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LALL offers many learning opportunities throughout the year. This learning is open to the public and all in the Laurier community.
Upcoming offerings are listed below. Be the first to know about new and upcoming offerings by signing up for our email list.
LOCATION: All lectures are held at the Waterloo Memorial Recreation Complex Community Pavillion
DATE AND TIME: Lectures in Winter and Spring 2024 will be held on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays. View lecture details below.
PRICE: $14 + HST
Register for Spring 2024 courses on our registration website.
California has been a divided state within a fractured nation since its statehood in 1850. Pro-slavery southern migrants exercised a disproportionate influence on politics there from its early years, and this continued. This lecture discusses key flashpoints where pro-southern, anti-Black ideas came to the fore, from the politics of the 1850s to Civil War-era Confederate militias.
Dana Elizabeth Weiner is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Officer in the history department at WLU. She teaches there about the early U.S., race, slavery, gender, western history, and the Civil War era.
Silence is a many-splendored thing: It is auditory and has to do with physics. It is spiritual and has to do with listening. It is political and has to do with courageous voices that are shut down. Are you comfortable with being quiet? Do you find that silence is a kind of emptiness, a lack of something? What if there are at least three really helpful ways to be silent? This presentation will introduce silence from a multi-disciplinary perspective and so you should be prepared for bits of philosophy, physiology, spirituality, and perhaps some hooting and hollering.
Matthew Bailey-Dick worked as an educator in both academic and non-academic settings, as a pastor in three Mennonite churches, and as a hospice volunteer. In his graduate studies Matthew looked into the connections between adult education, death education, and hope. Since 2021 he lived on a farm on the Saugeen/Bruce Peninsula but this year he moves back to Waterloo region.
Human zoo exhibits were popular across nineteenth-century Europe. The exhibits and their captive participants were documented in thousands of postcards. During the talk, opportunities will be offered to read and translate messages on postcards. This talk seeks volunteers who may wish to become occasional collaborators by reading and translating messages on postcards that will be scanned during a return trip to Germany in Fall 2024.
Judith A. Nicholson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, where she teaches about the persistence of residual media, notably postcards, and about early mobile media with a focus on the car as communication medium. Judith joined the university in 2008.
Directors, playwrights, actors, and designers set forth in a concerted movement to challenge the British and American influence in both the content of plays and the control of theatres. In their significant socio-political and cultural movement, these artists sought to create new, Canadian-run theatres with an interest in telling stories about Canadians, by Canadians.
Undertakings like this, however, are rarely simple and since then, Canadian theatre has moved through a series of changes and challenges in an attempt to broaden and diversify the stage, attract audiences, grapple with fickle arts funding, and offer a viable career path for Canadian talent.
Lindsay Thistle holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University. Her research focuses on the dramatization of history with a particular interest in representations of war and their changing connections with ideas of Canadian identity and culture at different points in time. She is a sessional professor in the Communication Studies Department at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Department of English Literature at Trent University where she teaches courses on Canadian theatre, film, television, literature, creative industries, and cultural policy.
Tired of Cyborgs? Mystified by Artificial Intelligence? Trying to remember what life was like before your smartphone took over the job of remembering everything for you? This talk introduces the wide and diverse field of posthumanism, beginning with an explanation of how it differs from the transhumanist tropes and cliches that continue to proliferate in the culture all around us.
But who is ‘us’, exactly? And what is so great about being human, anyway? We consider these and other questions using a diverse array of examples from film, television, literature, and other media.
Russell J. A. Kilbourn is Professor and Chair of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His books include The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style , W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film, and Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema.
Dr. Kilbourn is also one of the founders of the Posthumanism Research Network (based at Brock University and Wilfrid Laurier), and is an associate editor at Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. His current project is on posthuman memory.
Black-capped chickadees are familiar songbirds that are year-round residents across most of Canada south of the treeline. Anyone who has ever maintained a bird feeder in the winter has likely had these birds visit their yard. The bustling activity of chickadees at feeders in winter masks social dynamics that lead to consequences months later in the breeding season. This presentation will explore knowledge derived from decades of research on the social lives of black-capped chickadees.
Scott Ramsay is an associate professor of Biology at Wilfrid Laurier University since 2001. He spent nearly five years in the mid- to late-1990s at Queen’s University studying the mating system of black-capped chickadees.
Climate change is transforming our natural environment in ways we are only beginning to understand. The sugar maple (Acer Saccharum) is one of eastern Canada’s great natural assets, having played an important role in the development of Canada both commercially and culturally.
Unfortunately, it is possible that within 80 years the sugar maple will no longer exist in Southern Ontario due to the changing climate. This presentation will explore this issue and present results from a number of multi-year research studies conducted by Wilfrid Laurier University's Resilient Communities Research Collaborative.
Bryce Gunson is a doctoral candidate in geography, a lecturer at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a project manager at Wilfrid Laurier University's Resilient Communities Research Collaborative with areas of expertise in climate change adaptation, environmental justice, maple syrup and rural geography.
2023 saw an average global temperature increase of just over 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to the pre-Industrial baseline. As agreed to in Paris in 2015 this target was supposed to be a firm guardrail, but it looks like we are going to blow past it, an outcome that will have catastrophic consequences for our species as well as the rest of the biosphere. In light of our evident failure to reduce carbon emissions many are now looking to engineer the climate technologically in an effort to blunt some of the worst impacts of unchecked climate change.
We will survey the most prominent examples of technological climate interventions, then explore the troubling ethical and political questions posed for humanity by the potential deployment of such technologies in the coming decades.
Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Laurier and a Member of the Waterloo Climate Institute. He has written widely on the climate crisis and the philosophy of technology.
Many animals live in groups, from swarms of bees to herds of antelope to troops of chimpanzees and communities of humans. Conflict is a natural part of social living. Often, many individuals want access to the same resources, such as food or territory, but there isn’t always enough for everyone.
In this lecture, we will examine how animals deal with conflict among groupmates, how they decide if a conflict is worthy of a fight, and why some fights escalate to harmful violence.
Julia Kilgour (she/her) is a behavioural ecologist, interested in social behaviour and urban wildlife. She is currently a NSERC postdoctoral researcher at the University of Guelph where she is studying free-roaming cats in cities, how they affect other species, and the role of humans in directing those effects. Prior to her current position, Julia has studied social behaviour and the evolution of aggression in bats and fruit flies, as well as working as and urban wildlife biologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois.
Since its inception the concept of Utopia, derived from the Greek "ou-topos" and/or "eu-topos," has been associated with "no place" and "beautiful place," respectively. In either or both cases, the politics of utopia have centered on spatial coordinates: the arrival, or the impossibility of arrival, at a frontier beyond which lies a perfect society, freed from the troubles that mark history.
In this talk, we will consider a utopia of process, one located not in an imagined geography, but in time or change itself, a utopia of no fixed locale that we all nonetheless inhabit (or could inhabit), and consider its implications for a politics of process over a politics of destinations.
Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has published four books of short fiction and has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for fiction and won the 2012 Rogers writers trust of Canada fiction prize.
His scholarly work—on music, utopianism, American literature, the short story, and post-structuralism—have appeared in journals such as Canadian Literature, Genre, The Canadian Review of American Studies, Mosaic, and Modern Fiction Studies, among others. He has also published chapters in peer-reviewed anthologies published by Routledge, University of Nebraska Press, University of South Carolina Press, and Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
In the recent cinematic release Bob Marley: One Love the king of reggae is depicted as a devote Rastafarian on a mission to bring peace to Jamaica during a time of political violence, and spread reggae beyond Jamaica. The narrative revolves around the writing, recording and marketing of the album Time Magazine called the best of album of the twentieth century, Exodus (1977), and touches on a few different musical eras of Marley’s life.
This lecture will use the music of Bob Marley to trace the history of Jamaican music during his career (1962-1981). It will cover the influence of Rastafari and the political climate of Jamaica on his music, as well as his musical innovations and departures from other Jamaican musical practices as he sought to create an international sound that would resonate with diverse audiences around the world.
Brent Hagerman teaches in the areas of cultural studies and religion. His research is on Jamaican music and religion, with a focus on reggae. He has published several articles on reggae, and two books: Bob Marley FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the King of Reggae (Backbeat, 2018), and King Yellowman: Meaningful Bodies in Jamaican Dancehall Culture (University of West Indies Press, 2021).
We are currently planning and booking our next round of lectures for 2024.
Reach out to lall@wlu.ca with any hopes, dreams, or topics of interest!
Interested in teaching? Apply to lead a LALL lecture!