Welcome to The Fourth U Dimension, the official podcast of The Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York. This podcast is managed by the Religious Education team, and exists to help dive deeper into the important questions of our moment.

Today's podcast features Nora Samaran and a discussion of nurture, culture, and making change.

Naava Smolash, who sometimes writes under the pen name Nora Samaran, is a community organizer based in Vancouver and Montreal, and teaches in the English department at Douglas College. Her writing appears in academic and popular publications including Lit Hub, Everyday Feminism, Room Magazine, Briarpatch, West Coast Line, English Studies in Canada, Studies in Canadian Literature, Dwutigodnik, and the University of Toronto Quarterly. Her essay “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture” went viral in 2016 and grew into the book Turn This World Inside Out: the Emergence of Nurturance Culture (AK Press, 2019). She is currently working on a speculative fiction novel tentatively titled We Live at the River.

Further reading list here: https://norasamaran.com/2016/03/28/resources-for-dealing-with-conflict-and-harm/

Her book is at: https://bookshop.org/a/17191/9781849353588

The nurturance essay is at: https://norasamaran.com/2016/02/11/the-opposite-of-rape-culture-is-nurturance-culture-2/

Her most recent piece, Coercive Persuasion and the Alignment of the Everyday, is at: https://norasamaran.com/2021/01/14/new-post-in-progress/