Wonks and War Rooms

Get ready for Season 5 of Wonks & War Rooms! This season we’ll be diving into tech, politics, and policy. Host Elizabeth Dubois will talk to public policy managers, technologists &  campaigners to discuss how technology policy is shaped, how technology is used in political campaigns, and what that means for political communication research and practice. As always, episodes will drop on Wed...

Vinita Srivastava is the senior editor of culture and society for The Conversation Canada , and host of the podcast Don’t Call Me Resilient , as well as a research associate with the Global Journalism Innovation Lab . This episode, Vinita and Elizabeth chat about post-truth politics and the idea that how people feel about information is sometimes more influential than the actual facts. They discus...

Taylor Owen is a professor of public policy at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill university, and his research focuses mainly on tech regulation. This episode, he and Elizabeth define and categorize types of regulation. They discuss what tech regulation looks like, how lobbying impacts tech regulation, why regulation of tech is difficult, and the balance governments (both in Canada and...

This episode is an audio version of a special live taping of Wonks and War Rooms , in partnership with uOttawa’s Centre for Law, Technology and Society , where Elizabeth is joined by a panel of journalists to tackle a tough topic: online harassment of journalists and what it means for our democracy.  Rosemary Barton is the Chief Political Correspondent for CBC News; Fatima Syed is a reporter for t...

Riyadh Nazerally is the Director of Communications for the Hon. Marci Ien, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth, and is the former Director of Communications for Capital Pride in Ottawa. This week he and Elizabeth discuss the backfire effect and its three types: familiarity, overkill and worldview. They talk about how to understand and handle the backfire effect when it happens. Riyadh...

Adi, a lawyer and campaigner, explains how campaigns are often thinking about how they can crack into people's filter bubbles in order to raise awareness and find new supporters. During the  conversation Elizabeth and Adi tease apart the difference between algorithmically driven filter bubbles and echo chambers which come about as a result of individuals choices in their media environment. Ad...

Journalists Facing Mean Tweets: What It Means for Our Democracy - Join us Tuesday, March 22 at noon ET for a live virtual event! Register here . In this special live recording of the podcast, Elizabeth will chat with Rosemary Barton , chief political correspondent for CBC, Fatima Syed , host of The Backbench podcast (Canadaland) and vice-president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and Ma...

Sean Speer is the Editor-At-Large at The Hub , a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and previously served as Senior Advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He and Elizabeth chat about political polarization and dig into the different theories of polarization including elite polarization and mass polarization, as well as ideological versus affective polarizati...

Shuvaloy Majumdar is the Foreign Policy Director and Munk Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and this week he and Elizabeth tackle propaganda, government communication and mis/disinformation. They discuss the blurry line between government messaging and propaganda, and what they can look like in authoritarian versus democratic regimes. Shuvaloy also speaks to his experiences of gover...

Claire Wardle is a professor at Brown University and the co-founder of First Draft , a non-profit that focuses on misinformation and the tools needed to fight it. She and Elizabeth chat about information disorder, a term Claire helped coin. The term helps us think about issues related to mis- and dis- information as bigger than being about fact or not. Claire explains how it is actually much more...

To kick-off our season on mis- and dis- info we are rebroadcasting this great conversation with Nasma Ahmed who is the Director of the Digital Justice Lab . In this episode, recorded in 2019, Nasma helps Elizabeth unpack what exactly mis- and dis- information are, why we need to question content we see online, and how a lack of trust in larger political systems plays in.  Additional Resources: Fir...

This season of Wonks and War Rooms is going to focus on mis- and dis- information. We'll talk about information disorder, political polarization, post-truth politics, and more! Tune in to hear from political strategists, journalists, public policy folks, and academics. Get caught up on past episodes and find fully annotated transcripts in English and French at https://www.polcommtech.com/.  C...

This week Elizabeth wraps up season 3! This season was focused on Media and Digital Literacy, and Elizabeth runs through all the concepts we covered to help you gain a greater understanding of how these concepts are interrelated. Elizabeth also takes a look back at some concepts and episodes from previous seasons, and looks to the future for our next season on mis and dis-information. Additional R...

Elizabeth chats with public policy expert Vass Bednar about surveillance capitalism. Taking a few Canadian examples, they talk about how tech companies collect and use data about their users, how privacy policy might be a red herring and how incentive structures in the tech industry contribute to the system of surveillance capitalism. Additional Resources: Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveil...

This week Elizabeth chats about technological affordances with Rachel Aiello , an online politics producer for CTVNews.ca and a member of the parliamentary press gallery . They chat about how technology is changing how journalists report and how audiences receive information, from politicians on social media to journalists working from their phones. They also talk about technological determinism i...

Former content moderator and current director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, Andrew Strait and Elizabeth chat about what content moderation is, why it is always flawed, and how the way in which platforms are constructed impact the flow of content. They talk about a bunch of related issues including how to (and how not to) regulate tech companies in order to minimize harms. Additional Resources And...

Tim Fontaine is a former journalist who founded the satirical news website Walking Eagle News . He and Elizabeth chat about the role of political satire in peoples’ information diets. Political satire can provide an audience with a different perspective, help people understand the dominant narratives, and highlight gaps in dominant discourses. Elizabeth and Tim cover everything from the role of po...

Erin Gee is a policymaker, specialist in gender-based analysis, and Co-Founder of the Bad + Bitchy Podcast , and this week she discusses safe spaces with Elizabeth. Safe Spaces are online or physical spaces where historically marginalized groups might connect, share information and ideas, and mobilize. How does the idea of safe spaces connect to media and digital literacy? We consume information i...

This week Elizabeth chats with Jen Gerson, a freelance journalist and co-founder of The Line , about selective avoidance. Whether it be blocking someone on Twitter, unfriending someone on Facebook, or just carefully choosing from which sources we get our news, selective avoidance is an everyday occurrence. They discuss topics like the role of emotion in selective avoidance, fragmented media enviro...

Murad Hemmadi is a reporter for The Logic and this week he talks to Elizabeth about political information repertoires. From party campaign material to policy discussions to political memes, political information repertoires can be a mix of a lot of different things. They chat about what makes up a persons’ repertoire, the idea of Slacktivism, the lack of ‘backstory’ in the news, and Jagmeet Singh’...

Matthew Johnson is the Director of Education for MediaSmarts, and he chats with Elizabeth about critical digital literacy. From house hippos to authenticating information online, Elizabeth and Matthew discuss functional and critical aspects of media and digital literacy. They talk about the skills required to use digital and media tools, and the “key concept approach” to digital literacy, and digi...

This season we are doing things a little bit differently. We are going to spend this season looking at media and digital literacy and a bunch of political communication theories that are related. Next week we kick things off with a run down of what exactly media and digital literacy are. Then we will go week by week talking about things like political information repertoires, selective avoidance,...

Mini-episode coming at you. Elizabeth closes out season 2 with an update on plans for next season and a request to you listeners! While we are away you can follow Elizabeth's work on Twitter @lizdubois Check out the Pol Comm Tech Lab website: www.polcommtech.ca Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French .

Sherry Aske, former CBC multimedia journalist, and Elizabeth chat about the fourth estate and the networked fourth estate. They dive into the origins of theories and the range of information producers that make up the networked fourth estate. Sherry and Elizabeth also reflect on the power dynamics at play between actors in the networked fourth estate and what that means for who gets heard in the c...

Shaaz is a Digital Advisor and Director of Digital Transformation for Microsoft and he chats with Elizabeth about what exactly is digital transformation. They go from academic definition, to business buzz words, to practical applications. Shaaz explains why he puts humanity at the centre of digital transformation and why he always wants to focus on "why" (rather than just what fancy new...