The 2026 Big Thinking Summit: Inflection Point introduced a new kind of Federation event. Built through an interdisciplinary open call for proposals, it created a national forum for exploring how humanities and social sciences knowledge can contribute to public life.
Several participants and presenters were invited to engage with the event in a rapporteur capacity. Chosen for the individual perspectives they brought to the Summit; they reflected on the conversations they witnessed unfolding across the program.
Report on student research and the future of the HSS at the Big Thinking Summit
By Robert Gibbs, University of Toronto
The Federation experimented with a very different kind of conference — --defined as a Summit-- held during a year without its typical Congress. The U.S. counterpart of the Federation, the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies), has for a long time held something closer to this Summit than a Congress—their societies meet independently at other times and places, and at its annual meeting, the leadership meets to explore the future of the academy and award fellowships and advocate. (In 2026, the ACLS is taking a pause on its annual meeting: “we concluded that the entire community will benefit from a new approach to our Annual Meeting that is fueled by fresh thinking about our purpose and a format that best meets current needs.”) Clearly, we are all facing new mountains and a range of crises, even if they have a different urgency in Canada and in the US.
A Congress is a familiar form where many different learned societies meet at the same time and place. It draws scholars at each stage of their career, from PhD students through full professors. The learned societies have been the main keepers of career paths and have had both regulative functions in the disciplines as well as generative ones.
Thus, the crowd that gathered at Edmonton was a different scale and had very different interests in joining this Summit. If the Congress is normal science, then the Summit was a chance to assemble many leaders and innovators who are not so much confronting normal science as exploring new best practices of the universities. The U 15, like many leaders of those learned societies, was largely absent. But who was present represented a wider range of scholars, from a larger selection of Canadian universities and people who are exploring a wide set of new practices and kinds of higher education. To give them the floor, and perhaps more importantly, to convene them in one place at one time, was to attract various approaches and hopes for Canadian universities.
There was a lot going on in quite different areas, but I will focus on one central theme of my own thinking: students learning how to do research. We heard quite a lot about different kinds of research and especially about community exchange research and also different modes of collaboration. We heard about graduate students learning in new ways and also moving to new kinds of careers. This is a familiar topic for the Federation, but several of the sessions showed just how much progress is being made in preparing our PhD and MA students to contribute successfully to society beyond the universities. In a SSHRC session, there was emphasis on the stars who had found important roles beyond the walls of the academy, and several other sessions included current graduate students who presented changes in research practices.
There were a few discussions which explored new roles for undergraduates in research, especially in community exchange contexts. This, however, pointed to a general lack: few undergraduates attended and very few presented. Because the vast preponderance of students are undergraduates, they represent a large source for transformation in Humanities and Social Sciences. At the large comprehensive universities, there are some exploring undergraduates learning how to do research, but there is also a noticeable concentration at the smaller and often undergraduate-only universities. Hence, this Summit did bring into conversation leaders who might not have had the floor at the usual Congresses, but it still left off the table the questions about undergraduates as contributing to our fields and disciplines. The challenges for including these questions are real, because the more expansive possibilities for undergraduates in research are not linked tightly to the replication of the professors, and so, not so closely allied with the learned societies. This underscores again the issues about who the Humanities and Social Sciences community is: Is it the scholars and future scholars in the academy? Or does it include the students who study at different levels and are likely not to become professors?
Those students are a key frame for advocacy and the justification of our disciplines—to educate students who can create new knowledge outside the university and not only to be pleading for our leading-edge research in the university. One of the ongoing challenges for research universities is that it is hard to make a persuasive case that our research outputs really matter in the world, and all the more so with the HSS. But the tens of thousands of graduates could be a rich case for connecting their skills in creating new interpretations, new knowledge, new policies, ready to make a real contribution to our society. This would profoundly alter the familiar rhetoric about higher education as comparable to training in a trade with skills as preparation for jobs. However, there are several constraints at play—primarily, that we currently understand the published research of professors (and the up-and-coming professors) as the main value of research. And this is, second, where the professional societies are also at an inflection point—how do they further research that is conducted by students who pass through the university? And so, the question comes back to how the Federation works to engage the universities and those societies.
Many other very important issues and constraints were raised at the Summit—but perhaps the most missing topic was the Federal government’s signalling massive increases in spending for defence research. I did not hear any discussion about the implications, except the long-standing complaint that the priorities focus on STEM. So, let me flag a historical retort: From 19th-century Berlin to the Cold War, the Humanities and Social Sciences have a tradition of arguing the case that their studies can make a contribution in terms of language, history, policy and also what is called soft power. We do not make the drones or bombs, and we do not simply wave the flags, but our fields can make a contribution to the peace effort.
And let me end up with something I did hear, and not only once. The way to make a difference is first of all to listen to the parents of our students, to the communities where they live, in order to learn what the crucial issues are and to work with them to discern the vital questions in our society. We are holders of great traditions and bodies of knowledge, but the goal at this inflection point is not primarily to tell society what we know, but to listen and work with them in our research and teaching. (Less outreach; more exchange!).