Julie Sedivy

Trained as a language scientist, and having spent 20 years as an active researcher and academic, Julie Sedivy now spends much of her time thinking and writing about how people succeed and fail at communicating with each other and how they might transcend the barriers of differences in identity, personal history, and values.

In her book, Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self, she makes the case for nurturing complicated identities in which multiple ethnicities, languages, and world views can be integrated within a single individual. Multiplicity, she argues, is a natural human state and can be a site of common ground and reconciliation.

In 2017, she founded the Calgary-based book club, How Can You Think That???!? in which people from anywhere on the political spectrum meet to discuss books on a variety of political and social topics.