The 2026 FIFA World Cup is now underway, with fans who are coming from all over the world to the 16 North American cities (including Toronto and Vancouver) hosting a record 48 teams.

Reports from New York City, where an estimated 1.2 million football fans have descended for the tournament, suggest many international visitors have yet to adopt local tipping customs.

The World Cup presents an interesting cultural challenge for hospitality workers. Millions of visitors are expected to arrive from countries where tipping practices differ significantly from North American norms.

Restaurants, hotels, bars, taxis and other tourism businesses should anticipate that many international visitors may tip less than local customers or even not tip at all — not because they are dissatisfied with service, but because they are following the social norms of their home countries.

As a hospitality management professor who has lived and worked in Europe, the United States and Canada, I have always been interested in how cultural differences affect service management and consumer behaviour.

Tipping fatigue

Much has been written in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. about tipping fatigue in the last couple of years. In fact, a recent survey found two-thirds of Canadians believe the practice should be abolished.

The post World Cup visitors may tip differently — here’s what Canadian hospitality workers should know appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, another American writer, in Spain in 1923. During his four years with the Toronto Star, Hemingway produced nearly 200 pieces, 170 under his own name plus around 30 with verified pseudonym bylines. (Ernest Hemingway Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum/Wikimedia)

In January 1924, two young women on a Toronto Queen St. streetcar caught sight of Ernest Hemingway’s battered green hat.

They giggled among themselves that he might be Red Ryan, the city’s fugitive bank robber.

So reported John Hadley in the Toronto Star story “The Freiburg Fedora: Must Wear Hats Like Other Folks If You Live in Toronto” on Jan. 19, 1924. Hadley was Hemingway’s wife’s name, and John, the name of their infant son.
Today, it’s clear that Hemingway wrote the story. Journalist and literary historian William White first collected many of Hemingway’s Toronto Star pieces in Dateline: Toronto (1985).

Journalist William Burrill, author of Hemingway: The Toronto Years (1994), later uncovered some 30 additional long-lost stories, including several written under pseudonyms like John Hadley or Peter Jackson. By cross-referencing Hemingway’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Burrill demonstrated that “The Freiburg Fedora” was indeed Hemingway’s.

As Burrill notes, Hemingway adopted pseudonyms after reaching his quota with the Star, allowing him to sell additional stories and earn much-needed income for his young family. He first used the John Hadley signature only weeks after the birth of his first son.

With scholars gathering in Toronto in July 2026 to re-examine Hemingway’s Canadian years, “The Freiburg Fedora” offers a compelling opportunity to revisit a neglected moment in Hemingway’s literary development.

Evolution of fiction strategies

The significance of “The Freiburg Fedora” extends beyond its authorship.

Under the guise of Hadley, Hemingway was able to explore the less appealing aspects of himself. The sketch captures him at a pivotal moment when newspaper reporting begins to evolve into literary self-fashioning, anticipating themes and narrative strategies that would later define his fiction.

Although researchers established Hemingway’s authorship of the story decades ago, it has received remarkably little literary attention. During the July 2026 Toronto Hemingway conference, visitors to the Toronto Reference Library (where the Toronto Star collections are held), can see the original newspaper story on display.

The making of an outsider

Hemingway had covered Red Ryan’s escape for the Toronto Star, making the comparison he explored in “The Freiburg Fedora” especially apt. Contemporary newspaper photographs of Ryan wearing a fedora bear a striking resemblance to the young Hemingway.

The “Freiburg Fedora” opens with the wry observation: “There is one thing Toronto demands in clothes. That thing is conformation.” This first-person piece goes on to see “John Hadley” narrate Hemingway’s irritation in being mocked by the two women. Where another traveller might have laughed at the comparison, Hemingway’s alter ego begins to prepare a counterattack.

The story quickly becomes a satire of Toronto itself. On the eve of his return to Paris, Hemingway used the protection of a pseudonym to mock what he presents as the city’s social conformity and provincialism.

The hat is pivotal in this transformation. “John Hadley” never defends its appearance. Instead, he recounts its travels. It has weathered “the hot sun of the Thracian desert,” been worn beneath heavy snow glasses and even landed in “the sunbaked sand of the bull ring.”

The hat becomes almost a passport, bearing the marks of experience rather than fashion. What the Toronto passengers dismiss as an oddity, Hemingway presents as the visible trace of an adventurous life deliberately lived beyond convention. The battered fedora embodies the identity of a young writer consciously fashioning himself as an outsider character.

From streetcar quarrel to literary technique

Recent scholarship has increasingly emphasized the continuities between Hemingway’s journalism and fiction. Marcos Todeschin, for example, argued in his doctoral thesis that Hemingway’s newspaper writing and fiction should be understood as part of the same evolving literary practice. “The Freiburg Fedora” offers one of the clearest examples of that transition.

The fedora story reveals a characteristic that would recur throughout Hemingway’s fiction: the tendency to transform minor social encounters into contests of will. Rather than inviting sympathy, the Hemingway character steadily escalates the exchange through increasingly extravagant claims. He depicts himself as a provocateur who seems almost compelled to intensify the conflict.

He insists the hat was a gift from the late Emperor Charles of Austria, provoking fellow passengers by invoking the recently defeated First World War enemy who had died in exile. This prompts a male passenger to threaten him with “a sock on the jaw.”

At the height of the “Freiburg Fedora” confrontation, Hemingway steps off the streetcar at Queen and Bay streets, announcing that he has “an appointment with the new mayor.” Toronto readers would immediately have recognized the reference. Mayor William Wesley Hiltz had taken office only days earlier.

Whether Hemingway, as a reporter, had business at Old City Hall or simply fashioned a theatrical exit for his first-person narrator is impossible to know. Either way, he leaves the streetcar, and the argument, entirely on his own terms.

From journalism to fiction

“The Freiburg Fedora” introduces a narrative pattern that would become central to Hemingway’s later fiction. Social encounters become tests of will.

“The Freiburg Fedora” displays the irony, character construction and carefully controlled endings that would later distinguish Hemingway’s fiction. The newspaper story begins to assume the shape of literature while Hemingway simultaneously turns himself into an anti-hero of his own autobiographical narrative.

It also overturns the Toronto Star Weekly’s carefully cultivated public image of Hemingway. A staff profile published on May 6, 1922, presented him as a medal-decorated war veteran, who was “tall, dark, of distinguished appearance” and “a general favourite by his ability and his bonhomie.”

A strikingly different self-portrait emerges. Here, Hemingway depicts himself as quarrelsome, provocative and quick to escalate conflict rather than defuse it. Instead of reassuring readers, he leaves confusion in his wake.

Toronto’s lasting legacy

“The Freiburg Fedora” also reshapes understanding of Toronto’s place in literary development.

During his four years with the Toronto Star, Hemingway produced nearly 200 pieces, 170 under his own name plus around 30 with verified pseudonym bylines. These satirical pieces and literary reportage, including many short, character-driven autobiographical sketches, reveal a writer already experimenting with narrative voice, characterization and dramatic conflict.

On the pages of the Toronto Star Weekly, Hemingway also reflected on William Butler Yeats’s Nobel Prize in Literature. In a Nov. 24, 1923, column, he lamented that his literary hero, Joseph Conrad, had not received the honour and observed that “no American author has won the Nobel Prize.”

Three decades later, in 1954, Hemingway himself received it. The Nobel Committee praised him “for his mastery of the art of narrative” and for “the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

The foundation for that mastery was laid not only in Paris but also in Toronto.

“The Freiburg Fedora” deserves to be read not simply as an amusing newspaper sketch but as one of the earliest literary examples of Hemingway beginning to invent the writer he would become.

The post How a forgotten Toronto story shows Hemingway beginning to invent himself as a fiction writer appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Canada’s run at the 2026 FIFA World Cup made history, making a first-ever trip to the round of 16, the country’s best-ever men’s World Cup result.

The Canadian men’s team, playing in just its third World Cup after 1986 and 2022, won its first-ever men’s World Cup match on June 18, defeating Qatar 6-0 during the group stage. Canada then beat South Africa 1-0 in the Round of 32 before its run ended July 4 with a 3-0 loss to Morocco.

However, Canada’s run may have been more about what happened off the field than on it. Families watched games together, fans gathered in public spaces, jerseys appeared in schoolyards and clips circulated across social media. These are the moments where casual interest can turn into fandom and a sporting event can become a broader moment of national connection.

Hockey has long been central to Canadian sport identity. However, the participation numbers tell a more complicated story, one shaped by cost, accessibility and Canada’s cultural mosaic.

Surge in World Cup viewership

A pre-tournament poll found that only 28 per cent of Canadians planned to follow the World Cup closely. However, the emotional capital generated by hosting translated into a significant surge in viewership.

Canada’s group-stage victory against Qatar became the most-watched group stage match, drawing an average audience of 5.3 million viewers. Canada’s round of 32 win against South Africa attracted 5.2 million viewers, followed by 5.4 million viewers for the round of 16 match against Morocco.

This growth appears to extend beyond the World Cup itself. Major League Soccer reported an average of 7.9 million live match viewers per week across streaming and linear platforms during the first three months of the 2026 season, a 62 per cent increase from 2025, which MLS said was their strongest three-year period of fan growth.

However, Canadian soccer consumption does not necessarily mirror that of traditional soccer nations. Soccer fandom in North America grew by approximately 11 per cent between 2020 and 2025, while 33 per cent of Canadian fans prefer short-form content such as highlights and social media content.

Soccer is Canada’s most-played sport

A 2026 national report by Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities identified soccer as the most played youth sport in Canada, with 50 per cent of youths reporting that they participated.

This is consistent with data from the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, which has also shown soccer consistently ranking first in youth sport participation.

According to the Jumpstart report, the popularity of soccer is attributed to cost, broader accessibility and its connection to community roots. At an average cost of $450 to participate in soccer, they found hockey to be almost five times more expensive.

Across youth leagues, community fields, immigrant communities, school programs and recreational sport, soccer has had a strong presence in Canada. With nearly one million registered participants across 1,200 clubs, soccer is the most played sport in both Canada and the world.

From participation to fandom

While Canada may be a soccer playing nation, participation does not automatically make it a soccer-fandom country.

Exposure through participation can support awareness and attraction to a sport, but lasting fandom requires a deeper movement toward attachment and allegiance. That shift happens when a sport or team becomes personally and socially meaningful.

Historically, Canadian soccer suffered from a participation paradox. While many played the sport, viewership was not matched, compared to a sport like hockey. Co-hosting the 2026 World Cup has highlighted how that paradox has changed.

For World Cup interest to become lasting fandom, Canadians need repeated opportunities to attach meaning to the sport through recognizable players, media visibility, community rituals, shared memories and identity-based connections.

Building on women’s soccer success

Canada’s current soccer moment builds on decades of success by the women’s national team. Canada won Olympic bronze in London 2012 and Rio 2016, then gold at Tokyo 2020, the country’s best-ever Olympic soccer result.

The women’s team also produced Canada’s best World Cup performance, finishing fourth at the 2003 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Athletes like Christine Sinclair, Karina LeBlanc and Diana Matheson became nationally recognizable names, helping build the visibility and credibility of the game in Canada. Sinclair’s legacy is especially significant: with 190 international goals, she remains the all-time leading goal scorer in international soccer, across both the men’s and women’s game.

That legacy is now reflected in the creation of the Northern Super League, founded by Diana Matheson, which signals a growing market for professional women’s soccer in Canada.

Men’s professional soccer has also helped build this momentum. Toronto FC’s 2017 MLS Cup victory made it the first Canadian club to win the league title, while the launch of the Canadian Premier League in 2019 created a domestic professional pathway for men’s players across the country.

A broadening Canadian sport identity

Soccer’s rise is perhaps a reflection of a shift toward a more diverse sport identity in Canada. Basketball offers a useful comparison. The Toronto Raptors’ 2019 championship and “We The North” campaign showed how a sports moment can become a national identity moment, while youth participation and Canadian representation in the NBA point to basketball’s continued growth.

Rugby and cricket also reflect this changing landscape, through women’s rugby success, grassroots rugby development and cricket’s growth in immigrant and community sport spaces.

Soccer’s rise does not erase hockey’s place in Canada; rather, it broadens the story of what Canadian sport identity can look like.

From a fandom perspective, Canada’s historic run matters because it gives people a reason to care. It creates emotional entry points: moments when casual viewers begin to say “we,” wear the jersey, follow the players and feel that the team’s success reflects something about them too.

This is especially powerful in national-team sport, where fans are seeing a version of them represented on a global stage. Canada’s World Cup run may therefore be strengthening the link between soccer and Canadian identity by giving people shared memories, recognizable players and repeated emotional moments around which fandom can form.

However, lasting fandom depends on what happens next. If media coverage, youth pathways, domestic league visibility and access to Canadian soccer continue, this World Cup run could help turn a long-standing soccer participation culture into a more lasting national soccer fandom.

The post Canada was already a soccer nation: Its historic World Cup run proved it appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

You’ve typed it, deleted it and typed it again. You need to let your colleague know there’s a problem with a project at work. Should you use a grinning face — 😄 — in that Slack message to soften the blow, or an angry face — 😠 — to show your distress?

If you’ve experienced this type of internal debate, you’re not alone. Instant messaging now dominates workplace communication, with 91 per cent of businesses using two or more chat platforms. But when we instant message, we can’t see our colleagues’ facial expressions. We try to compensate with emojis, using them as stand-ins for non-verbal cues.

But do emojis actually help, or can they backfire?

My recent study, conducted with colleagues at the University of Ottawa and published in Collabra: Psychology, reveals that emoji choice matters. The emoji you pick, and whether it matches the tone of your message, may impact both how competent your co-workers think you are, and how appropriate your message is for the workplace.

The research project

We asked 243 research participants to read short workplace instant messages from a hypothetical co-worker.

The messages varied on three dimensions: the emotional tone (positive, negative or neutral), the emoji attached (a grinning face 😀, an angry face 😠 or none) and whether the sender was described as a woman or a man.

Participants rated how competent they thought the message sender was. They also rated how appropriate the message felt for a professional setting.

No emoji is often the safest bet

Overall, messages with no emoji received the highest ratings for competence and appropriateness. A neutral “Can I have Tuesday off?” read as perfectly professional. So did a more positive: “Just attended another super-effective presentation.”

When the sender added a 😀 to either message, the ratings held steady. This is likely a reassuring finding if you’re someone who likes using emojis to sprinkle warmth into your messages.

On the other hand, when the sender added a 😠, competence and appropriateness ratings dropped.

This finding was remarkably consistent: across positive, neutral and negative sentence content, the no-emoji version was either the top-rated option or statistically tied for first place.

Match emoji and message tone

But the real story is that emojis need to match the tone of your message. A grinning face 😀 attached to “Someone broke the printer again” came across as less competent and less appropriate than either a negative emoji or no emoji at all.

Here, the mismatch may have created the impression that the message was passive-aggressive or insincere.

Notably, an angry face 😠 paired with a negative message fared better than one tacked onto a positive or neutral one. However, sending that same negative message with no emoji still outperformed the congruent but angry version.

For negative messages, emojis that fit the emotional tone of the text don’t really help. Those that clash actively hurt.

Women rated women more strictly

We also tested whether the sender and participant gender changed any of this. For competence, they didn’t — which is notable given evidence that women are judged more harshly for expressing negative emotion in face-to-face workplace settings.

One possibility is that text-based communication mutes the impact of gender enough to blunt that bias. When gender cues are reduced to a name or profile picture at the top of a chat window, rather than continuously signalled through appearance or voice, recipients may simply process them less.

For appropriateness, we found a small but significant effect: women rated negative emojis from women senders as less appropriate than men did. It’s a modest finding, but it aligns with research suggesting that women sometimes hold other women to stricter professional standards — an interesting thread worth pulling on in future work.

Small choices carry weight

The key takeaway for emojis at work is this: match, don’t mask. A positive emoji appended to a positive or neutral message is fine, but using one to sugarcoat bad news may detract from perceptions of competence.

Negative emojis are generally riskier than their positive counterparts, but if you’re going to use one, at least make sure the message underneath is genuinely negative. And when in doubt, the plainest option — no emoji — almost never hurts.

We’re still collectively figuring out the norms of digital professional communication. Of course, a controlled study with undergraduates reading hypothetical messages can only tell us so much about your workplace messaging thread. Workplaces will all have their own norms to navigate, and most of us run private experiments every day in our chat apps.

Studies like this one suggest that the small choices — a grinning face here, or an angry face there — may carry more weight than we think. The good news is that the underlying principle is pretty intuitive: say what you mean, and let the emoji agree with you.

The post How emoji use at work can determine how competent your colleagues think you are appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Dating platforms market themselves as technological solutions to loneliness right at your fingertips. And yet, for many who are overwhelmed with choice, Valentine’s Day feels lonelier than ever. (Unsplash)

In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, dating apps typically see a spike in new users and activity. More profiles are created, more messages sent, more swipes logged.

Dating platforms market themselves as modern technological solutions to loneliness, right at your fingertips. And yet, for many people, the day meant to celebrate romantic connection feels lonelier than ever.

This, rather than a personal failure or the reality of modern romance, is the outcome of how dating apps are designed and of the economic logic that governs them.

These digital tools aren’t simply interfaces that facilitate connection. The ease and expansiveness of online dating have commodified social bonds, eroded meaningful interactions and created a type of dating throw-away culture, encouraging a sense of disposability and distorting decision-making.

The business of modern dating

Online dating apps are big business.

Match Group, a technology company that dominates the online dating sector with an extensive portfolio of dating app products — including Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish and OurTime — reported fourth-quarter revenue of US$878 million this month.

Its analysis showed fewer people are paying for its apps, with paying users down five per cent year over year.

The decline appears to reflect a trend prompting the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools to drive user growth and appeal to younger customers. Part of this means converting free users into paying ones.

Dating apps don’t sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren’t primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They’re designed to keep users swiping.

Why swiping never ends

Prolonged uncertainty is profitable. By creating the sense that a better match is always one swipe away users are kept engaged. Design strategies that gamify choice, offer intermittent variable rewards (like a slot machine) and frequent push notifications produce a fear-of-missing-out mentality and can lead to compulsive and addictive patterns of use.

Maximizing user interaction and time spent on the app, and accumulating consumer data turn users into lucrative opportunities for paid features, monthly subscriptions and advertising dollars.

Dating apps market the idea that dating platforms can achieve our social goals more efficiently and more intelligently, meeting a real-world need with a technological solution.

In this system, people are expected to constantly improve and optimize themselves. Paying for added features becomes an investment in oneself, while value is determined by desirability, performance and outcomes.

By creating an interesting profile, crafting witty messages and curating photos and videos of ourselves, we commodify our time and self-worth, reinforcing the idea that we alone are responsible for our success on the apps, even if the playing field is strategically manipulated to keep us on them longer.

So are we being set up to fail? The distinction between failure and success overlooks a key issue: dating apps function as political entities that control access to and distribution of resources.

Changing social reality

Online dating apps sell us hope by exploiting our needs, desires and insecurities. When apps keep hinting that something better is just one more swipe away, they start to reshape our expectations, and even inflate them.

Typically, people employ a decision-making strategy called “satisficer,” which refers to both “satisfy” and “suffice.” This means we generally choose something that’s good enough, rather than searching endlessly for perfection, because of limits on time, information and cognitive energy. In relationship decisions, compatibility used to be enough.

With apps, there’s an endless supply of options — endless potential partners, endless possibilities. The issue is that the options feel infinite and, as a result, we’re being trained not to be satisfied anymore. Rather, we’re encouraged to keep swiping.

The platforms serve as central planners of resource access, production and distribution, offering the information and databases that guide decisions in a global market of potential partners. As a result, human actions are treated as market-based transactions.

Users adopt a consumption mindset in which choosing partners is no different from shopping, constantly comparing others and discarding some in search of the highest-value partner.

Rather than being defined by connection or mutual care, interactions become a question of optimizing our choices. The illusion of oversupply creates the sense that people are replaceable and forces them to compete on superficial standards of beauty or status. Success and desirability on these platforms tend to reinforce existing hierarchies such as class, race and religion.

These tools can also promote a rejection mindset, with users more likely to reject potential partners as the number of options increases, becoming more closed off to romantic opportunities.

Loneliness is a feature, not a flaw

Reducing romantic connection to a commodity weakens social bonds and prioritizes individual success over community, leading to increased isolation and loneliness.

Dating apps are active platforms that prioritize personal preferences and individual strategies rather than addressing structural inequalities or the underlying causes of loneliness.

By fostering a competitive digital environment, these apps encourage disposability and change how people assess and select one another, often resulting in burnout and cynicism.

Users are prompted to view themselves as products to be optimized and others as options to evaluate. Dependence on dating apps to address loneliness ultimately weakens our social bonds and alters how we engage with one another.

The post What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Students participating in an international study experience practise weaving at the Fortezza del Girifalco, in Cortona, in the Tuscany region of Italy. (Tanya White), Author provided (no reuse)

Seated on the stone floor of a medieval fortress in Italy’s Tuscan hills, students rip thin, one-inch strips of fabric. They then knot the strips together to create extra chunky yarns. With these chunky yarns, they use oversized, thick crochet hooks, knitting needles and six foot-by-six foot tapestry looms.

This is in the Fortezza del Girifalco, in Cortona, in the Tuscany region of Italy, affectionately known to our group as “the castle.”

As a fashion and textile designer and professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), I am here with students who are participating in the The Creative School’s Global Learning program.

I create with different yarns and software, developing art-to-wear, objects, sculptures and installations. Creating with textiles is how I express and process my ideas. Yet the purpose of this creative textile work with the students in this program goes far beyond exposing them to textiles. It’s about exploring processes through which we can unearth radical new forms, concepts and esthetics.

Students are from diverse programs at the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University (fashion, interior design, graphic communication management, journalism, professional communication, media production, performance and sports media). Over three weeks, we’ll create a substantial textile exhibition for peers, visitors and the Cortona residents.

Site of creative life

The Fortezza del Girifalco is a site of creative life. It has been repurposed and renovated for new visitors, artists and audiences. Most notably, it is the centre of the international photography festival Cortona on The Move.

Yearly, the Fortezza is reimagined, with new interior work, additional and updated partitions, floors and surfaces to facilitate the design of this world-class exhibition. It has a bistro, with coffee, drinks and food.

Planning such an educational-immersive experience involved a great deal of collaboration: discussions with the Creative School’s dean’s office, especially Sadia Kamran, associate director, communications and international development, and Kathleen Pirrie Adams, associate professor from the School of Media, as well as our Cortona operations lead, Tommaso Rossi. After this, the Fortezza Atelier course was planned and piloted in June 2025.

The aims were simple: show up, contribute, be creative and collaborate with your peers.

In three weeks, there was near-perfect attendance. Students gained skills and knowledge, culminating in the creation of a textile exhibition.

Creativity and craft

In the 2021 article, “Build to think, build to learn: What can fabrication and creativity bring to rethink (higher) education?”, authors Jean-Henry Morin and Laurent Moccozet combine their respective expertise in information systems and the representation of and visualization of knowledge to examine the inherent benefits of hands-on education. They consider how this enriches and deepens theoretical understanding.

It is this common tacit knowledge that can’t be taught in the metaverse because it requires a shared embodied experience.

The course introduced students to making textiles, weaving, crochet, knitting and draping with a common raw material to start with, which was a roll of unbleached cotton calico or muslin. It was a purposely humble material that relied on the students’ creativity and resourcefulness.

The frayed yarns and rudimentary studio environment simplified the output, but this limitation became a benefit; they began to pick their exhibition spaces and discuss concepts, narratives and fabrication.

The Fortezza Atelier gave students the chance to unplug, disconnect and use their hands to create a textile project inspired by the Tuscan setting and their personal impressions of international travel and learning.

The classroom: the Fortezza del Girifalco

The journey to the Fortezza was a large part of the experience, set on top of the Tuscan hills.

Its steep incline provided a panoramic view of the surrounding Basilica of Santa Margherita, towns and valley.

It was accessed by a challenging but hikeable path or a small shuttle van that took the students up to the site in groups of eight. Some students would hike and some would ride.

For me, this daily commute was a near-spiritual set-up for the day, providing separation, concentration and a peaceful attitude toward work in the Fortezza — a pathway for other but related embodied creative practices.

Work began and ended with the journey up the mountain, which took presence and commitment every session.

Our Italian team member, Rossi, who manages the Fortezza, brought his two- year-old dachshund named Rustyn.

Rustyn became an honoured part of the Fortezza Atelier course, playing with the students, providing a mascot/emotional support animal role and even serving as a special guest at their final exhibition.

Communal practice

Not even a full day into the process, and without being asked, students were assisting each other, sharing knowledge and skills, forming teams organically and celebrating each other’s accomplishments. I helped and contributed to the communal learning environment.

After setting the expectations and aims on the first day, we, as a class of 32 plus one dog, worked productively, set our schedule and fulfilled our commitment to the course and each other.

Through interviews, informal conversation and a final reflective assignment, students shared their insights on the course: that with hard work, investment, care and collaboration, you can envision and create something with lasting impact.

For most, these projects seemed unattainable, even unimaginable, before time in Cortona.

The educational and social benefits of this opportunity for faculty, students and higher learning institutions also point to significant potential for other iterations of site-specific studio practice experiential learning programs tailored to specific locations and contexts.

The post How hands-on textile work inspires creativity and growth appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Holidays bring celebration, rest and, for many families, long stretches of indoor time. For some, this means table top games quickly reappear on kitchen tables. Games provide opportunities for learning mathematics actively.

These moments of playful learning raise a broader question: how can we support student’s mathematical learning at home without turning the holidays into formal lessons?

One answer comes from a simple but surprisingly powerful classroom learning tool: Tarsia jigsaw puzzles. These are puzzles created with free Tarsia software, from Hermitech Laboratory. The software enables people to create, print out and save customized jigsaws, domino activities and different rectangular card-sorting activities.

For the mathematics classroom, the whole sheet of a Tarsia puzzle printed on paper is typically laminated (for repeated use) before being cut into pieces.

Social and active learning that values mistakes

Canadian mathematician Anthony Bonato advises: “No matter what method is used to teach math, make it fun.” Most students would agree; joy is often missing from their experience.

As a mathematics education researcher, I add that regardless of the method used to teach mathematics, the learning should be active and social, and value mistakes as opportunities for learning. These are conditions under which learners feel safe to try, fail and try again.

Tarsia puzzles, which have been around for more than a decade and have found use in K-12 classrooms, accomplish all of this with almost no explanation for students. However, their use in university calculus classrooms appears to be rare.

My research has focused on why using Tarsia puzzles work to teach math, and their impact in the undergraduate classroom.

Matching geometric tiles

The Tarsia software allows teachers to embed mathematical relationships — fractions, functions, graphs, algebraic expressions — into geometric tiles such as triangles, rectangles or rhombus.

Learners must match the tiles so that the edges align, eventually forming a complete single shape.

The Tarsia software presents users with a variety of puzzle types to choose from.

Teachers in elementary and secondary schools use Tarsia puzzles to strengthen number sense and deepen understanding of functions, graphs and algebraic relationships. University instructors can use them to enliven topics such as limits, derivatives and integration — areas where students often feel intimidated.

Mathematical ‘prompts’

Each tile carries a mathematical “prompt” — for example, an appropriate Tarsia puzzle for elementary school learners might involve pieces marked with fractions, decimals and percentages, to help students understand equivalents like ¼ = 25 per cent.

For more advanced learning, puzzle pieces might show two equivalent fractions, a logarithmic expression and its simplified form or a function paired with its graph.

In both cases, learners assemble the puzzle by identifying which pieces belong together. When all tiles are matched correctly, a single full shape emerges.

Because Tarsia puzzles emphasize recognition and relationships rather than lengthy calculations, learners think about how ideas connect. They compare expressions, notice graphical features and reason out equivalence. In many ways, the activity mimics authentic mathematical thinking.

Tarsia puzzles require little supervision, and most of students’ learning happens in the conversations around the table — not in written solutions.

Grades 11 and 12 math students might use a Tarsia puzzle on logarithms — part of learning about exponents or “the power to which a base must be raised to yield a given number.”

Why active learning matters

Decades of research show that students learn mathematics best when they talk through problems, test ideas and make mistakes in low-pressure settings. Studies confirm that active learning improves understanding, reduces failure rates and builds confidence across STEM subjects.

Yet many mathematics classrooms still operate as one-way lectures, where students quietly copy procedures and hope to follow along.

Tarsia puzzles reverse this pattern. They create structured, collaborative problem-solving that feels more like play than assessment. A student who dreads formal proofs may still be eager to match a derivative with its graph. Another who dislikes fractions may feel less pressure when an incorrect guess simply means trying another tile.

A challenging puzzle might combine square and triangular pieces into a 10-sided figure, helping to teach limits, sequences, series and partial derivatives in multivariable calculus.

Recent study

At Toronto Metropolitan University’s active learning classroom, colleagues and I explored how Tarsia puzzles help first-year students learn calculus, relying on structured reflection and student feedback to examine our own teaching practices.

Several themes consistently emerged from the analysis of our reflective notes about students using Tarsia puzzles:

1. Less fear: Students who were usually anxious about being wrong participated more freely. Mistakes became part of the puzzle-solving process rather than personal shortcomings.
2. More talk: Learners debated ideas, explained reasoning and corrected each other — behaviours rarely observed in traditional tutorials.
3. Better engagement: Students worked longer and with greater focus compared with worksheet-based tasks. Some who typically packed up early stayed to complete the puzzle.

Why parents and tutors should care

Mathematics is often portrayed as solitary work, yet mathematicians collaborate constantly — arguing, checking, revising and proposing alternatives. Students benefit from similar interactions.

At home or in small tutoring groups, a Tarsia puzzle offers a low-stakes entry into mathematical reasoning. Learners who are reluctant to speak up in class may confidently identify mismatched edges or question whether two expressions are equivalent. Misconceptions are revealed naturally through the puzzle, allowing gentle correction without embarrassment.

To try Tarsia puzzles, parents and tutors of young students could try examples suitable for upper elementary and junior high school students.

A call to developers

The Tarsia software is useful but dated. Currently, it operates on a Windows operating system.

A modern web-based version — with collaboration tools, curriculum-aligned templates, and built-in accessibility — would significantly expand its adoption. Educational technology developers looking for impactful, low-cost tools could find enormous potential here.

Mathematics becomes easier when it invites curiosity. Tarsia puzzles, modest in design but powerful in effect, encourage learners to talk, think and take intellectual risks. They help parents, tutors and instructors see students’ reasoning in real time, not merely their final answers.

Most importantly, they restore an often-forgotten truth: mathematics can be playful — and learning happens in conversation.

The post Jigsaw puzzles help make mathematics learning more active and fun appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Toronto Blue Jay Addison Barger hits a grand slam against the Los Angeles Dodgers during sixth inning World Series playoff MLB baseball action in Toronto on Oct. 24, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Whether it’s the World Series, the FIFA World Cup or the Olympic Games, the hope for hosting mega sporting events is that the economy will emerge as the true winner.

A quick search shows how expensive World Series tickets are, or how much it costs for accommodations, food and transportation. Similar spending patterns can be predicted for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which Canada is hosting with Mexico and the United States.

Visitor spending provides direct economic benefits, generating revenue for businesses and providing jobs. There are also indirect benefits through suppliers and staffing, and induced benefits as staff spend their wages locally.

Mega-events can also generate significant reputations benefits for host cities and countries, including heightened global media exposure, enhanced national branding and greater confidence among international investors who see the city as capable of managing large-scale events.

These intangible outcomes can translate into sustained tourism growth, increased economic vitality and a lasting “feel-good” effect that boosts civic pride among residents and visitors.

While hosting large sporting events appears to be great for communities, research suggests the actual financial outcomes are often more modest than anticipated. Nonetheless, many politicians remain eager to host them.

The math doesn’t always add up

Tourism and event scholars suggest being cautious about the so-called multiplier effect. This is the idea that mega-events ripple throughout the economy, providing benefits for others.

Meta-analyses of such events show highly variable economic outcomes and frequent overestimation of long-term benefits. A lot of spending is lost due to export leakage, where additional gain goes to non-local businesses, event organizers and ticketing agencies instead of local businesses.

Often, mega sporting events cause tourism displacement, as regular tourists avoid the destination due to crowds and high prices, sometimes even after the event finishes.

Politicians, tourism offices and event organizers are quick to claim large economic benefits when bidding for and hosting events.

Yet some academics warn that “most economic impact studies are commissioned to legitimize a political position rather than to search for economic truth.” In other words, government-commissioned studies are often biased toward positive results.

A World Series boost — but for how long?

The Toronto Blue Jays post-season run and the World Series produced a concentrated burst of spending: sold-out home games, fuller hotels at higher prices, restaurants and bars crowded for watch parties and heavy merchandise sales.

Local media and business surveys commonly report measurable upticks in hospitality and retail during playoff runs, and small business owners cite increased footfall and merchandise revenue.

Sports economists, however, urge caution in extrapolating short-term spikes into lasting gains. They describe playoff-driven forecasts as “overstated,” pointing to limited duration, substantial leakage and limited job creation beyond temporary hospitality shifts. While people may spend more on a game night, they often spend less elsewhere, meaning net spending is usually smaller than headline numbers suggest.

A World Series may be excellent for civic morale and a short retail bump, but it rarely transforms a city’s economic trajectory on its own.

Canada’s FIFA World Cup moment

The FIFA World Cup is a multi-week, globally televised event with millions of spectators and huge international attention. For Canada’s co-host role in 2026, official and municipal assessments project substantial economic benefits.

FIFA has announced that over 1 million tickets have been sold for next year's World Cup. The tournament will be hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) 2025-10-16T23:01:21.556Z

A City of Toronto impact assessment projects roughly $940 million in positive economic output for the Greater Toronto Area, including hundreds of millions in GDP and several thousand jobs from June 2023 to August 2026.

British Columbia also estimates significant provincial output and thousands of roles tied to hosting in Vancouver. These are significant short-term impacts that reflect visitor spending and operational expenditures.

But will hosting the World Cup add much to cities that are already well-known? Some are doubtful, but the visibility can help achieve tourism marketing objectives and support bids for future international events often central to destination strategies.

Counting the real costs

Mega-events often come with significant financial and environmental costs. While they can create jobs, these are typically short-term, low-wage positions concentrated in hospitality and service sectors.

Public funds directed at event staging or stadium upgrades could finance affordable housing, transit or health services with potentially higher social returns for local residents. There have also been repeated cases where promised mega-event legacies failed to materialize.

Environmentally, mega-events produce significant carbon footprints from global fan travel, temporary construction, energy use and waste, with many events having more negative than positive environmental outcomes. This is particularly relevant for transnational tournaments that attract long-distance travellers and temporary stadium retrofits.

Cities seeking to maximize gains should prioritize local community benefits and measure net economic impact, not gross receipts, by accounting for displacement and export leakage.

For the World Series, that meant leveraging short-run enthusiasm into repeat visitation and accrued local spending habits. For FIFA 2026, the focus should be on converting global attention into long-term tourism and business flows while ensuring community benefits and limiting environmental costs.

Only then will the reputational windfall translate into durable economic value.

Measuring the real impact of mega-events

Sports events can deliver meaningful short-term revenue, reputational exposure and long-term benefits, but those outcomes are neither automatic nor evenly distributed.

Thoughtful policy design, transparent evaluation and binding community and environmental safeguards determine whether a World Series run or a World Cup week becomes a fleeting headline or a lasting city asset.

The main benefactor of the World Cup will be FIFA, not host cities. As The Economist noted in its review of economist Andrew Zimbalist’s Circus Maximus, there is “little doubt that under current conditions, prudent city governments should avoid the contests at all costs.”

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Electronic Arts (EA) is one of the world’s largest gaming companies. It has agreed to be acquired for US$55 billion in the second largest buyout in the industry’s history.

Under the terms, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund (a state-owned investment fund), along with private equity firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, will pay EA shareholders US$210 per share.

EA is known for making popular gaming titles such as such as Madden NFL, The Sims and Mass Effect. The deal, US$20 billion of which is debt-financed, will take the company private.

The acquisition reinforces consolidation trends across the creative sector, mirroring similar deals in music, film and television. Creative and cultural industries have a “tendency for bigness,” and this is certainly a big deal.

It marks a continuation of large game companies being consumed by even larger players, such as Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision/Blizzard in 2023.

Bad news for workers

There is growing consensus that this acquisition is likely to be bad news for game workers, who have already seen tens of thousands of layoffs in recent years.

This leveraged buyout will result in restructuring at EA-owned studios. It adds massive debt that will need servicing. That will likely mean cancelled titles, closed studios and lost jobs.

In their book Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street, researchers Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt point to the “moral hazard” created when equity partners saddle portfolio companies with debt but carry little direct financial risk themselves.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) is looking to increase its holdings in lucrative sectors of the game industry as part of its diversification strategy. However, private equity firms subscribe to a “buy to sell” model, focusing on making significant returns in the short term.

Appelbaum notes that restructuring opportunities are more limited when larger, successful companies — like EA — are acquired. In such cases, she says, “financial engineering is more common,” often resulting in “layoffs or downsizing to increase cash flow and service debt.”

Financial engineering combines techniques from applied mathematics, computer science and economic theory to create new and complex financial tools. The failed risk management of these tools has been implicated in financial scandals and market crashes.

Financialization and the fissured workplace

The financialization of the game industry is a problem. Financialization refers to a set of changes in corporate ownership and governance — including the deregulation of financial markets — that have increased the influence of financial companies and investors.

It has produced economies where a considerable share of profits comes from financial transactions rather than the production and provision of goods and services.

It creates what American management professor David Weil calls a “fissured workplace” where ownership models are multi-layered and complex.

It gives financial players an influential seat at the corporate decision-making table and directs managerial attention toward investment returns while transferring the risks of failure to the portfolio company.

As a result, game titles, jobs and studios can be easily shed when financial companies restructure to increase dividends, leaving workers with little access to these financial players as accountable employers.

Chasing incentives and cutting costs

The Saudi PIF has stated a goal of creating 1.8 million “direct and indirect jobs” to stimulate the Saudi economy. But capital is mobile, and game companies will likely follow jurisdictions that have lower wages, fewer labour protections and significant tax incentives.

Some Canadian governments are working to keep studios and creative jobs closer to home. British Columbia recently increased its interactive media tax credit to 25 per cent.

The move was welcomed by the chief operations officer of EA Vancouver, who said “B.C.’s continued commitment to the interactive digital media sector…through enhancements to the … tax credit … reflects the province’s recognition of the industry’s value and enables companies like ours to continue contributing to B.C.’s creative and innovative economy.”

This may buffer Vancouver’s flagship EA Sports studio, but those making less lucrative games or in regions without financial subsidies will be more at risk of closure, relocation or sale. Alberta-based Bioware — developer of games including Dragon Age and Mass Effect — could be at risk.

Other ways of aggressively cutting costs might come in the form of increased AI use. EA was called out in 2023 for saying AI regulation could negatively impact its business. Yet creative stagnation and cutting corners through AI will negatively impact the number of jobs, the quality of jobs and the quality of games. That could be a larger threat to EA’s business and reinforce a negative direction for the industry.

Game players have low tolerance for quality shifts and predatory monetization strategies. Research shows that gamers see acquisitions negatively: development takes longer, innovation is curtailed and creativity is stymied.

Consolidation among industry giants may cause players to lose faith in EA’s product — and games in general, given the many other entertainment options that are available.

Creative control and worker power at risk

Some have raised concerns that the acquisition could affect EA’s creative direction and editorial decisions, potentially leading to increased content restrictions.

While it’s still unclear how the deal will influence EA’s output, experiences in other industries might be a sign of things to come. For instance, comedians reportedly censored themselves to perform in Saudi Arabia.

The acquisition may also have a chilling effect on the workers’ unionization movement. Currently, no EA studios in Canada are unionized. Outsourced quality assurance workers at the EA-owned BioWare Studio in Edmonton successfully certified a union in 2022, but were subsequently laid off. Fears of outsourcing, layoffs and restructuring could discourage future organizing efforts.

On the other hand, the knowledge that large financial players are making massive profits could galvanize workers, especially considering that before the buyout, EA CEO Andrew Wilson was paid about 264 times the salary of the median EA employee.

The deal certainly does nothing to bring stability to an already volatile industry. Regardless of any cash injection, EA remains very exposed.

The post What the US$55 billion Electronic Arts takeover means for video game workers and the industry appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

In the debut episode of the new sitcom The Paper, freshly appointed editor-in-chief Ned Sampson tries to rouse the spirits of his colleagues at The Truth Teller, a fictional local newspaper in Toledo, Ohio.

It’s a community institution with a storied past but a precarious future — in recent years, the paper has relied almost exclusively on news wire articles and clickbait entertainment to meet its bottom line.

Ned makes a declaration while standing on a desk, as a documentary film crew records it all:

If you have ever wanted to be the first person to know what’s going on in the place where you live, or if you want to make sure the people who are running your city are telling the truth … You are more than welcome, all of you, to volunteer your time at this newspaper.”

It’s meant to be an uplifting moment, with the earnest but inexperienced leader insisting that good journalism can make the paper profitable again. But, even as some colleagues respond with cautious optimism (if not skeptical curiosity), the episode ends by cutting back to an earlier gag — a nearby building has been on fire the entire time, unnoticed and unreported.

It’s an apt, if unsettling, metaphor for the state of local news in North America, where so many outlets have vanished that residents often don’t know what’s happening in their own backyard.

Alarming rate of collapse

Local newspapers are collapsing at an alarming pace. In Canada, more than 500 outlets have closed since 2008, affecting more than 370 communities, according to the Local News Research Project.

In the United States, the number exceeds 2,800 closures since 2005, based on research by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

The result is what scholars call “news deserts” — places where no professional local news source remains to cover councils, courts or communities.

The causes of this decline are multifaceted. Reporters and editors need to be paid, newsrooms need resources and investigative journalism is costly and time-consuming. Print advertising, once the financial lifeblood of local papers, has been in steep decline for years as businesses moved their spending to platforms like Google and Facebook.

That collapse in revenue left papers more dependent on digital ads and subscriptions, neither of which has filled the gap. According to the Florida-based Poynter Institute for Media Studies, local news websites saw about a 20 per cent drop in page views and unique visitors in 2022, undercutting the ad impressions needed to sustain online revenue.

Patchwork assistance

Canadian news organizations have sought compensation for the ways tech platforms profit from news content. Google reached a deal with the Canadian government to provide $100 million annually for five years to domestic publishers in exchange for an exemption from the Online News Act, which allows continued access to Canadian news links.

As Gretel Kahn with the Reuters Institute reports, some Canadian outlets — including The Conversation Canada — have begun to benefit from these payments. The money is disbursed by the Canadian Journalism Collective, a federally incorporated nonprofit.

However, the effects are uneven: larger corporate chains such as Postmedia and Torstar are getting most of the support, while smaller independent and local publishers receive far less. This patchwork assistance offers temporary relief but does little to fix the deeper imbalance in how digital advertising profits are distributed.

Expectation of free news

Audiences have now grown accustomed to receiving news instantly and for free, often through social media feeds or aggregators rather than directly from a newspaper. Younger readers in particular encounter news on platforms like TikTok, Instagram or YouTube, where entertainment and opinion often overwhelm verified reporting.

In this environment of declining ad dollars and fragmented attention, local outlets are trying harder than ever to convince audiences their work is worth supporting. This is the tension The Paper plays for laughs.

Throughout the series, the characters contend with all manner of challenges as they strive to keep their newspaper relevant and viable. They get scooped on major stories by a teenage blogger. They struggle to decide whether to chase sensationalism that attracts eyeballs or invest in reporting that actually matters. They try to revive accountability coverage by investigating local businesses but must tread carefully not to alienate the few remaining advertisers willing to support them.

Reporters as underdogs?

On screen, journalists have often been depicted as crusaders for truth — from All the President’s Men to Spotlight to The Newsroom. Even shows and films that explore the darker side of the industry, like The Wire, Bombshell or Tokyo Vice, frame journalism as a profession of serious consequence and high-stakes drama.

The Paper suggests something different: reporters not as larger-than-life figures, but as struggling underdogs doing their best and often getting it wrong. On one hand, this risks trivializing the work of local journalists at a time when the survival of their industry is already in doubt.

For real reporters, it’s no laughing matter. A 2022 Canadian study found many are experiencing high rates of burnout, anxiety and online harassment. In 2021, in the U.S., newsroom employment had fallen by more than a quarter since 2008, with those left behind facing heavier workloads as colleagues were laid off.

The loss of reporters has created gaps in coverage of councils, courts and communities that once formed the backbone of civic accountability.

Heartfelt missive

On the other hand, when it’s at its best, The Paper is a heartfelt missive about why local journalism has always mattered: that despite its sometimes dysfunctional newsroom, the reporters are people who truly understand and care about the community they cover because they live there too.

This kind of connection has long been a foundation for building public trust and encouraging dialogue. But it has been severely eroded as outlets close and news deserts spread.

Research shows that as local news declines, so does voter turnout, civic engagement and political accountability.

The Paper doesn’t pretend to solve the seemingly insurmountable problems facing local news, but it does capture the messy reality of trying to do the job. In a moment when journalists are often idealized or demonized, showing them as flawed but dedicated may not be comforting — but it may be closer to the truth.

The post What The Paper reveals about local news and journalism today appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Imagine an actor who never ages, never walks off set or demands a higher salary.

That’s the promise behind Tilly Norwood, a fully AI-generated “actress” currently being courted by Hollywood’s top talent agencies. Her synthetic presence has ignited a media firestorm, denounced as an existential threat to human performers by some and hailed as a breakthrough in digital creativity by others.

But beneath the headlines lies a deeper tension. The binaries used to debate Norwood — human versus machine, threat versus opportunity, good versus bad — flatten complex questions of art, justice and creative power into soundbites.

The question isn’t whether the future will be synthetic; it already is. Our challenge now is to ensure that it is also meaningfully human.

All agree Tilly isn’t human

Ironically, at the centre of this polarizing debate is a rare moment of agreement: all sides acknowledge that Tilly is not human.

Her creator, Eline Van der Velden, the CEO of AI production company Particle6, insists that Norwood was never meant to replace a real actor. Critics agree, albeit in protest. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors in the U.S., responded with:

“It’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion, and from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.”

Their position is rooted in recent history: In 2023, actors went on strike over AI. The resulting agreement secured protections around consent and compensation.

So if both sides insist Tilly isn’t human, the controversy, then, isn’t just about what Tilly is, it’s about what she represents.

Complexity as a starting point

Norwood represents more than novelty. She’s emblematic of a larger reckoning with how rapidly artificial intelligence is reshaping our lives and the creative sector. The velocity of change is dizzying, and now the question is how do we shape the hybrid world we’ve already entered?

It can feel disorienting trying to parse ethics, rights and responsibilities while being bombarded by newness. Especially when that “newness” comes in a form that unnerves us: a near-human likeness that triggers long-standing cultural discomfort.

Indeed, Norwood may be a textbook case of the “uncanny valley,” a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the unease people feel when something looks almost human, but not quite.

But if all sides agree that Tilly isn’t human, what happens when audiences still feel something real while watching her on screen? If emotional resonance and storytelling are considered uniquely human traits, maybe the threat posed by synthetic actors has been overstated. On the other hand, who hasn’t teared up in a Pixar film? A character doesn’t have to feel emotion to evoke it.

Still, the public conversation remains polarized. As my colleague Owais Lightwala, assistant professor in the School of Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University, puts it: “The conversation around AI right now is so binary that it limits our capacity for real thinking. What we need is to be obsessed with complexity.”

 

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A post shared by Tilly Norwood (@tillynorwood)

Synthetic actors aren’t inherently villains or saviours, Lightwala tells me, they’re a tool, a new medium. The challenge lies in how we build the infrastructures around them, such as rights, ownership and distribution.

He points out that while some celebrities see synthetic actors as job threats, most actors already struggle for consistent work. “We ask the one per cent how they feel about losing power, but what about the 99 per cent who never had access to that power in the first place?”

Too often missing from this debate is what these tools might make possible for the creators we rarely hear from. The current media landscape is already deeply inequitable. As Lightwala notes, most people never get the chance to realize their creative potential — not for lack of talent, but due to barriers like access, capital, mentorship and time.

Now, some of those barriers might finally lower. With AI tools, more people may get the opportunity to create.

Of course, that doesn’t mean AI will automatically democratize creativity. While tools are more available, attention and influence remain scarce.

Sarah Watling, co-founder and CEO of JaLi Research, a Toronto-based AI facial animation company, offers a more cautionary perspective. She argues that as AI becomes more common, we risk treating it like a utility, essential yet invisible.

In her view, the inevitable AI economy won’t be a creator economy, it will be a utility commodity. And “when things become utilities,” she warns, “they usually become monopolized.”

Where do we go from here?

We need to pivot away from reactionary fear narratives, like Lightwala suggests.

Instead of shutting down innovation, we need to continue to experiment. We need to use this moment, when public attention is focused on the rights of actors and the shape of culture, to rethink what was already broken in the industry and allow space for new creative modalities to emerge.

Platforms and studios must take the lead in setting transparent, fair policies for how synthetic content is developed, attributed and distributed. In parallel, we need to push creative institutions, unions and agencies to collaborate in the co-design of ethical and contractual guardrails now, before precedents get set in stone, putting consent, fair attribution and compensation at the centre.

And creators, for their part, must use these tools not just to replicate what came before, but to imagine what hasn’t been possible until now. That responsibility is as much creative as it is technical.

The future will be synthetic. Our task now is to build pathways, train talent, fuel imagination, and have nuanced, if difficult, conversations. Because while technology shapes what’s possible, creators and storytellers have the power to shape what matters.

The post What AI-generated Tilly Norwood reveals about digital culture, ethics and the responsibilities of creators appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Settling in a new country is often imagined as a sequential process, built on a supposed hierarchy of needs. You accomplish one priority, then another, and another and then you’re integrated into the country and economy.

Material and essential matters — housing, employment, language classes — come first. Cultural or spiritual matters — a sense of belonging, community connections, civic participation — come second.

The recently released research I conducted with Toronto Arts Council (TAC) on its Program for Newcomers and Refugees (PNR), however, suggests this logic needs to be challenged.

What does art have to do with settlement?

Founded in 1974, TAC is an independent funding organization that operates at arm’s length from the City of Toronto. Its mission is to enrich the quality of life in the city by supporting the arts. The decision to create a program specifically for newcomers was driven by research highlighting the barriers newcomer artists faced in finding work and navigating the Canadian arts landscape.

The PNR launched in 2017 and has allocated about $2.92 million between its inception and 2023. Forty organizations received support through the Newcomer and Refugee Arts Engagement stream, while 176 individual artists received Newcomer and Refugee Artist Mentorship grants.

Two years ago, along with TAC, I began researching to learn about who benefited from this support and how. We held focus groups with newcomer artists, arts managers and settlement

organizations, analyzed program data and produced film portraits of two artists.

Our goal was to understand what the arts contribute to integration and what challenges newcomer artists face. Our findings show that the divide between settlement and the arts should be reconsidered.

Instead of being treated as separate domains, they can complement each other in ways that strengthen integration.

The arts as holistic settlement support

The Newcomer and Refugee Arts Engagement stream provides grants to organizations — including settlement agencies, community arts organizations and artistic institutions — with experience serving newcomers through artistic activities. Beneficiaries of the engagement stream showed that arts projects are not cosmetic add-ons.

Community arts professionals work hand in hand with settlement workers to address practical barriers from the outset.

Child care is arranged so mothers can attend. Interpreters support multilingual workshops. Programs offer snacks and Toronto Transit Commission fare. Schedules are adapted to hospitality and shift-work hours. These small design choices make participation possible.

The outcomes are multidimensional. Arts programs support language learning in low-pressure, confidence-building settings. They open pathways to employment through the acquisition of digital skills, production experience and access to professional networks. They reduce isolation and support mental health by creating safe, culturally sensitive spaces.

Newcomers Dance Too!, a free dance class for refugee-background women and girls in Flemington Park run by dancers from Fusion Cardio Toronto — which was promoted in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi and other languages — is one example.

StoryCentre Canada, a non-profit that empowers short multimedia first-person narratives, set up digital storytelling workshops that taught photography and video editing while letting participants share their stories in the language of their choice, building both technical and communication skills. Hinprov, a collective of South Asian improvisers, created spaces where expression was possible even for those still learning English.

Arts projects also spark civic conversations. At Matthew House, which offers transitional housing settlement assistance, a mural led by a refugee artist-in-residence prompted neighbours to ask questions about refugees, opening dialogue that challenged stereotypes. Another PNR project collaborated with LGBTQ+ newcomers, using photography and film to counter stigma and create networks of care.

These initiatives show how the arts allow creative newcomers to assert their voices and identities on their own terms, positioning them not simply as guests but as active shapers of the cultural fabric of their new country.

Newcomer artists face systemic barriers

Newcomer artists design and deliver effective arts-based projects. Their ability to contribute, however, is limited by systemic obstacles.

General settlement services rarely provide tailored guidance for creative careers. Newcomer artists are directed toward generic job markets or told to pursue “Canadian credentials,” with little information about arts funding, networks or sector norms.

Discrimination compounds these hurdles: accents and linguistic differences become barriers to casting and collaboration; racial bias and expectations about “ethnic” content narrow opportunities; western-centrism and unfamiliarity with certain artistic traditions from outside the West devalue skills gained abroad. For instance, an Indian musician criticized the tendency to classify Indian classical music as “world music” rather than recognizing it as a classical form, limiting its appropriate recognition and funding.

Administrative rules add further exclusions. Temporary residents may be ineligible for public arts funding. Artists living in the Toronto area but outside the city proper can be excluded by residency requirements, even when they exhibit and perform in Toronto. These policies limit access to precisely the resources that help artists integrate into local scenes.

As part of our project, we worked with filmmaker Ogo Eze to produce two short portraits of newcomer artists: Iranian artist Aitak Sorahitalab and Palestinian-Syrian musician Tarek Ghriri.

Both stories illustrate how, despite formidable challenges, newcomers can become community leaders, using their art to support other newcomers while enriching Toronto’s cultural scene. Their stories show resilience but also underline how much potential is lost when systemic barriers remain in place.

Mending the arts and settlement divide

We have too often treated settlement and the arts as separate and incompatible worlds. Bridging them requires a shift on both sides.

On the settlement side, we must move away from sequential-needs thinking that relegates the arts to the bottom of the priority list or treats cultural activities as communications window dressing. This underestimates the concrete, multifaceted support community arts professionals can provide and sidelines newcomer artists.

On the arts side, TAC’s program is a promising template. By offering targeted support to newcomers, the PNR acknowledges the particular challenges they face when starting out, while avoiding the trap of permanently labelling them as “migrant artists.”

Given that only two per cent of Canadian arts funders offer targeted support for newcomers, lessons from this program can guide similar initiatives across Canada and beyond.

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