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The Laurier Lifelong Learning lecture series is open to everyone.
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.
- Price: Thursday 90-minute lectures are $16 + HST.
Fall 2025 Lectures
Register for Fall 2025 courses on our registration website.
Reach out to lifelonglearning@wlu.ca with any hopes, dreams, or topics of interest!
Interested in teaching? Apply to lead a LLL lecture!
Thursday, Sept. 25 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
Comics and graphic novels are no longer just books for children and teens, but have become one of the top selling genres in book sales. It is the third largest category of books sold in 2024, surpassed only by general fiction and romance. Since 2019, sales of graphic novels have risen over 100 percent. These graphic novels are not just superhero stories, but explore complex subjects, including love, family relationships, illness and death. In this talk, we look at some examples of autobiographical comics created by second-generation Asian Americans who recount their search for identity, their family’s immigration, displacement, and inter-generational trauma. These artists use textual and visual narration to explore their childhood memories, their pains and struggles with the high expectations of their parents. Using graphic narratives, the 1.5 and second generation children of these immigrants and refugees express their unhappiness at having to follow their parents’ scripts of achievement; growing dissatisfaction with the social parameters of their ethnic culture, as well as the prejudices they encounter outside their homes. Authors such as Thi Bui (Vietnam), Tessa Hulls (China), and Victoria Ying (Taiwan) deal with typical immigrant issues, such as assimilation, belonging, and intergenerational conflict, but they also raise issues pertinent to the 21st century, such as racism; depression, eating disorders, refugee experiences, being mixed-race, inter-ethnic differences, the influence of film and social media, war and, postmemory. Comics and graphic novels are no longer just books for children and teens, but have become one of the top selling genres in book sales. It is the third largest category of books sold in 2024, surpassed only by general fiction and romance. Since 2019, sales of graphic novels have risen over 100 percent. These graphic novels are not just superhero stories, but explore complex subjects, including love, family relationships, illness and death. In this talk, we look at some examples of autobiographical comics created by second-generation Asian Americans who recount their search for identity, their family’s immigration, displacement, and inter-generational trauma. These artists use textual and visual narration to explore their childhood memories, their pains and struggles with the high expectations of their parents. Using graphic narratives, the 1.5 and second generation children of these immigrants and refugees express their unhappiness at having to follow their parents’ scripts of achievement; growing dissatisfaction with the social parameters of their ethnic culture, as well as the prejudices they encounter outside their homes. Authors such as Thi Bui (Vietnam), Tessa Hulls (China), and Victoria Ying (Taiwan) deal with typical immigrant issues, such as assimilation, belonging, and intergenerational conflict, but they also raise issues pertinent to the 21st century, such as racism; depression, eating disorders, refugee experiences, being mixed-race, inter-ethnic differences, the influence of film and social media, war and, postmemory.
Instructor Bio
Eleanor Ty, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a professor of English at Laurier. She has published on life writing, graphic novel, Asian North American, and 18th Century British literature. She is author of Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (U of Illinois P, 2017); and editor of Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (Ohio State UP, 2022) which won the Comics Studies Society’s 2022 Prize for Edited Book Collection. She has just completed a book manuscript on Asian American and Asian Diasporic Graphic Memoirs
Thursday, Oct. 2 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
What are the practical, philosophical, and ethical aspects of planning a funeral? Why would you begin to plan your own funeral before you die? How do you ask your loved one to express their funeral wishes? This presentation will provide information and ideas about funeral planning in general and it will encourage you to reflect on some of the deeper issues having to do with mortality, meaning of life, personal legacy, and the importance of ritual for both individuals and communities. Believe it or not, good humour and joy will be among the undertakers for this presentation.
Instructor Bio
Matthew Bailey-Dick has worked as an educator in both academic and non-academic settings, a home renovator, a hospice volunteer, and a funeral presider. Currently he works as a Mennonite pastor. For his doctoral degree he looked into the connections between adult education, death education, and hope.Thursday, Oct. 9 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
History necessarily begins with the advent of writing. With writing, kings of 2000 BC and later could aggrandize themselves for posterity, leaving behind a record of their accomplishments and conquests. Yet, before writing, humans used new media (communication technologies that were new at the time) to serve human needs that came before that of the needs of kings to extend their legacies past their lifetimes: tallies to track patterns in things like moon cycles or menstrual cycles; clay tokens in envelopes to seal interpersonal contracts once the advent of farming meant the advent of wealth disparities, trade, and waged work; and the beginnings of bureaucracy were demanded in early empires to track data for taxation, army conscription, and rationing of food via the beginnings of writing technologies: technologies like woven quipu and other counting technologies. This talk will take attendees through new communications media in pre-historic times, pre-dating the many forms of new media yet to come over the next few millennia.
Instructor Bio
Jade L. Miller, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Chair of the Communication Studies Department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She received her PhD in Communications from the University of Southern California, and her BA in Art History from New York University. Before Laurier, she held a two year Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities at Tulane University. She works on the political economy of creative production, global media flows, and media industries. Her research program seeks to conceptualize the shape of media production and distribution networks in an increasingly networked age, focusing on shifting relationships of power and place. Her largest project has been her 2016 book Nollywood Central (BFI), on informality and organization in the Nigerian movie industry known as Nollywood, and she regularly teaches the Media History introductory class in Laurier's Communication Studies undergraduate major.
Thursday, Oct. 16 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
As part of the ‘quantified self’ movement, self-tracking has become a dominant practice within contemporary health and fitness. GPS-based watches and other wearables from companies including Garmin, Apple and Fitbit pair with hundreds of self-tracking apps and enable users to upload, display and analyze their activity data. There are clear benefits to the use of self-tracking in health and fitness including increased motivation, enhanced goal-setting, and personal accountability. There are also areas of concern such as privacy violations, peer-pressure, and feelings of inadequacy. This lecture offers a critical examination of self-tracking, with a specific focus on the quantification of health and fitness. What is at stake when we translate walking into steps, when we assign scores to our sleep, and when we perceive our activities in terms of speed, distance and calories burned?
Instructor Bio
Dr. Jonathan Finn is Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier. He is the author of Beyond the Finish Line: Images, Evidence, and the History of the Photo-Finish (McGill-Queen’s, 2020) and Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mugshot to Surveillance Society (Minnesota, 2009) and editor of Visual Communication and Culture: Images in Action (Oxford 2012). His current research project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and is an examination of self-tracking in health and fitness with a focus on endurance sport.Thursday, Oct. 23 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
Forty years have passed since Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the Soviet Union. Within five short years the USSR was shockingly in the dustbin of history and the Cold War (seemingly) over. This talk revisits the tumultuous events of March 1985. Who was Gorbachev before his ascent to power that year? Was the USSR that he inherited doomed from the start, or did he misjudge both his power and his ability to save the Soviet state through radical reform? Indeed, what was Gorbachev’s agenda in the first place? This talk focuses on these questions, though Ronald Reagan and even Vladimir Putin may make cameo appearances.
Instructor Bio
Leonard G. Friesen was a professor of History at WLU from 1994 until his retirement in July of 2025. The author of numerous books and articles on various aspects of Imperial Russian and Soviet history, Friesen lived with his family in the USSR under Gorbachev. He has travelled to the USSR and its successor states some 30 times over the decades. Friesen will be no stranger to many in LALL.Thursday, Oct. 30 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
This lecture dives into the extraordinary effects of music on the brain and psyche, uncovering how sound can spark brain activity, shift emotional states, and enhance cognitive function. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, it explores music's potential as a therapeutic tool for mental health, neurological conditions, and emotional well-being. From stress relief and mood elevation to cognitive healing, the lecture taps into groundbreaking research from neuroscience, psychology, and music therapy, shedding light on music’s profound ability to transform both mind and body.
Instructor Bio
Heidi Ahonen, PhD, Registered Psychotherapist, Accredited Music Therapist, Professor of Music Therapy and Co-ordinator of PhD Programme (Music Therapy & Community Music), Wilfrid Laurier University.
Thursday, Nov. 13 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
The Trojan War is one of the most famous events from Greek history but also one that still has so many mysteries and a fair share of controversy associated with it. Did Troy actually exist? If so, was a large war fought there at the end of the Bronze Age that led to the site's destruction? What is the evidence for all of this and how does it help us understand this volatile and mysterious period of time? This talk will examine the myth and the reality of Troy and the war that defined it.
Instructor Bio
Dr. Scott Gallimore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology & Heritage Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He conducts archaeological research in Greece with interests in the Greek world under Roman rule, economic history, and the archaeology of disasters.
Thursday, Nov. 20 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
For as long as human beings have gathered in communities, surveillance has been part of the arrangement. Whether it was through mechanisms like the church, peer-to-peer systems of informants, or social institutions that converted citizenship into fragments of data, the way in which we have organized ourselves has been tied to a process of watching and evaluating. It is easy to think that the conversion of every aspect of our contemporary lives into data is a consequence of the digital environment, but the historical roots run deeper than that. This talk will address an admittedly complex question: Are we compelled to become objects of surveillance? And is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Instructor Bio
Jeff Heydon is author of Visibility and Control: Images and Certainty in Governing (Lexington, 2021), and teaches in the Communication Studies department at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Thursday, Nov. 27 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
Climate warming at high latitudes is occurring at rates that are 4x faster than the global average. This is resulting in widespread and rapid changes in our northern forests. Notably, wildfires are becoming larger, more frequent, and more severe with marked implications for the recovery of forests and the people and wildlife that rely on them. Layered on these fire related changes are changes in the pests and pathogens that can further undermine ecosystem resilience and alter forest recovery trajectories. In this lecture, I will discuss these various changes and what this means for the face of Canada’s boreal forests.
Instructor Bio
Dr. Jennifer Baltzer is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Forests and Global Change at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has been leading an extensive boreal forest research program throughout Northwestern Canada for 15 years. Her interdisciplinary program examines the impacts of climate warming, including permafrost thaw, wildfire regimes, and biome shifts, on the distribution and function of high latitude boreal forests and its implications for northern communities. Within Canada, she works closely with the Government of the Northwest Territories and Yukon Territorial Government. Dr. Baltzer plays leadership roles in NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability campaign, the Smithsonian Institute’s Forest Global Earth Observatory Network, and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund Program Global Water Futures.
Thursday, Dec. 4 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
This talk traces the long arc—from the Luddites of Nottingham to Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford—showing how we spent the 20th century standardizing work so we could fit people to machines. Today, AI flips the script: routine cognitive tasks are easier to automate than many embodied ones. We’ll explore: why skilled trades, customer service, care, and live performance, as key examples, still require significant human presence; how human–machine complements work in practice, and; what people and organizations can do now to reclaim what’s distinctively human while putting smart tools to work.
Instructor Bio
Bruce Arai is a professor in the Leadership Program at Laurier and a former senior academic administrator who helped build the Brantford campus into a major presence in the city. He is also the founder of Trade Smart College in Hamilton, Ontario, a career college focused on skilled trades, employer‑aligned curricula, professionalism, and paid internships that provide students with significant work experience before graduation. All of his work at the college and the university centers on a core idea of privileging student success over institutional prestige by preparing people for high‑demand, human‑centered work where judgment and craft still matter.
Thursday, Dec. 11 (1:30 - 3 p.m)
Course Description
Many of us are familiar with a bygone era in film where musicals were as popular as Marvel superhero movies today. Many don't realize the genre relied heavily on European artists to create the visual style that made the musical irresistible to audiences. This lecture will look at some of these artists and their unique contributions.
Instructor Bio
Mark Terry is a Professor in the Departments of English and Film and Communications Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His innovative work in remediating the documentary film has opened doors to the United Nations for underrepresented communities worldwide. This work has been recognized by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television with its Humanitarian Award; by Queen Elizabeth II with her Diamond Jubilee Medal; and by the National Communications Association in Washington with their J. Robert Cox Award for Environmental Communication, marking the first time a Canadian has won this award in the association's 110-year history.