Community and engagement
The forums I have founded in Auckland, and the civic programmes I led in Central Asia before them, are where I work in practice on the question my research asks in theory: what allows people who disagree to keep talking to one another, and to learn something when they do.
Public dialogue in practice
- Founded
- Walk & Talk Auckland (2024) and The Civic Room (2026)
- Reach
- More than 5,000 members of Walk & Talk Auckland
- Rating
- 4.8 out of 5 across 497 reviews of Walk & Talk events on Meetup, as of October 2026
- Settings
- Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, and earlier five countries of Central Asia
- Coverage
- Otago Daily Times and Otago Access Radio, on Walk & Talk
My research studies how political actors answer criticism, and how often the answer is a deflection rather than an engagement. The community work asks the constructive version of the same question: under what conditions do people with different views engage with each other’s arguments instead of deflecting them?
Each forum is designed around that question. A short framing at the start gives everybody the same context, so that disagreement is about the issue rather than about the facts. Ground rules, including the Chatham House Rule at The Civic Room, make it safer to say something tentative. Walking side by side, rather than facing one another across a table, lowers the stakes of a conversation between strangers. A written discussion paper afterwards gives the conversation a record that people can return to and dispute.
The same principles shape my teaching, where communication is learned in company and practised on real disagreements, and they feed back into my research, through a duoethnography of walking-based methods now under review and through the questions about constructive disagreement set out on the research page.
Founder, 2024 to present
Walk & Talk Auckland
A free community in which strangers walk together and talk through questions on which they may disagree. It now has more than 5,000 members, and participants have reviewed its events 497 times on Meetup, with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5. The qualities they name most often are a welcoming host (368 reviews), meeting new people (317), an engaging conversation (291), and feeling safe (281), which are the conditions the format is designed to create. The Otago Daily Times described it as a “sort of living library”, and it was the subject of an interview on Otago Access Radio in 2025.
Walk & Talk is also where I test movement-based methods for the quality of discussion, the equity of participation, and wellbeing. A duoethnography of walking-based methods in tertiary education, written with L. Halcomb-Smith, is under review with Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology. A Walk & Talk project developed with Mithila Kamaraj and Austin Fu took third place at the academyEX AI Hackathon in 2025, and I spoke about it at academyEX in 2026 as “Walk & Talk: Innovation through Connection”.
Founder, 2026 to present
The Civic Room
A facilitated public forum on contested questions, formerly called Sit & Think. Each session opens with a short framing so that everybody starts from shared context, continues with an open floor under the Chatham House Rule, and is followed by a discussion paper. The inaugural session was held at the Ellen Melville Centre in central Auckland.
Where Walk & Talk is informal and open to anybody, The Civic Room is structured. It is a small working model of the deliberative settings that political communication scholars write about, and a place to see which of their conditions can actually be created in a room.
Communication and leadership
Civic and media programmes in Central Asia
Described in outline only, because the materials belong to the organisations I built them for.
From 2018 to 2021 I worked for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, first as a programme coordinator and then as regional programme manager for five Central Asian countries, with a team of more than twenty-five. I designed and led summer schools, training workshops, and conferences for local communities, independent media, and think tanks.
Leading a programme of that kind is mostly communication work. It meant agreeing aims with partners who did not share a political context, a first language, or always a view of what the programme was for; translating between donors’ expectations and what was possible on the ground; and designing events at which journalists, researchers, and community members from different countries could work together on equal terms. It is where I learned that leadership across cultures depends less on authority than on building a shared understanding of the task.
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Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Programme Coordinator, then Regional Programme Manager, 2018 to 2021
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Danish Institute for Human Rights
Analyst, Eurasia Department, 2017
Edited and translated human rights education toolkits, and facilitated a study tour in Denmark for government officials from Kyrgyzstan.
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Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan
Vocational Development Tutor, 2013 to 2014
Aotearoa New Zealand
Te Tiriti o Waitangi and relationships
I am at the beginning of learning what Te Tiriti o Waitangi asks of me as an educator who came to Aotearoa from overseas. In 2025 I took part in a two-day wānanga on Te Tiriti with Te AtaKura Educators, facilitated by Dr Veronica Tawhai, and completed an introductory course in te reo Māori and tikanga.
That learning already shapes my practice. Manaakitanga is the principle on which I design for belonging in my teaching, and it informs how the forums I run welcome people who are new to them. I do not claim expertise in Māori or Pacific epistemologies. I intend to keep studying te reo, and to build relationships with Māori and Pacific communities patiently, through the people and organisations already doing that work, and on terms those communities set.
Service and public lectures
Other communities I serve in Auckland, and the public lectures I have given to them.
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Auckland Stoics
Co-host
Public lectures in 2026 on “Stoicism, Reason, Justice, and Action in World Politics” and “Words and Wisdom: Stoic Perspectives on Rhetoric”.
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New Zealand Red Cross
Refugee support volunteer
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LoveHeart
Public lecture, 2026
“Power, Ideas, and Persuasion: Understanding Global Politics in an Age of Narratives.”