PPSA Banff: how to go to a new conference when it is still scary 10 years after getting a PhD

Impostor syndrome gets a lot of attention these days, in the academy and beyond. Sometimes I think it even functions an odd form of credibility, an admission that takes some of the discomfort out of the not-knowing that is a function of probably most jobs.

Lots of ink has been spilled on how impostor syndrome manifests, and especially its gendered and racialized dimensions. I will only add that while this phenomenon exists, I believe it is just one way of describing the isolation of being new at things, especially in the academy.

To wit: since 2020, I have worked in a department (Political Science) that is outside of my trained discipline (Geography). I was hired primarily because of my background in urban research and teaching, so I teach Urban Politics, which is quite interdisciplinary, among other courses. Working in a field outside of my discipline means that my colleagues publish in different journals and go to different conferences than I do; they also (mostly) have the same basic knowledge-background as my students – which I do not. In practical professional terms, this can sometimes look like being at a faculty meeting and realizing everyone is going to be away a particular week at a big disciplinary meeting that isn’t even on my radar. [Cue sinking feeling.]

So while I actually don’t feel like an impostor, sometimes I feel like a perpetual outsider. I think this is an important distinction to make: there are things and methods we know, and some that we don’t, and it can be itchy – especially in a world that prizes the confidence of knowing – to feel outside of what people around you do. This includes the theoretical knowledge, as well as the disciplinary culture, of an academic field.

One remedy for this outsider feeling – rather than to just label myself an impostor and hope no one notices – is to look for opportunities to expand my knowledge about the discipline that surrounds me, and their way of thinking about the social and political world. So in Fall 2024, when my colleague Renan Levine invited me to be on a panel about work-in-learning, at the Prairie Political Science Association (PPSA) conference in Banff, Alberta, I jumped at the chance.

Although I have been to plenty of academic conferences, I had never attended a Political Science conference before. At this conference, I got to go as an expert in my subject area and also as a learner of relevant topics. More important, I got to see how the discipline talks and thinks about itself when it is alone with friends.

Things that were great about this invitation:

1. I got to present on the internship program I have established in Political Science at UTM, which I’m super proud of. A presentation is a great opportunity to reflect on one’s own work, so it was intellectually satisfying.
2. I could offer my expertise in pedagogy, and be in conversation with people from many backgrounds who really care about this style of learning, which is still widely undervalued in the academy at large.
3. I was able attend a Political Science conference, as part of an existing collegial group, without feeling way out of my depth.

This last one is really the most important! We should all be inviting people to opportunities they might not enter on their own: junior colleagues, foreign colleagues, people outside of or new to the discipline. No one loses or diminishes their shine by including others; quite the opposite.

Also: Banff! What a place!

This conference was also such a pleasure because it was small enough to actually get to know people, without that feeling of being lost in the hall in high school. There was a reasonable number of choices for each session. People sat together at meals and asked about one another’s work and ideas. I’ll definitely look for opportunities to go back again.

I was also able to go to this conference on a UTM Teaching Development Travel Grant, which UTM offers to help faculty travel to conferences to present specifically on pedagogy, which is still quite a small part of most academic conferences. As I have stated before, these small pots of money can go a long way in helping people to make connections, and grow their academic and pedagogical practice in really constructive ways.

So, since I went to my first Poli Sci conference, am I now done feeling like an outsider? Absolutely not! But I guess I have stopped feeling like that is the point. In fact, it never was.

Toronto to Hyderabad to Dublin: how I got there, and how I got here

This week, I am in Dublin, working out of the reading room of the National Library of Ireland which, itself, is a delight. These big, austere, quiet spaces blend the big fiction and the mundane work of academic life, and I cherish them.

I am here for an intensive writing collaboration, based in research on urban public spaces in Hyderabad, India that I completed in the past year with my colleague, Dr. Hari Sasikumar (who is a postdoc at Dublin City University (DCU), and also a photographer).

This week has me thinking about academic collaboration, but especially about gathering resources and connections in an academic life, storing them away, and putting them together when the time comes.

I am thinking about how what results is not a completed puzzle, but more like a treehouse made of scraps of wood and cardboard, decorated with tiles and paint. It is improvised, and imagined, and made of what you find. When it’s finally done – or done enough – if you are very lucky, you get to go up there with a snack and a blanket, and not come down for some time.

Presently, I’m in that treehouse: I’ll explain.

This story actually begins in the oft-forgetted days of the early pandemic. In 2021, I had gotten a University of Toronto Global Classrooms grant to bring international scholars into my virtual classroom for POL 402: Public Space, which was a seminar for a group of (excellent) fourth year students. The grant was to pay three scholars who were studying public spaces in different places around the world to come teach in my class. I was connected with them by Dr. Luisa Bravo, founder of City Space Architecture in Bologna, Italy (who, at that time, I had also never met in person), and who also runs the Public Space Academy.

Hari had just finished his PhD, and written his book on public life in Kerala, India – Social Spaces and the Public Sphere – and he came to talk about it in our virtual classroom. The teaching went extremely well, as had the planning that preceded it. In the way of knowing someone only virtually, we got along quite well, and we talked about staying in touch if another opportunity presented itself. Which it did, but not for a long time.

Three years later, in winter 2024, an opportunity came across my desk to apply for the University of Toronto School of Cities India Research Catalyst Travel Grant, funded by theUniversity of Toronto India Foundation (UTIF). Having been funded through the School of Cities before (especially in my work with Metropolitics), I was keen to apply, but I had never been to India and I needed some direction.

So I got back in touch with Hari, who suggested that we consider research working with Hyderabad Urban Labs (HUL), a nonprofit organization in his hometown of Hyderabad, that does local urban research and community development projects.

At the time, HUL was running a design competition around small public spaces in Hyderabad, called i’Local. In conversation with the organization’s director, Dr. Anant Maringanti, we decided to enter the contest; whether or not we got the U of T grant, we could begin a conversation with HUL, and then think about a future project. Although neither of us were designers, that entry packet was a great first pass at engaging with the big questions of public space that HUL has been asking for some time – in particular: how can the leftover spaces of the city be rethought to serve local communities?

Spoiler: we did not win the contest.

But, eventually, we did win the U of T grant, and I booked travel to India. After months of zoom calls and email conversations, Hari and I finally met in person in a hotel lobby in Hyderabad in February 2025. In a whirlwind ten days that followed, we visited many sites of the iLocal competition; were guided by Anant and other very generous members of the HUL team; and took piles of notes and photos.

I would return for another round of research in India in July 2025, this time on my own, for five days in Hyderabad, and another five in Mumbai, where I would meet members of the UTIF staff. I was also graciously taken around by wonderful colleagues at the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA). More meetings, more photos, more field notes, more incredibly enlightening conversations.

And while Hari and I kept meeting on the phone and over zoom, we are taking the opportunity of my being in Paris this year to meet up in person, and to write intensively together for a week. We sit and write in the big reading room; we get lunch and talk ideas; we read and write some more. This is an absolute gift of time, and an opportunity to break out of the isolation of so much of academic writing.

For me, in-person conversations enrich my academic work like no other. That is how I wrote my dissertation with the beloved PhD club; how I stay energized on urban issues through the board of Metropolitics; and how I would choose to work always. I am taking the opportunity of sabbatical to re-set this practice.

I tell this story because I think a lot of us see the final product of this or that academic project, and have no idea where to start building something similar. If the work involves collaboration, it may seem from afar that either you have to chase the biggest grants, or just luck out with making a good friend in grad school and then writing with them forever on your own dime. Those things, certainly, can happen, but they are only one way of engaging in great academic projects, among so many other kinds.

For this project, I took advantage of small grants as they came my way, wove in scholarship with teaching, and built relationships with people and institutions over time. This is not ‘networking,’ but rather a larger orientation to choosing connection over isolation, and to opt for presently available resources. I knew I wanted the treehouse, but I didn’t have plans drawn up at first, and I certainly didn’t know all the places it would take me.

I acknowledge that I am able to do this because I operate in a well-resourced institution with supportive colleagues. I also am always, always keeping an eye out for possibilities that will nourish my thinking and teaching and writing. This collaboration is the treehouse, and the path to the treehouse. It begins by gathering this piece, and that.

Jackman Scholars-in-Residence at U of T

Jackman Scholars program                

Working backwards through 2024-25, one of my most fulfilling experiences as an educator in a very long time was as a faculty supervisor for the Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program at the Jackman Humanities Institute. This program, across the three University of Toronto campuses, has faculty apply with a research project for which they would like a team of undergraduate research assistants. Once the projects have all been accepted, students then apply for the projects that most interest them, and faculty choose their team from the appropriate matches. Students receive research training, room and board for a month on a U of T campus, extracurricular programming, and a living stipend; faculty get assistance on their projects, and some funds to support the students and ongoing work on the project. The students for this program are truly outstanding – the process is really competitive, and the students get to apply in their areas of interest. I got to work with five truly excellent students who blew me away with their insight, dedication, and care.

In Spring 2025, my project was entitled Paying for Parks: Public Space in the Urban Landscape. The original project brief read:

This project examines how changing revenue streams have affected the spaces and character of the urban public realm over the past four decades. By comparing the municipal budget shares of parks departments over time, across medium and large North American cities, and the adjacent public discourse surrounding these changes, we will better understand the discourse of privatization.

In the end, my team and I ended up focusing on parks budgets just in the largest Canadian cities, and then – due to data constraints – on Ontario’s largest cities. We continue to work on this project, and we hope to submit a paper based on the data by the end of this year.

However, here I would like to mention the elements that I think make this program so successful as a place of authentic learning:

1. There are no grades. This seems a bit obvious, but when the incentive moves away from external rewards and towards students’ interest in the topic area and in learning research methods, the whole attitude changes, for everyone. Concerns about cheating or plagiarism pretty much evaporate. I don’t have to take on the role of enforcer, and students get to ask real questions.
2. The students show up in a subject area they are interested in, and they bring their training. I have rarely encountered a group of students who come in so ready to tackle urban problems. While there were terms I needed to (and was happy to!) explain, the basic concepts of municipal government and governance had already been covered in their previous courses. Most of this group had not necessarily thought about public space in the ways I was describing, but they knew how to think about the state, about complex urban issues, and about the built environment. When we got together with other groups, it was clear that they also were incredibly invested in this process.
3. The research is real. Sometimes we got stuck, but the payoff of figuring out an actual problem – often having to do with a data set – was tremendous. On one really excellent day, we met with Dr. Enid Slack (of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at the Munk school). When one student said it would have been helpful to have her knowledge at the start of the project, Dr. Slack told them that if we did that, they wouldn’t have shown up with such good questions. This was my first time working in big quantitative data sets, and there were times I was just as lost as the students, or times when we had to reconfigure the sample in order to handle the data we had. We built this project together, and depended on one another.
4. We all left wanting more. A great learning experience is one that ends on a high note. At the end of the program, when all of the groups across the three campuses got together to present their work, everyone sat in an auditorium on U of T’s downtown campus cheering for each other’s research project. Our group were incredibly proud of our poster, and we were all sad to say goodbye to one another.  I continue to work on the project with students in a paid RA capacity.

I think a lot about this program – could it be expanded, or would it lose its sparkle? How can this style of learning be translated to the undergraduate classroom? I definitely look forward to applying again in the future, and I will encourage my students to do the same.