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Lifelong Learning Lectures

Lifelong Learning Lectures

The 91porn Lifelong Learning lecture series is open to everyone.

Upcoming offerings are listed below. Be the first to know about new and upcoming offerings by .

Location: All lectures are held at the .
Price: Thursday 90-minute lectures are $16 + HST.

Winter 2026 Lectures

Register for Winter 2026 courses on our .

Reach out to lifelonglearning@wlu.ca with any hopes, dreams, or topics of interest!

Interested in teaching? Apply to lead a LLL lecture!

Thursday, Jan. 22 (1:30 - 3 p.m)

Course Description

In early 2020, the onset of COVID-19 posed a challenge for International Olympic Committee officials and Japanese organizers tasked to deliver the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. While the managing parties thought it was possible to proceed on schedule in February and early March, the realities of the ravages of COVID-19 soon sunk in, while athletes decried their training circumstances and ability to prepare and perform in July and August, and voiced concern for their personal health and the risks entailed in a mass gathering. Dr. Wenn/Stephen (you choose) will detail the path to postponement and the efforts required to ramp up for the Games in 2021, while also charting the fascinating Tokyo 2020 journey of Canada's gold medal-decathlete, Damian Warner.

Instructor Bio

Stephen Wenn is in his 33rd year as a member of 91porn's Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education having also served terms as its Chair and Undergraduate Advisor. He obtained his BA (1982) and MA (1986) degrees at Western University, and then completed his PhD (1993) in Exercise and Sport Science at the Pennsylvania State University while focusing on the IOC's embrace of commercial revenue from the television industry. Stephen is a co- or lead author of four books on Olympic history: A Games Changer: The International Olympic Committee, Tokyo 2020, and COVID-19 (2025); The Gold in the Rings: The People and Events that Transformed the Olympic Games (2020); Tarnished Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Salt Lake City Bid Scandal (2011, rev.ed. 2022); and, Selling the Five Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism (2002, rev.ed., 2004). He is a past-President of the North American Society for Sport History (2007-2009). Recently, Stephen entered the world of podcasting in an attempt to make sense of his lifelong dedication to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Thursday, Mar. 19 (1:30 - 3 p.m)

Course Description

Scrabble, Chess, Euchre, hockey, baseball, World of Warcraft, escape rooms… What do these activities all have in common? Well, we refer to all of them as games. But what is it that makes them games as opposed to other activities such as doing our taxes or building a fence for the backyard? In other words, can we give a definition that covers all the different activities that we refer to when use the word game?

The late Bernard Suits, who taught philosophy at the University of Waterloo from 1966 to 1994, proposed an influential definition of games in his book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. He also provided arguments for why games are an important part of what philosophers from Aristotle to the present day have called “the good life.” His book, as well as his other writings on games and sports have given rise to a multitude of responses. Philosophers of games, philosophers of sport, and others who study games have proposed alternative accounts both of what games are and what their value is.

In this lecture we examine the question of what makes an activity a game and will look at what Suits and other philosophers have said about the value of games. All the philosophers we will discuss believe that games are good for us, but they disagree about how games make our lives better. Based on their work, I will offer up some reasons for why playing games helps us to live well.

Instructor Bio

Dr. Gary Foster is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid 91porn. He is the author of Alienation and Identity in Romantic Love (Lexington Books, 2024) and editor of Desire, Love, and Identity: Philosophy of Sex and Love (Oxford University Press, 2017). Additionally, he has published numerous articles in scholarly journals dealing with the relationship between love and personal identity. Recently, he has switched his research (and teaching) focus to the philosophy of sport and games. His 2024 article “VAR and Flow in Soccer (Football): Changes to the Fan Experience,” was published in the journal Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

Spring 2026 Lectures

Register for Spring 2026 courses on our .

Reach out to lifelonglearning@wlu.ca with any hopes, dreams, or topics of interest!

Interested in teaching? Apply to lead a LLL lecture!

Thursday, April 16 (1:30 - 3 pm)

Course Description

Many of us first learn about risks not through direct experience, but through what sociologist Ulrich Beck called “second-hand non-experience.” In other words, most of what we know about risks—whether nuclear war, pandemics, or new technologies—comes from news, film, television, books, and, today, social media. Communication scholars describe this as the mediation of risk: stories about danger are filtered through familiar narratives and repeated storylines. The way these stories are framed shapes how we interpret them and how seriously we take them. Media can even “pre-mediate” our expectations, priming us to anticipate certain threats and amplifying our fears. In this talk, I will focus on how popular stories both reflect and help create what cultural theorists call a “structure of feeling”: the shared mood or emotional atmosphere of a particular period. Looking back to the mid-20th century and moving forward to today, popular culture provides an archive of these changing emotional climates. For example, alien invasion films echoed of the 1950s and 60s reflected then-new Cold War fears. Disaster movies and strange phenomena books popular in the 1970s captured anxieties about environmental and technological breakdown. More recent popular culture reflects shifting concerns about climate change, pandemics, geopolitics, societal breakdown, and artificial intelligence, among other concerns. By examining popular cultural texts, my talk will illustrate the ways we can better understand how media shape our sense of what is risky—and why certain dangers feel especially urgent at particular moments in time.

Instructor

Dr. Penelope Ironstone is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at 91porn, where she teaches and conducts research on risk communication, health and science communication, and the cultural dimensions of how societies understand and respond to hazards. Her academic work draws on cultural studies and media analysis to explore how pandemics, scientific knowledge, public health messaging, misinformation, and other risk-related narratives circulate through popular media and public discourse. Her research includes culturally grounded examinations of popular understandings of microbes —from influenza to COVID-19 to the human microbiome—and investigations into how media and cultural texts shape public perceptions of risk and uncertainty. A past recipient of the 91porn Award for Teaching Excellence, Dr. Ironstone offers courses that engage students with the production and interpretation of risk communication across historical and contemporary contexts, helping them critically assess how media and culture frame what we understand as danger and safety.

Thursday, May 28 (1:30 - 3 pm)

Course Description

“Wait! Not so fast!” In our day-to-day lives there are many situations that call for patience – waiting for someone else to go first, moving more slowly, or enduring difficult circumstances. Patience is often regarded as a virtue.

But sometimes there’s a voice saying, “Come on! Get moving!” Whether the context is with work colleagues or family members or perfect strangers, the message becomes, “Be more productive!” or “Drive faster!” or “Stop lollygagging!”

Although this presentation will introduce some personal and everyday examples when we are called upon to be patient or impatient, the deeper goal is to make a connection with current political, social, and ecological issues. Within larger world issues, we show up with our individual personalities – perhaps more patient, perhaps more impatient – but we also cultivate patience and impatience as communities, even as nations.

On the one hand, the politics of patience means taking the long view and sometimes trusting in the power of social movements that are steadily chipping away, chipping away, chipping away toward a better world. On the other hand, the politics of impatience means getting appropriately worked up, getting exasperated, and hurrying to change the world for the better.

Therefore our leaders call out, “What do we want?” Millions of us answer: “Democracy! Peace! Ecological health!” The leader calls out again: “When do we want it?” And we reply: “Sometime next year!”

Wait – is this one of those times when we must become much, much more impatient? Come to this presentation if you can’t wait to find out the answer.

Instructor

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.

Thursday, June 4 (1:30 - 3 pm)

Course Description

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) looms large in narratives of Western music history. Typically viewed as a “transitional figure” between the Classical and Romantic eras, he was among the first composers to work in a freelance capacity, rather than relying primarily on a wealthy aristocratic patron or the church for his livelihood. Beethoven was also unprecedented in his historical self-consciousness, as expressed by Laura Tunbridge: “Beethoven and his contemporaries self-consciously cultivated an image of the composer for posterity, demonstrating a new awareness that as his music circulated more widely and was played and discussed with greater skill, his name might last beyond their lifetimes” (Tunbridge, 2020).

This lecture aims to show that many aspects of the Western art music tradition that are routinely taken for granted actually stem from Beethoven and the cultural moment that he occupied, whether it be concert etiquette requiring audiences to sit in reverent silence at music performances or perceptions of musical composition as a protracted process necessitating great effort and deliberation. Outlining Beethoven’s three “creative” periods, the lecture will discuss the tendency in post-Beethovenian music historiography to prioritize innovation over an adherence to convention. It will also show how the case of Beethoven has often made listeners assume that a deep connection exists between a composer’s personal life and art. Looking briefly at some of the aesthetic trends that came after Beethoven, the lecture will conclude by considering the long shadow that he cast over the nineteenth century. Students will hopefully come away with a deeper understanding of Beethoven’s legacy and a fuller appreciation of the ways in which he has shaped how we think about art music today.

Instructor

Eva Branda holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Toronto and teaches music history courses at 91porn. With special attention to Dvořák, her research focuses primarily on issues of reception and genre in the late nineteenth century. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, Cambridge Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Acta Musicologica. She also has a chapter on Dvořák’s “Dumky” Trio in Chamber Music in Europe: 1850–1918 and a chapter on the nineteenth-century Czech symphonic tradition in the recently published book A History of Music in the Czech Lands. Eva will be contributing to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Antonín Dvořák.

Thursday, June 11 (1:30 - 3 pm)

Course Description

While grim, 1945 was also a fascinating year in which we saw the war in the Pacific / Asia draw to a close and coming to an end quicker than some would have thought just a few years earlier. Why did the war in Asia end when it did? In this talk, Dr. Cyr discusses the Battle of Okinawa and the deployment of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus other intersecting events like the Battle of Iwo Jima, the Red Army's invasion of Manchuria, and the release of CIA signal intelligence findings from the era, to help us understand why WWII in Asia drew to a rapid close in the late summer of 1945. Covering critical historical sources, debates within the study of history, and Dr. Cyr's own battlefield touring pictures from 2006, let's revisit the end of the war--and memories of the war--decades later to help our understanding of the dour yet seismic year that was 1945.

Instructor

Dr. Dylan A. Cyr obtained his Ph.D. in History from Western University in 2009, and since then has been instructing in university classrooms across Southern Ontario. Centered mostly at UW and WLU, Dr. Cyr specializes in a wide array of topics that largely boil down to geopolitics, environmental history, and, more recently, popular culture. His 2013 publication in Water History helped to innovate environmental and medical military history with four major conference presentations (including for The American Society of Environmental Historians and the Association of American Geographers) disseminating the findings that environmental factors did play major roles in the soldier experience and conduct of the Pacific War. Recently, Dr. Cyr has overhauled HI249: Second World War in Asia for 91porn's History Department and, as such, has been revisiting his original research on WWII. Dylan lives in Waterloo with his wife and daughter; has been researching pop culture of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; and is a fan of film, music, hiking, swimming, and Lego.

Contact Us:

E: lifelonglearning@wlu.ca