Lecture

The Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies is proud to present the Shaw-Mannell Leisure Research Award Lecture featuring 2024 recipient, Dr. Ana Maria Munar.

The award recognizes international career contributions to the study of leisure, broadly defined, and influence on leisure scholarship at the University of Waterloo. The award is named in honour of retired faculty members Sue Shaw and Roger Mannell to recognize their outstanding individual career achievements.

This presentation explores how social capital can be harnessed to support place transformation. Despite its recognized importance, social capital remains poorly understood due to fragmented definitions and theories. By framing it as a form of capital, this talk presents a unified framework that clarifies how elements like trust, networks, and norms enable collective action

Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times With Homeboy Industries as a backdrop, this talk will explore the power of love to transform the disunity that currently keeps us from each other. Loving is our home and knowing that, is to never be homesick again.

Join us for an engaging discussion with Tess Chakkalakal, author of A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt, as she speaks with moderator Dr. Vay.

Divided postwar Berlin was home to people of different non-binary genders. They found or made spaces for living dignified lives, even in the deeply queerphobic societies of Cold War Germany. In her talk, Andrea Rottmann will introduce us to some of them and to the pleasures and problems of writing their histories.

Canadian theologian Dr. Catherine Clifford will be speaking about "From Vatican II to a Synodal Church." She will reflect on her experiences as a voting delegate at both sessions of the recent "Synod on Synodality" (Fall 2023 and 2024) and explore how the seeds of Synodality planted sixty years ago by the Second Vatican Council are yielding positive results for the Church as it responds to the needs of the 21st century.

Drawing on various scholars, Dr Zoe Todd critiques the push to 'braid' Indigenous and settler paradigms in conservation. As a Red River Métis scholar, Dr Todd advocates for the radical refusal of systems based on white possession and individualism, urging western institutions to embrace Indigenous practices and global anti-imperialist solidarities.

Join Rachelle Besaw, Descendant Member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and veteran of the United States Navy, for her talk on Indigenous Identity and Academia.

What is it about the life and literature of Kafka that has resonated with readers across cultures and generations? In search of an answer, this lecture will move from Weimar Berlin, where Kafka was a fixture in one of the most important cultural magazines of the 1920s, to the 2020s, when Han Kang, first introduced to English-language readers as ‘Korea’s Kafka’, became the country’s first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The kitchen has long been a site of both nourishment and defiance—a space where survival, culture, and activism converge. This talk explores how food serves as a powerful tool of resistance, from the resourceful cooking of enslaved and oppressed peoples to the current and impending food injustice movements that call to questions folks understandings of a tariff and bird flu.