Hikma Collective Podcast

“Saying ‘no’ does always feel like a risk because you're wondering: is another opportunity going to come along? And the answer is always yes. It just takes time to trust it and to recognize the opportunities when they come your way.” In this special episode, we launch the publication of Erica Machulak’s book, Hustles for Humanists: Build a Business with Purpose! Joined by panelists Crystal Moten, Katina Rogers, and Sophia van Hees, Erica and her guests reflect on entrepreneurship, taking risks, trusting the process, and the value of community.  Speakers Bio Katina L. Rogers is an independent scholar and educational consultant who designs creative, sustainable, and equitable structures for institutions through Inkcap Consulting. Her scholarly interests center on higher education reform, including scholarly communication practices, professionalization, career development, public scholarship, and labor policy advocacy. She is the author of Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing (punctum books, 2024) and Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020). Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Slate, LA Review of Books, and more. Erica Machulak is a medievalist turned entrepreneur and the author of Hustles for Humanists: Build a Business with Purpose (Rutgers University Press, 2025). As the Founder of Hikma, she leads a social impact start-up with a mission to mobilize scholarship for the public good through consulting, capacity building and storytelling. Over the past five years, Hikma clients have secured $12M+ in funding to create evidence-based resources and tools, inform policies, and craft accessible communications published by Forbes, the CBC and other platforms. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (BA), the University of Oxford (Master of Studies) and the University of Notre Dame (PhD). Crystal Marie Moten, PhD is a public historian, curator, and writer who focuses on the intersection of race, class, and gender to uncover the hidden histories of Black people in the Midwest. Moten holds degrees from Washington University in Saint Louise (BA) and the University of Wisconsin, Madison (MA/PhD). She is the author of the award-winning book, Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee. Sophia van Hees is a multi-passionate creative with a background ranging from fine art to cognitive neuroscience. She takes an experimental approach to her business and design work, weaving together threads of ideas to discover new and unpredictable connections along the way. As owner of Brave Snail Designs, she also embraces fearless creativity mixed with slow and meaningful growth. Sophia holds a Bachelor of Speech Pathology and PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia. Link: Hustles for Humanists: build a Business with Purpose. (Rutgers University Press, 2025) https://www.hikma.studio/book

“On the one hand, I was reading the literature and, on the other hand, I was also talking to people in the field, different stakeholders.. . and what I realized was that there was a very strong disconnect between what I was reading in the journal articles and what I was seeing in the field.” In this episode, T.S. Krishnan discusses his book, Untapped Knowledge in India’s E-Waste Industry: A Roadmap to Strengthen the Informal Economy (Palgrave 2023), which provides in-depth research into the value of informal processors in India’s e-waste industry and its stakeholders.  Topics covered in this episode include: Overview of the e-waste industry in India Disconnect between academic literature and what is happening in the field How individual consumers can help address the growing e-waste challenge Advice for finishing a book Speaker Bio T S Krishnan is an independent scholar with expertise working across disciplines such as supply chain management, ethnography, and sustainability. He has served as a visiting faculty at Indian Institute of Management Nagpur and Ashoka University. Krishnan has worked in industries including sales enablement, data science, artificial intelligence, and product management. He received his PhD from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. Links Untapped Knowledge in India’s E-Waste Industry: A Roadmap to Strengthen the Informal Economy (Palgrave 2023)  Sign up for Krishnan's Newsletter "SCRAPPED: Afterlives of Technology: Economics, Politics, and Culture of India's Recycling Industry."   

“Having good support networks, working with compassion, working with honor, working with humility, working with love–I think those are the ways forward. And I think as soon as you begin to think in those ways, doors start to open. That's how you know you're going in the right direction.” In this episode, Shannon Leddy and Biz Nijdam discuss their SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2025), "Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North,” a three-year project that brings together Indigenous and settler artists, scholars, and cultural organizations to develop Indigenous-centered popular media approach to amplifying the stories of Canadian and Greenlandic Inuit (Kalaalit) and Sámi stories of resilience, resurgence, renewal, revival, and resistance.  Topics covered in this episode include: Defining the Indigenous North and approaches to trans-Indigenous dialogues Creative methods of collaboration between knowledge keepers and cartoonists Cultivating joy and playfulness in working with the community Advice for scholars interested in collaboration  Speakers Bio Dr. Shannon Leddy is a member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia and an associate professor of art education at the University of British Columbia, whose practice focuses on using transformative pedagogies in decolonizing and Indigenizing teacher education. Before arriving at UBC, Shannon taught high school Art, Social Studies, and English.  She is the Co-Chair of the Institute for Environmental Learning, along with Dr. David Zandvliet, and her book, Teaching where you are: Weaving slow and Indigenous pedagogies, co-written with Dr. Lorrie Miller, is now available from the University of Toronto Press. Dr. Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and settler scholar in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia Vancouver. Biz’s research and teaching are grounded in the belief that popular culture is capable of both reflecting social and political discourse and intervening in it. Biz's scholarship examines the representation of complex histories in comics and digital and tabletop games, Tarot’s capacity for innovating classroom teaching, and the role of comics and arts-based research in preserving Indigenous knowledges, sharing Indigenous storytelling traditions, and revitalizing Indigenous languages. Biz established the UBC Comics Studies Cluster in 2023, where she continues to support community partners, local nonprofits, BC’s First Nations, and UBC faculty and students in making comics about the important issues facing society today. She is also the Director of the UBC Pop Culture Cluster, which is home to the UBC Critical Play Lab, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum.   Leddy and Nijdam co-lead the SSHRC-PG-funded Survivor-Centered Visual Narrative’s Turtle Island Research Cluster and are working in collaboration with residential school survivor Dorothy Visser and graphic artist Natasha Donovan. Leddy and Nijdam co-direct the SSHRC-PDG-funded Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North in collaboration with project co-leads Asta Mønsted (Kalaallit, UC Berkeley), Tim Frandy (Sámi, UBC), and Frederik Byrn Køhlert (Edinburgh Napier University). Spanning Canada, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Sápmi (Norway, Sweden, Finland), and Denmark, this project brings together First Nation, Métis, Inuit, and Sámi knowledge holders to co-create graphic narratives and arts-based public programming that highlight resilience, resurgence, renewal, revival, and resistance.  

“We, the humanities, always have to be defending our existence. . . because we are being threatened more than ever, we are more relevant than ever.” In this episode, Franciso Pena, Francisco Gago, and Katie Brown, share insights about collaborative humanities looks across disciplines and borders gleaned from winning a SSHRC Partnership Grant for their project, “The Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: A Digital Edition of the General e Grand Estoria (DEGE).” Topics covered in this episode include: -Why medieval literature is important to us today. -Digital humanities, Generative AI, and learning to be adaptive. -Collaboration in global contexts and uncertain borders. -Why we need to defend the humanities more than ever. Links: Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: https://dege.ok.ubc.ca/ “UBCO professor spearheads global effort to translate, analyze rare 13th century text” July 9, 2025: https://research.ok.ubc.ca/2025/07/09/ubco-professor-spearheads-global-effort-to-translate-analyze-rare-13th-century-text/ Speakers Bio: Francisco Peña Fernández is Professor of World Literatures at UBC, Okanagan campus. He holds a degree in Geography and History from the Universidad de Sevilla, a PhD in Hebrew and Aramaic Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a PhD in Spanish from the University of California, Davis. His research is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. It spans Medieval Studies, Literary and Biblical Studies, and Religious Studies. He engages in a synthesizing analysis of literature, history, and religion so as to develop new understandings of Medieval Iberian cultures. Francisco Gago-Jover holds a degree in Geography and History from the University of Valladolid, an MA in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. in Hispanic-Romance Linguistics and Philology, with a dissertation focused on medieval Spanish military lexicography. His research centers on historical lexicography and medieval linguistic corpora, resulting in two military dictionaries, a critical edition of the Spanish Ars moriendi, and numerous paleographic transcriptions. He is the director of the Old Spanish Textual Archive, a lemmatized and morphologically tagged corpus of over 400 semi-paleographic transcriptions. He has taught at several American and Spanish universities and regularly leads digital humanities workshops. Katie Brown is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Exeter. She holds a BA in Modern Languages and European Studies from the University of Bath, an MA in European Studies from Cardiff University and a PhD on contemporary Venezuelan literature from King’s College London. As a researcher, editor and translator, Katie specialises in women’s writing and narratives of displacement. She is now applying her interest in collaborative translation to medieval Spain through the Digital Edition of the General Estoria project.

“What does being a scholar mean to you?” How do we create learning communities that offer participants the agency to thrive? This question is at the heart of our “Beyond the Academy” research initiative in partnership with researchers Andrea Webb and Jillianne Code at the University of British Columbia. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we have gathered insights from professional learners who know firsthand what it means to teach, be taught and co-create knowledge: PhD Students and alumni. In this episode, we share some of our findings, implications, and next steps for this ongoing work.  Topics covered in this episode include:  What does being a scholar mean to you?  Professional agency within and beyond the academy  Communities of practice and the benefits of building a constellation of communities   Dr. Andrea Webb spent a decade as a classroom teacher and department head before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold Concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education.   Dr. Jillianne Code is a Canadian researcher, educator, and learning scientist specializing in learner agency, online learning technologies, and the impact of social media on student success and well-being. As the Director of the ALIVE Research Lab at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Code studies agency ‘unbundled’ from formal education, including video games, virtual reality, technology education, and social media communities.

"Everybody wants to be heard. They have a story to tell." Music is a universal language that can activate a community. In this episode, Dwandalyn Reece discusses her work examining the material culture of music, telling stories across contexts, and making knowledge accessible to general audiences.   Topics covered in this episode include:  Telling the stories behind the objects of music to reach people  How to determine whether what you’re doing has an impact  How listening better helps build relationships  Dr. Dwandalyn R. Reece is Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and curated the museum’s permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017. Reece has collaborated with other SI units on such programs as the 2016 NMAAHC Grand Opening Festival, Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration and the 2011 Folklife Festival program, Rhythm & Blues: Tell it Like It Is. She is chair of the SI pan-institutional group Smithsonian Music and is currently working on the NMAAHC and Smithsonian Folkways collaboration, The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, and serving as co-curator of the Smithsonian Year of Music. 

"It's that interconnectedness that really defines Indigenous ways of knowing." In this episode, we share highlights from our Hikma Office Hours event about Indigenous ways of knowing and how to work with partners and collaborators in a meaningful and respectful ways to drive change. Camille Callison brings expert knowledge and lived experience to our conversation about Indigenous knowledges, reconciliation, and building relationships in library, archival and cultural memory praxis.  Topics covered in this episode include:  Getting comfortable talking about truth, reconciliation, and “Indigenous ways of knowing” Better practices for collaboration and partnership with Indigenous communities  Connecting scholarship with local knowledge to advance better policies, practices, and tools

"I don't break things without consequence." In this episode, Brittany Brathwaite discusses her willingness to break the rules in order to change the world, our society, or ourselves for the better. Brittany shares insights from her work interrupting health inequality for women and girls of color, supporting women and non-binary owned businesses, and creating a community of practice for youth workers. We cover topics such as: What is a worker-owned co-operative business model Countering the idea of disruption in innovation Advice for building more humanity into business and operationalizing your values both externally and internally

“The practice of entrepreneurship is the ‘how,’ and the social is the ‘why.’” In this conversation, author and social entrepreneur Madeleine Shaw invites us to reimagine the landscape of entrepreneurship. She shares insights about how we are all unlearning something, how flexibility is the new balance, and how we can create the conditions for social change using empathy, storytelling, and community. Topics covered in this episode include: Employing the tools of entrepreneurship to build the scaffolding for social change, The importance of nurturing relationships, How to communicate productively with people who might not share the same values, and Encouragement and advice for people just starting out and for those who want to start doing better Speaker Bio: Madeleine Shaw is a social entrepreneur and author based on unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver BC). She is best known as the co-founder of Aisle (formerly Lunapads), one of the first groundbreaking ventures in the world to commercialize reusable menstrual products. In 2014 she founded G Day, an event series for girls, and in 2018 she launched Nestworks, a family-friendly coworking community. In her first book, The Greater Good: Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World, she offers encouraging tips and reflections for aspiring impact-based entrepreneurs. Check out The Greater Good: https://madeleineshaw.ca/the-greater-good/

“It’s a way of honoring the knowledge and experience that’s in the room.” Generative questions are a way of entering a conversation with a new or existing partner and honouring the knowledge and experience that’s in the room. To kick off Season 3, Hikma’s founder Erica Machulak shares 3 tips for asking generative questions to spark authentic conversations with your potential partners and collaborators. These tips will help you: Start collaborative projects on the right foot, Surface potential connections that may not always be intuitive or visible, and Maintain relationships over time. In the episodes that follow in this season, we talk with some of our dream mentors and show firsthand how we use generative questions to leverage our empathy and curiosity to move conversations forward.