work, and which ones are more likely to be dismissed, feared, or disciplined?
As this episode unfolds, what might become possible if joy, grief, rage, and tenderness were understood not as distractions from justice, but as part of how justice is lived and sustained?

the conversations we need to have episode 3 cover with monique chambers and dr. naila keleta-mae

Episode 4: Speaking Legitimacy: Race, Tone, and Power in the University

In episode 4 of the Conversations We Need to Have, with host Monique Chambers, Senior Training Specialist from the Office of EDI-R, we reflect on how communication norms inside universities are often shaped by culture, history, and power rather than neutrality alone. From professionalism and tone to clarity, silence, and emotional expression, the conversation explores how expectations around communication can shape who feels heard, understood, and able to belong.

Featured guests, Dr. Frankie Condon and Dr. Kim Nguyen from the Faculty of Arts, invite listeners to consider what gets normalized in academic spaces and what it might look like to imagine communication differently in pursuit of more inclusive and equitable communities.

What could more equitable communication look like in our campus communities?

Episode 4: Let's reflect

-As you listen to this conversation, where do you notice communication norms being treated as neutral when they may actually be shaped by power, culture, and institutional comfort?

-What examples come to mind where tone, professionalism, or clarity were used to judge how something was said more than to engage what was actually being said?

-As this episode unfolds, what would more just and humane communication look like in your own classroom, department, team, or institution?