Research Unplugged Episode 4 – The Accidental Academic

Print | PDF

• Interviewers: Andrew Welsh, Tracy Woodford
• Guest: Dr. Kate Rossiter
• Length of Interview: 39:21
• Listen to the Episode

SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING

This episode contains conversations that are sensitive in nature and references institutional violence, including sexual and physical abuse, and injustice. Listeners may find the material disturbing.

00:00:00 [Intro music]

00:00:12 Andrew Welsh

Hello and welcome back to Research Unplugged, the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences podcast where we talk with different faculty members from different programs in our faculty about their research. Today we're very lucky to have Dr. Kate Roster with us. She's a full professor in health sciences. I'm Andrew Welsh, and I'm joined by Tracy Woodward. Sorry, Woodford.

00:00:36 Tracy Woodford

That's okay.

00:00:38 Andrew Welsh

That's the second time I've gotten it wrong, so.

00:00:41 Tracy Woodford

You'll get it eventually.

00:00:42 Andrew Welsh

We've only worked side by side for a few years. Thanks for joining us, Kate, really appreciate it, because I know you're coming in from Waterloo.

00:00:50 Kate Rossiter

Well, so I started here in Brantford, and Laurier is lucky enough to have two health-related departments, Health Studies and Health Sciences. And so, I am currently kind of on leave from Health Studies to be in Health Sciences. So yeah, most of the time these days I'm in Waterloo.  I've spent much of my career here in Brantford.

00:01:10 Andrew Welsh,

Yeah, this is a busy time of year, so we really appreciate you taking time to join us.

00:01:13 Kate Rossiter

My pleasure.

00:01:15 Andrew Welsh

So, just to kind of get started, I'm not sure, and again, our target audience really is outside of the university. I thought maybe you could, start off, tell us a little bit about what Health Sciences is.

00:01:27 Kate Rossiter

Okay, so there's, again, we have two departments. And I can talk a bit about both of them because they're both unique and interesting. So, Health Sciences, where I am currently the chair, is a large department in the Faculty of Science. And the goal is really to orient students to thinking about health from what we call a cell to society perspective. So, it means that students learn about health from the sort of biological perspective in terms of microbiology, immunology, virology, all the stuff that is happening at the cellular and subcellular level, all the way up to thinking about health at the societal level. So that we know that health is both, that it's not just, you know, your health is not just determined by your genetics or the diseases you're exposed to, but it's also where you live, where you work, how you live. And so, in that department, we really expose students to thinking about both and trying to understand human beings as complex organisms that are both biological and social, and that those two things are kind of knit together. As a department, we really work to make, sort of help students understand that human health is really dynamic. And it's actually not so different from Health Studies. which takes a not dissimilar approach. Some of the differences there really are about the campus and the size. Health Studies also takes, I would say, a cells to society approach and really orients students in a couple of different directions, understanding human health, again, both from the biological and from the social. So, I think that it's a real strength of Laurier on the whole, and students can kind of pick where they want to go.

00:03:02 Andrew Welsh

You mentioned that you're the Chair.

00:03:04 Kate Rossiter

I am. It's a little bit like being the conductor of something, it's a little bit like being the person who is in charge of, it's kind of like being a sheepdog. I don't mean to say that the faculty are sheep, but I mean, it's lots of people doing their own thing and kind of headed off in their various interesting directions. And the Chair's job is to kind of round everybody up and keep everybody moving in a particular direction.

00:03:28 Andrew Welsh

All right; we're going to dive into our big questions now. We'll start kind of, you know, we're always interested in how faculty got interested in being professors. So, what drew you to Health Studies and Health Sciences?

00:03:43 Kate Rossiter

So, it was an accident.  I know some people really are geared toward being in academia from a sort of young age or in undergrad know that that's what they want to do. And that was not the case for me. I come from an academic family. So, some of it felt kind of, you know, kind of normalized because I had a mom who was an academic. But that was not where I intended to end up. So, I started in biology, assuming that I was going to be a doctor. And for those listening who are old, it's because I watched a lot of ER. For those who are young, it's because I watched the show that was like the Pitt in my era that is inspiring everybody to become doctors. So, I just assumed that I would become a doctor. And then after a semester and a half of being in bio, I was like, absolutely not. I'm not in love with this at all, and I don't want to do it. So, I switched to theater, as one does, and finished a degree in theater. And again, I had very, very supportive parents who were not so fussed about, you know, the long-term career trajectory of someone with a theater degree. And finished that degree, came home- as I think many people have this experience-I had no idea what I was doing and landed totally by accident in a job as a frontline support worker with people with intellectual disabilities. And it was really, truly like, I didn't know what I was doing with my life. It was a job that I could get. And I ran a theater program. It was great. And I didn't know it at the time, but that actually was one of the more influential jobs that I have held. I loved it, and I loved the people that I worked with. It really made me re kind of consider how we understand humanity and people and joy and these kinds of big questions. I knew that it wasn't going to be my forever job, and I knew that I also really liked school. And so, I, after working there for a couple of years, I went back and did a master’s in performance studies in New York City. Again, you will not find a hot job market for people with master’s degrees in performance studies. It's not a real big-ticket seller, but my parents were really supportive. So, I moved to New York and, you know, like, I don't know, I don't think I had any idea what I was thinking about. I just did it and came out on the other end with some great experiences and quite a lot of debt and still not really any clear aim of where I was headed. And I got a job as a fake nurse. I had been doing some kind of like teaching assistants in high schools when I lived in New York. It was like a grad student sort of work study program where you went and worked in inner city schools. And I had been doing sex ed in those schools. I don't even remember how I sort of landed there. And for people who are younger who are listening, it's sort of a lesson saying yes to all the open doors and just seeing where they head because it's very unpredictable. Anyway, so I came home with all this debt and these two degrees in theater. And my mom happened to be sitting next to someone in choir who worked at an unnamed university who said to my mom, do you know anybody who could help us do condom care talks for our first-year students? Because our nurse educator’s just quit. And my mom was like, well, do I have the indebted grad student for you? So, I sort of did this job very temporarily to kind of help out. It was again, one of those weird things that I said yes to. And I just stayed, like, I think people sort of forgot about me. And so there I was like in the nursing office, sort of faking out being a nurse for a long time, like for two years. And in that time sort of developed, like I was like, you know, “I'll make something of this.” So, I developed a bunch of educational programs and ran the peer education program and, you know, really developed it more as a health education position than a nursing position. And during that time, SARS-1 hit and somehow, I found myself on the whole school advisory committee for this large unnamed university kind of helping advise. And it wasn't because I had any training in public health. It's because I went on the Google machine and like was interested in health research and interested in like what was going on and had always sort of been interested in health. That's why I started school wanting to be a doctor.

So, I then realized that I also didn't want to be a kind of untrained health educator in this particular position for the rest of my days. And I also knew that I still loved school. So, I went back and did a master's in public health. I started one. And I think if you're someone who really likes academia, you really like academia. And I swapped from that master's program into the PhD. Again, I was not intending on being an academic. I just kind of kept saying yes to stuff that felt interesting. And then at the end of that, I got through my PhD, and I still really had no, I don't actually remember at all thinking, I got to get myself an academic job. I don't think I knew what I was doing at all, but came to the end of my funding, came to the end of my degree, started to panic about not having work as one does and started to look at academic jobs among other things. And it just so happened that a place called Laurier Branford had a bazillion job openings and I applied for two of them and got one of them and moved here and my whole life changed. So, for me, it was very wending. It was not on purpose. I sort of fell into it, you know, and I think people have really different career paths through. I think people take very, very different paths. So, for me, like, you know, it's sort of where I ended up. It was not actually a long-term goal, but a place that I kind of fell into. Yeah.

00:09:26 Tracy Woodford

This is why I love this question so much. And you had mentioned that you didn't have this clear path right from the beginning. And I think this is great for students who don't know what they want to do and they hear these stories and they go, oh, okay. It's important for me to take out other opportunities and not be so closed about where I need to go and go with the flow.

00:09:50 Kate Rossiter

Totally, absolutely! And I teach a lot of students, or I work with a lot of students who are so gung-ho about going into medicine or dental and they, have one line in their head. And what I keep saying is that, maybe you will, maybe you will, you might, but in fact, you also might not. And falling off that track is not the end of the world, that there are other tracks to be taken. And life does not go in a straight line. And so sometimes you fall off a track because you choose a different direction. And sometimes you fall off a track because you're pushed off that track. But there are lots of other tracks to be on that are really interesting. So, I try to say that to my students a lot. And again, some of our students end up in medical school and that's wonderful. Some of them get there and love it. Some of them get there and hate it. You actually don't even know if you're going to love that thing that you are so dusty or sort of gearing towards. So, I just have never taken a straight route to things. And I've said “Yes” to a lot. And in the times that I've said “Yes” to a lot, I guess the other piece for me is that I've always, it sounds like very nerdy. I've always tried to do, made myself really indispensable and really did my best at the thing that I've said yes to, even if I hadn't intended on saying yes, even if I, even it wasn't like this is my ultimate career goal, I have always tried to do the thing that I was doing as well as I could, whether it was being a student or being a fake nurse or working with people with intellectual disabilities. So yeah, those would be my kind of, those are the things I tell my students a lot.

00:11:14 Tracy Woodford

That's great. That's super inspiring.

00:11:17 Andrew Welsh

It's just funny you said the thing about indispensable because that's what my dad always told me was just make yourself indispensable.

00:11:22 Kate Rossiter

Indispensable, yes. Yeah, totally. In whatever that looks like, you know, like [laughs] faking your way through a SARS response for a university, for example. Yeah, like, you know, show up for the thing that you're doing. Even if it's not the thing you intended to do, show up for the thing that you're doing and see where it takes you. Yeah.

00:11:40 Tracy Woodford

Great advice.

00:11:42 Andrew Welsh

And I don't know if anyone plans on being a professor because it's not exactly the most…

00:11:46 Kate Rossiter

I think some people do. I know people who they feel like it is their only choice and that they feel like it is the only thing that they were meant to do. And that's a tough place because it's, you know, it's competitive. And if you feel like there isn't anything you can do outside of academia, that's really high stakes. In fact, I'm not sure that any, I don't think it's good for anybody to feel like the thing they're doing is the only thing that they are capable of doing.

00:12:12 Andrew Welsh

Yeah, that I agree with.

00:12:12 Kate Rossiter

Yeah so, I do know some people who feel like they were sort of geared to go into academia from a very young age and where it's been a really straight shot, but it just, it wasn't for me.

00:12:23 Andrew Welsh

One thing that is interesting is that how the love of learning, which I think all the people we've interviewed talk about kind of eventually leads into or goes hand in hand with research.

00:12:34 Kate Rossiter

Oh yeah. I mean, it's, you're talking to huge nerds. That's what you're doing here.

00:12:40 Andrew Welsh

So, we want to segue into talking about your research. So just, you know, in general, tell us a little bit about what you have done over time.

00:12:47 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, so again, it's really been a kind of windy path. When I did my PhD, I was, again, kind of lucked into things. I found myself on a research project that was using theater to translate research findings about brain injury. And I was a really good pick for that. I had a degree in theater and a degree in health, perfect. And I ended up writing my thesis about the use of theater in medical education. I did a lot of arts-based stuff. So, my work tends to be in this kind of funny place because of my background where I use creative methodologies to either help me describe the findings, help me describe what I've done in my research, or help me make what my research has helped me understand through art. I feel like it's sort of differently accessible through those mediums. Or I use art to help develop ideas. So, I use art kind of, art and art space or creative methodologies all the way along the research spectrum. And that's what I wrote about in my dissertation. And then I was the kind of artist in residence on a large project about, or the dramaturge in residence, theater person in residence, on a large project about ethics and pandemics. which was supposed to be my postdoc project, but I ended up getting the job here and continuing that project. So, at that point, I, again, worked on this big project about like, how do people make decisions about ethical issues within a pandemic space?

So how do we make decisions about, say, for example, scarce resources? So, if there's only so many ventilators to go around during a respiratory pandemic, how do we make decisions about who gets those respirators? How do we, do we say it is for people who are sickest, oldest, youngest? You know, there's lots of ways of kind of cutting that pie up. So that was a very large project. And I was a sort of piece of that and ended up writing a play about what we were finding in focus groups and some historical research I did actually here in Branford about Branford's response to the 1918 pandemic. And I looked at those two back-to-back. That's kind of where I started when I was here, was really, you know, thinking about theater and infectious disease and pandemics. And, you know, again, like life has a kind of funny way of doing real sharp turns. I was kind of coming to the end of that project and I wasn't actually sure where things were going next. And my dad died quite suddenly. And my dad's brother was a person with Down’s Syndrome. And when my dad died, I became his co-guardian. And he was not somebody I knew very well. He was somebody who was institutionalized when he was very little, as was kind of the practice for his era, his time. And I had always wondered about this person. I had this job that I, you know, when in my early 20s working as a support worker with people with intellectual disabilities, which of course led me to think about my own family. I had met my Uncle John a few times. We'd gone to his institution. I was aware that at some point he'd moved from the institution into a group home. I was fairly disconnected. I remember going to the institution that he lived, the Southwest Regional Center, and being sort of frightened and not really knowing what to make of it and not really knowing what to make of him. We often do a bad job of helping particularly kids understand intellectual disability and you know, helping kids kind of assimilate certain kinds of difference in ways that are helpful. And I didn't have that. And so, my dad had died. I was, clearly thinking a lot about his life and his family and now became the kind of co-guardian of a person I really didn't know.

And at this time, there were several really big class action lawsuits being launched on behalf of survivors of institutions like the one that my uncle was in against the Ontario government. And I kind of had all these pieces swirling, and I really very impulsively, like a theme to my career is like impulsivity. It's like the upside of ADHD [laughter]. I emailed, there were, I knew that one of them, one of the lawsuits was on behalf of survivors of the Huronia Regional Center, which was in Orillia. I knew that there were two litigation guardians who were assisting with that, and I emailed them out of the blue and said, look, I'm A qualitative researcher. I, you know, help people tell stories about their lives, and I help make sense of those. And I have this family history. Do you want help?  And they wrote back maybe like 20 minutes later and they were like, yes, we do [laughter]. We sure do! And that was like 15 years ago. And it's sort of been the rest of my, you know, that has really, that really launched the whole kind of the major part of my research career.

So, that led to a research project where we worked with a group of survivors, people who had been in institutionalized at the Huronia Regional Center, often when they were little. So, people who had been diagnosed or labeled as having what we call an intellectual or developmental disability. All of the people that I've worked with were institutionalized when they were pretty little, like kids and teens. When they were institutionalized, the expectation would have been that they would have lived there for a very long time, their whole lives. They did not. Many of the people were de-institutionalized. They were taken out of institutions later. So, we worked with that group and with some allies and with some artists, we had actually a fairly large research project and several other researchers, scholars. And our kind of beginning question was like, “Well, what was life in Huronia like? What happened here?” We knew that it wasn't good. We knew that the class action lawsuits were churning up stories about how not good those experiences were, but I'm not sure that we were prepared for how not good they are, they were. And so relatively quickly, the research question changed from, gathering stories and lived experiences of people who had the experience of being institutionalized to what happened here? Why are these spaces so inherently violent and what were the experiences of violence like? And so that question in various ways and in various shapes has kind of taken up my brain space for a really long time.

So, kind of at this point, I would say that my research has to do with institutional violence. So, the kind of violence that happens in institutional settings like Huronia and like most of the asylums that I've looked at are very similar. Orphanages are often similar, residential schools, of course, we know those histories hospital schools. So, there's a whole group of institutions like similar institutions, where when we look across those institutions, we see the same kind of violence happening over and over and over again. So, the real driving question has been to say, like, “Why? What is happening here?” And so, some of that has been collecting those stories, understanding what that violence looks and feels like, understanding what it feels like to survive that violence. More recently, we've done some work with frontline caregivers who are working with people who have survived. So, you know, we kind of, you can think about that violence as like throwing a stone in a water and there's like ripples out. So, we've been kind of exploring different rings on those ripples.  But yeah, that's really been the work that's taken up the last 15 years of my life, like a really long time. Yeah.

00:19:59 Tracy Woodford

Did you look at different types of violence within the institution?

00:20:02 Kate Rossiter

Yeah. So, you know, it's funny because I started, we started working with our, the survivor group, and we've done many different things with that survivor group. And I have to say, like, that group of people are extremely brave. And have really, really changed who I am as a person in terms of how I understand the world, how I understand human beings, what I understand of the world. So, I just sort of need to be clear that those guys have really taught me so much about things. But when we started working together, we were kind of gathering stories and people came with their institutional files. Part of the class action lawsuit was being able to have access to the file that was kept on you when you were inside the institution. So, people had that kind of paperwork, which often doesn't really match up with people's experience, right? Like what's written about you officially doesn't match up with your actual experience or your memory. And so, some of it was trying to understand the discrepancies between those and trying to really put together a kind of clearer picture of what happened, what life was like. And as part of that, I did a series of interviews with survivors, like, you know, sort of big, you know, kind of long one-on-one interviews. And I wasn't actually; I did not set out to ask about violence at all. I did not, that wasn't what I was intending to do. I was just asking about what “Was daily life like?  Where did you eat? Where did you dress? How did you bathe? How did the day unfold?” And it just in terms of asking those questions, and it was really about kind of like, how did people's bodies exist in these spaces? Every single interview was replete with violence of all kinds. So physical, emotional, sexual. And in fact, at the end of one interview with one gentleman, he said, “You didn't ask about sexual abuse.” And I didn't, I didn't ask about violence at all. And I said, yeah, but please tell me. And he said, you can't talk about Huronia without talking about sexual abuse. It is everywhere. It’s part of the daily fabric, whether it was what you experienced yourself or witnessed somebody else experiencing. Again, I didn't ask about violence. I didn't ask anything about experiences of violence. Those were the experiences that people brought to us and that were, you can't get away from it.

00:22:10 Tracy Woodford

Right.

00:22:10 Kate Rossiter

All of those kinds of violence people experienced. So, incursions of every type really is what I'm trying to say. So, people experienced emotional violence in all sorts of ways, profound physical violence, and for many profound sexual violence. And then actually kind of a layer that I've realized more recently, actually spiritual violence, which I hadn't thought about. So, people who, these are kids who were told, God doesn't love you. You're not a child of God. You will never go to heaven. And its sort of fascinating and horrifying to see what sticks. And That really sticks for people, right? It's really hard to shed the idea that you are not loved by the God that you believe in. So, really decimating, really, really hard.

00:22:55 Kate Rossiter

Yeah.

00:22:56 Andrew Welsh

And this is the work then that made-up kind of the content of your book?

00:23:01 Kate Rossiter

Two books, yeah. So, the first book was written by myself and my forever colleague, Jen Rinaldi, who's at Ontario Tech University. And that book was really looking at Huronia itself. It was called “Punishing Conditions,” and it was using that data, so those interviews and all the work that we did alongside survivors as the basis for saying, trying to understand, using Huronia as an example, as a way of understanding the patterns of institutional violence. So, as a social scientist, my job is to look for social patterns, and this helped me understand the social patterns that I was seeing across institutions. The second one is called “Population Control” And it's an edited collection that is turning our attention a little bit away from bricks and mortar spaces like Huronia and thinking about institutionalization not as a space, but as a way of thinking about human beings and care. So, what we call is like the logic of institutionalization. So, the logic of how some people are contained and managed within time and space and what the impact of that is. So, that sounds like, kind of nebulous, that's not super straightforward. But what we're trying to pin down are the ways that some people are dehumanized within time and space as a way of keeping them contained.

00:24:27 Andrew Welsh

Just for the audience, is there like an example of something that specifically we do or a group in particular?

00:24:41 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, so this book looks at a number of different groups and different authors looked at different kinds of groups. So, for example, residential schools was one of them, we're looking about the continuum of that. So, group homes, sheltered workshops. So, what we're looking at is how do we often center the needs of the institution or the organization over the needs of people? And what we look at are this kind of like moment where the social provision of care is tied up with social loathing. So that's where we kind of find this like place of violence, where you have groups that really require care for a variety of reasons. And every group, every society has some subgroups that will require attention or care in one way or another. That's just inevitable. But it's the place where those groups of people are also socially loathed. And when those things are tied together, that's where we find violence to be kind of rife. And that can happen in a lot of different places. That could happen in long-term care facilities, it could happen in group homes, it could happen within the prison system. There's lots of different kinds of ways or places that might occur. But we're, again, like looking at these kinds of spaces where you see, okay, this is a group that requires care. And that care is tied together with a sense of kind of overall social loathing. And we know that that's a recipe for disaster.

So, for example, in the States right now, we are following closely the detention of people, detention of migrants. And so, here is a group that has, in terms of public discourse, in terms of the way that the sort of general public perceives, I'm going to use scare quotes, “Illegal migrants,” that has become over time more and more socially loathed. And you can really see the trajectory of political leaders who say this is a group that is taking jobs, is causing chaos, is, you know, causing crime rates to spike, despite the fact that those are in fact not true assertions. That's the talk, that's the rhetoric, it's the discourse. And so, that kind of rhetoric or discourse gets soaked in at the public level, and that group becomes more and more loathed or dehumanized, and also is a group for a variety of reasons that requires some kind of state or public care or attention. And so, the manifestation of that, I think, is what is happening inside detention centers, where ostensibly the state is providing a certain kind of care, and again, I'm using scare quotes that you can't see, for detained, and again, I'm using scare quotes to say, “Illegal migrants.” And what we can predict about those spaces, given our research, is that those will be places where there is incredible violence happening. We can say to a person that those are people who will be in those spaces experiencing a variety of different kinds of violences.

 And so, we've done some kind of op-ed writing about that, but mostly just are extremely concerned about what we know is happening. And that, of course, is impactful for people detained at its most extreme. We know that the people who were detained in the States and sent to CECOT [Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo] in El Salvador, we know that they came out the other side having experienced horrific abuse, horrific sexual abuse, horrific physical abuse.

But actually, you know, the other pieces that we tend to lose track of is it's also really impactful for people who work in those spaces for the towns where those spaces are. So, one of the pieces that we're starting to work on is the idea of a moral stain, that working in spaces like that are also dehumanizing, also do something to people's sense of... being okay in the world, their sense of morality, their ability to cope. And we know that it has all sorts of kind of impacts on people's general mental health or general well-being. We know that towns where detention centers hold kind of experience a ripple out effect, what we call a kind of moral stain. So, it's bad enough that there are people who are detained and held against their will and subject to all sorts of violence, but we also know that there's these kind of ripple out effects. It's not good for society. It's not a social good, actually. So, those are the things that we're thinking about right now. It's very light [laughter].

00:29:01 Andrew Welsh

I was going to say very light reading.

00:29:04 Kate Rossiter

Very, very light. Yeah. Fun [spoken ironically or sarcastically].

00:29:05 Andrew Welsh

It just made me think the thing that popped into my head when you talked about, like, when I look at the title “Population Control,” like I would assume then for political leaders who want to control these populations, that vilifying those groups serves a purpose.

00:29:18 Kate Rossiter

Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, and I would say, you know, vilifying, just dehumanizing, right? Like that there are some parts of the population that are perceived as less than human and therefore open to certain kinds of treatment. And that could be people who are unhoused or people who struggle with substance use disorders. It could be migrants, for a long time it was people with intellectual disabilities or people with disabilities in general. There are, all of these kinds of groups that sit at the social margins, I think, experience that. And that dehumanization opens the doorway to institutional violence, I think.

00:29:55 Andrew Welsh

That term “Moral stain,” too, I think that's going to stick with me because it's just something you don't think about. You immediately think about the groups impacted, but that's a really good word to describe.

00:30:04 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, so you know it's funny. That term came to me-this is how research happens for me. I was reading Reddit [laughs], this is the type of research, but I was reading about CECOT, because, you know, this stuff is, it's so hard to watch this unfold, given the work that I do. And so, I was kind of glued to that coverage particularly… You know, time is a flat circle, maybe it was last fall? Whenever people were being hauled away to CECOT, and I was reading some Reddit threads. And there was one really interesting thread where people were frantically taking aerial kind of Google, you know, Google satellite shots of the CECOT prison in El Salvador and trying to understand what was going on there. And someone said, “If you take pictures,” and this is on Reddit, “You can see that there is, a pile of bodies.” And, oftentimes, because institutions like CECOT are very segregated, they're very kept away, that it really breeds a kind of interesting horror fantasies about what happens there. And those horror fantasies in many ways are borne out in reality because really awful things happen in those spaces. And so, this person was saying, “There's a pile of bodies, there's a mass grave site.” And then someone else, “And you can see because the dirt has been made bloody.” And it's, I mean, it's really horrifying, right? Like there's this sort of space where the ground has been, like blood of people has been seeped into the ground. And someone else responded like, “No, that's like motor oil. That's where they're changing,” you know, “Car parts” or something.” And I thought, and I was sort of thinking about it, and in some ways it's all moot, right? Like we absolutely know one of the things that is famous about CECOT is people go in and don't come out. So, whether there are piles of bodies or not doesn't matter. We know that it's a space of containment and death, regardless of how those bodies are kind of managed. Every institution of its type will have places of burial because people don't make it out. That is true of residential schools. It was true of places like Huronia. And what I sort of, what stuck with me was this idea of something being stained, right? That, what they were looking at, whether it was blood or oil or whatever, that something about this space was contaminated, was stained. And because a lot of my work focuses on processes of moral disengagement, the processes that people undertake, that staff undertake in institutions to disengage from their moral selves in order to do harm to others, I thought, right, this is a moral stain. It is a stain on people to know that we have incarcerated human beings who are being hurt, and we know it and there's very little we can do. And that has a kind of staining effect. And we think too little about the moral implications of the kind of damage we do to people. So, we've been kind of turning that around and trying to think about it in different ways and yeah, so that's where that came from.

00:33:01 Tracy Woodford

That's very powerful.

00:33:03 Kate Rossiter

Thanks. Thanks, Reddit [laughs].

00:33:08 Andrew Welsh

So, where is this going next? Where do you see yourself? Are you currently working on anything?

00:33:13 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, we are. We've sort of switched gears a little bit. So that, without getting into it too much, we did actually explore that area in a very straightforward way that probably was too political. So, I have to switch gears a little bit [laughter]. And we're actually, we have done some more local work around people who have provided care for folks who have survived institutionalization. And again, trying to understand how, what it means to witness those experiences of violence, what it means to kind of work on behalf of people. We're now working a little bit with a new group. We're working with parents and family members of adults who have intellectual disabilities who are facing this really interesting, really, really hard cliff where this is maybe the first group of adults who have not been institutionalized and many have grown up at home or, you know, in the community, which means in their family. And they have now parents who are aging and who are heading into their 70s and maybe older who don't have solutions for their kids. And they have adults who have adult needs and adult lives as people with disabilities. And they themselves, as the people who have done all the kind of organizing and caretaking, know that they're facing the end of their lives, and they feel like they're falling off a cliff. And so, we're trying to help think through what solutions would be and trying to help them think about what, it's a kind of very, very quiet crisis because they've done such an incredible job of being parents to people with intellectual disabilities and those adults are doing wonderful jobs of being adults with intellectual disabilities. It's not registered as a crisis, but it will be because there are not spaces, there are not good alternatives. And so that's kind of what we're working on now. And then we have some other ideas around going forward. I would really like to work with this idea of the moral stain, but the kind of how right now is not super clear to me [laughter].

00:35:21 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, we live in dangerous times.

00:35:22 Tracy Woodford

Right, that's true.

00:35:25 Andrew Welsh

Yeah. You're very good with words because the “Quiet Crisis” is a really good way to explain it because it's not something I think people would think about unless you were immersed in it.

00:35:35 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, and that's, actually that's kind of one of the things we're going to be trying to do with this is to make that lived reality clearer because for the family members, they will say things like, “Well, this is a no-brainer.” Like, you know, “Well, everyone knows that this is what, you know, our lives look like.” And like, it's actually not a no-brainer.  I think the lives of people with disabilities are often quite invisible to people without disabilities. And to try to make some of those realities clear is really, really important as a form of advocacy because we as a society don't make it easy for people who have disabilities of a variety of types. And, you know, I think if we think about adults who have a variety of needs that need some support and losing that support system, maybe slowly, maybe suddenly, that is a crisis. It's a disaster for a variety of reasons. Yeah.

00:36:29 Tracy Woodford

Well, like Andrew said, you do a good job of describing that. And maybe that's your drama background, but... [laughter]

00:36:37 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, that's it. Two degrees [laughter].

00:36:39 Tracy Woodford

There you go. It's all coming together.

00:36:41 Kate Rossiter

See, it all comes together [laughter].

00:36:43 Andrew Welsh

But you know, I'll say the way you describe when you start talking about that you did the work in, you know, theater performance. And then when you talked about like health studies, health sciences and what you did it, it just makes sense.

00:36:56 Kate Rossiter

Yeah, well it always made sense to me! It was never felt like a wild left turn. It was just like, “Well, yeah, of course, of course I'll be a fake nurse. What better job for us? Two degrees in theater. No problem!” [laughter]

00:37:08 Andrew Welsh

No, it really did make sense. Well, we really appreciate you coming in. Like I said, it's a busy time of year for everybody. You're our 4^th I guess, but our trademark has been at the end to ask a dad, do you have a dad joke you tell your class, your kids.

00:37: 26 Kate Rossiter

Okay, no, it's the opposite. I do not have dad jokes I tell my class. I had to ask my kids for this. I have to go in the reverse. Okay, Andrew, what is the downside of eating a clock?

00:37:38 Andrew Welsh

I don't know what is.

00:37:39 Kate Rossiter

It's time-consuming [laughter].

00:37:42 Tracy Woodford

That's great. I like that.

00:37:44 Andrew Welsh

I genuinely liked, that was good. I love it.

00:37:45 Tracy Woodford

You're going to use it, aren't you?

00:37:46 Andrew Welsh

What I do, we do, I do the dad joke of the day on our work group chat, and I'm not making them up. I'm Googling them and a staff member got me from Home Sense. It's a little box of a dad joke of the day every day. But it's quite high stakes. Oh, it's quite high stakes.

00:38:01 Kate Rossiter

Okay, here's another one. What is the difference between a dirty bus stop and a lobster with breast implants?

00:38:10 Andrew Welsh

I don't know.

00:38:11 Kate Rossiter

[laughter] One's a crusty bus station, the other one's a ***** crustacean.

00:38:17 Andrew Welsh

[laughs] That one's actually good.

00:38:18 Kate Rossiter

It’s actually pretty good. I was like, “Oh no, I'm going to mess it up. One's a dusty crustacean. No, that's not it. Was it a busty bus station? Nope.” [laughter]

00:38:24 Andrew Welsh

It's even more pressure when you have to say it as opposed to type it. My dad joke of the day was, where do Cow farts come from?

00:38:31 Kate Rossiter

Where?

00:38:32 Andrew Welsh

The Dairy Air [laughter].

00:38:33 Kate Rossiter

Oh, cute, cute. That's a cute one [laughter].

00:38:37 Andrew Welsh

Well, again, thank you very much for joining. Tracy and I. I think people are really going to be very, very interested with this episode. Thank you again and thank you to everyone who's listening. We'll, I guess, call it a day.

00:38:53 Kate Rossiter

Thanks, everyone.

00:38:54 Tracy Woodford

Thank you so much.

00:38:54 Andrew Welsh

Take care. Bye

00:38:54 [Outro Music]

00:39:03 Andrew Welsh

Thank you so much for listening to the Research Unplugged Podcast. This episode was made possible by the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University and produced by Andrew Welsh and Tracy Woodford. Original music provided by Kevin Byrne, Megan Shubrook, and Tracy Woodford. You can find out more about today's guest and the research in the show notes for this episode. Until next time, remember to unplug and stay connected.