The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Jessica Riddell, a speaker, professor, and researcher who focuses on systems change in higher education. Jessica’s recent book, Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Systems for Human Flourishing, and her previous co-authored book, Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning, cover various facets of educating and leading across the university. Jessica is a professor of early modern literature at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada, where she also holds the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. She is the founder of the think tank Hope Circuits Institute and sits on the board of directors for the American Association of Colleges and Universities. In all these roles, she participates in a wide range of conversations at national and international levels about how universities fulfill the social contract to our broader society.
Committed to cultivating hope in higher education, Jessica wrote Hope Circuits to challenge educators to reconsider the assumptions with which we operate. In it, she offers innovative tools that emerge out of the stories of luminaries she gathered for the project and helps us come to a clearer understanding of systems of governance, leadership, and institutional culture so that everyone in the university can flourish. But such flourishing isn’t limited to higher education, which she argues plays an important role in fostering creativity and democracy across sectors. “Higher education,” she says, “is the place where we keep democracy and ourselves alive and awake. And my goodness, we need to stay alive and awake at this moment.”
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