The Let’s Talk Common Sense webinar provided a sneak peek into how the podcast hosts tackle these questions, alongside panellists Astra Taylor, a writer, filmmaker and organizer, and Dr. Candis Callison, a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous journalism, media, and public discourse. They are both featured in episodes of the podcast.
Stay tuned for the first episode coming out in April 2025.
Watch the webinar
Trust your senses, but question your common sense
Now more than ever, common sense is everywhere. But what role is it playing? In a world dominated by logic-defying events, this is the perfect time to think about who defines common sense, how it works, and how it might work differently.
“The organizer in me always wants to remind people that common sense is something we can change,” said Astra Taylor.
Panellists quickly established that common sense does not have just one meaning.
There is conventional common sense: Don’t touch a hot stove. Storm clouds bode poor weather. These are things we can all agree on.
And then there is common sense as it is used to assert shared values. It’s this version of common sense that the webinar challenged.
For example, if it becomes common sense that renewable energy could never sustain a community’s energy needs, then climate communicators will have a much harder time talking about renewables as a viable alternative to using fossil fuels.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that common sense is about place and time and culture.
It’s how societies generally tend to speak about what they hold in common,” said Callison.
What makes our moment particularly fraught when it comes to common sense, however, is that Canadian and American societies feel fractured, without a common understanding of the world.
Examples abound. In November 2024, Alberta’s United Conservative Party passed a resolution to “recognize the importance of CO2 to life and Alberta’s prosperity,” in a blatant denial of the primary cause of climate change, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In response to the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles in January 2025, President Donald Trump suggested LA firefighters lacked water to put out the fires because water had been diverted to protect an endangered fish in northern California. A statement which has no basis in reality.
When it comes to climate change, Astra Taylor points out that we’re told that what we are witnessing and experiencing is not valid.
“Sensing is physical; it’s a faculty. I think there’s a way we are being instructed not to trust our senses,” said Taylor.
“I spent a lot of time in North Carolina, where the hurricane [Helene] did immense damage, and it’s overwhelming to the senses to see cars, semi-trucks, fast food joints that look like they’ve been through the apocalypse. And yet we’re being told, don’t trust your senses. This isn’t climate change. This isn’t the disaster that it actually is.”
In this case, common sense becomes weaponized. Those who claim that certain outrageous statements or actions are common sense use the phrase to silence dissent. That is one of the ways common sense works.
As Westheimer said, “We always need to ask, whose common sense is it? Who benefits and who suffers?”
Reclaim the commons to change common sense
Is it possible to reclaim common sense? If common sense as it’s understood right now is used to shut down discussion or maintain the status quo, the panellists suggested that one way forward is to revisit and extend the idea of the commons.
“I think if we want to create a different economic order, it has to be a fight for some kind of reinvention of the commons,” said Taylor.
“You know, we think about commons in terms of all kinds of things… What would it be like if the Internet was not a commercial cesspool, but a commons?”
There are many past and contemporary examples of people practicing collective land stewardship and governance.
“What comes through in many of the articulations from Indigenous leaders is a sense of collectivity that includes not just their communities but those around them,” said Candis Callison. “The plants and animals also have their way of thinking about the commons.”
“There’s a lot to be learned from the diversity of governance systems and societies that have governed Indigenous commons.”
Joel Westheimer argued that the idea of the commons can even help us envision better futures.
“Cultivating the imagination and imagining a world that could be different, imagining possibilities of not using fossil fuels…for that, you need to open up the notion of common sense.”
We need nuanced conversations, not Instagram posts
Common sense doesn’t emerge from nothing. It is constantly being remade, as Astra Taylor said. The question is, who is making sense of our world these days?
Journalists have long been considered sense makers, said Callison. Their role has been to record what they hear and interpret those events.
However, with the rise of social media, the media landscape in North America has become fragmented.
From forum spaces like Reddit to Facebook to X, there are far more places for people to voice their opinions on what makes sense, yet there is little to no public control of how these digital spaces are governed.
Once seen as a vehicle for change, Callison noted that now these platforms should be recognized for what they are: private corporations making their own decisions about how and when we can speak to each other.
Barbara and Joel created the Commons Sense podcast to counter the fact that common sense works best when it’s not questioned. They want to open up the idea of common sense, question it, and propose alternatives to what counts as common sense today.
“Nuance doesn’t fit in a tweet or an Instagram post. A podcast allows you to explore things in depth,” said Westheimer, emphasizing how podcasts can offer participants a chance to connect and share ideas.
That doesn’t mean podcasts are universally good. As Astra Taylor pointed out, many prominent right-wing podcasters share—and, in some cases, create—misinformation through their platforms.
At best, this suggests that people are hungry to understand the world and eager to learn. The challenge, then, is to steer these conversations away from scapegoating—blaming immigrants for a housing shortage, for example—and towards collective action.
From this perspective, creating common sense becomes not only a public conversation but an opportunity for learning and listening together
“We have to think about our messages,” said Taylor. “Are they condescending? Entertaining? Are we talking in a way that makes people feel safe to learn?”
This isn’t only important for podcasters. Climate communicators hosting a booth at a local event, or volunteers using deep canvassing techniques can practice non-judgmental conversation and sense-making too.
As long-form media that often prioritizes dialogue, podcasts can offer a platform for this work and allow new articulations to emerge.
But of course, podcasts take a lot of resources and time to produce. Podcasting offers climate communicators a valuable reminder: having a conversation and making it fun can create that shared understanding so critical to climate action.
Watch the webinar for more insights on how to make sense of this moment, and stay tuned for the first episode of the Commons Sense Podcast, which will be released in April.
Resources from the Webinar
A list of resources shared by the panellists and attendees.
PANELLISTS’ BOOKS & RESOURCES
Candis Callison:
- How Climate Change Comes to Matter
- Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities
- Media Indigena podcast
Joel Westheimer:
- Among schoolteachers: Autonomy and Ideology in Teachers’ Work
- Pledging Allegiance
- What Kind of Citizen
Astra Taylor:
- The Age of Insecurity
- Democracy May Not Exist
- The People’s Platform
- Solidarity
- 2023 CBC Massey Lectures: Astra Taylor
Barbara Leckie:
- Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time
- Open Houses: Poverty, the Architectural Idea, and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Loving the world could address the climate crisis and help us make sense of changes to come
Chat Resources:
- A Day in the Life of a Republican
- How populist leaders like Trump use ‘common sense’ as an ideological weapon to undermine facts
- A working blog is about work, reading & technology
- Rumors Have Values
- The Commons, Short and Sweet
- On the idea of “restorying” the climate
- The facts of climate progress are the antidote to pessimism
- On common sense and populism
- On Trump and his use of “common sense”
- On teaching and hope
- On storytelling and climate
- On uncertainty
- The Politics of “Common Sense” Is Making Us Meaner
