Here’s the longer story.
I’ve done a few different things.
From 2016 to 2019, I studied at McGill University, in Montreal, where I got degrees in civil law and common law (BCL/JD). At that time, I was particularly interested in the philosophy of law and in media law. I took film production and screenwriting classes at the University of Southern California in 2017. Then, in 2018, I wrote my first research paper on moral responsibilities in filmmaking, under the supervision of Daniel Weinstock.
I was also fascinated by what I perceived as the collapse, in the United States, of the central pillars of democracy and the rule of law that I had studied at McGill. Everyone was talking about populism, conspiracy theories, culture wars, misinformation, the death of facts and expertise. I couldn’t understand why science seemed to have no influence on certain debates. How could we be talking about things like climate change, homeopathy and astrology more in terms of feelings and personal beliefs than in terms of scientific evidence?
In 2019, I studied political philosophy and public policy for a semester at Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas. In 2021, I got my MSc from Université de Montréal’s school of public health, under the supervision of Jean-Louis Denis and Daniel Weinstock. For my master’s thesis, I did an in-depth review of the literature on vaccine refusal in several academic disciplines and developed a conceptual model of the factors that might explain the failure of many science communication interventions that focus on information dissemination. I graduated on the university rector’s honor list.
The more I studied science communication, the more interested I became in the forms of writing that, unlike most scientific writing, can provide transformative, immersive reading experiences and encourage social empathy. I also read classic works in epistemology and became increasingly fascinated by the question of how we know and make sense of the world.
Literary journalism - non-fiction writing that combines journalistic reportage techniques and narrative and stylistic devices associated with fiction literature - is interesting with regard to both of these questions. Beyond offering knowledge or information, literary journalism can provide empathetic understandings of situations that matter for public reflection and dialogue. Literary journalism is also animated by epistemological ideas that seem to me more cognizant of the complexities of how people actually know and understand the world around them than most other types of journalism.
My doctoral research, which is supervised by Juliette De Maeyer, aims to chart the worlds and relationships in which Joan Didion wrote in her New Journalism period, from 1964 to 1979. You can read more about my research here. I am able to dedicate my time to this project thanks to funding from the Canada Graduate Scholarships - Doctoral (CGS D) program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), for which I am very grateful.
Despite my main research interests having evolved, I’m still concerned about improving science communication. In 2021, I was a teaching assistant for a course on disinformation, for which I taught classes on cognitive biases and scientific literacy. In 2022, I helped put together a summer school on science journalism, which featured talks by many scholars and science journalists, including Ed Yong from The Atlantic.