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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.
This year, Laurier is celebrating 100 years of the Faculty of Arts! Any lectures marked by a "***" are taught by instructors from across the Faculty of Arts at Laurier. Attend these lectures to join the celebration!
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.