Public lecture series brings scholars together to talk about the fragility of democracy

September 9, 2019 – Orillia, ON

The global political landscape has showcased the inherent fragility of democracy, but does that mean democracy is dying?

Political experts and scholars will come together in Third Age Learning Lakehead’s (TALL) fall lecture series, Is Democracy Dying?, to explore the struggles and threats that are transforming our democracies and the solutions we can employ to make democracy more meaningful.

Presentations will include:

• Why do Democracies Fail? Lessons from Interwar Germany – Dr. Valerie Hébert, Associate Professor, History and Interdisciplinary Studies, Lakehead University.
• Can We Make Good Political Decisions? – Dr. David Moscrop, political theorist, a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, and a columnist for the Washington Post.
• Teardown: Imaging a New Democracy? – Dave Meslin, activist, organizer and author. His TED talk about apathy has more than 1.7 million views and his video clip from the 2016 Canadian election coverage, using stacks of Lego bricks, has over 2.5 million views on Facebook.
• The Struggle for Canadian Democracy: The Politics of Voting System Reform Today – Dr. Dennis Pilon, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University. He is Canada’s leading expert on the issue of voting system reform and the author of two books on the topic.
• The Alt-Right’s Threat to Democracy (And What We Can Do to Counter it) – Dr. Tanner Mirrlees, Associate Professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University, the vice president of the Canadian Communication Association, and a steering committee member for The Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism.

The TALL five-part lecture series runs every Wednesday from September 18 to October 16 from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. at St. Paul’s Centre in Orillia. There is a registration fee of $59 (plus HST) per person. For more information, or to purchase tickets, head to lakeheadu.ca/tal.  

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Media contact: Jaclyn Bucik, Media, Communications and Marketing Associate, Lakehead University, jbucik@lakeheadu.ca or 705-330-4008, ext. 2014.

 Lakehead University has approximately 9,700 full-time equivalent students and 2,000 faculty and staff in 10 faculties at two campuses in Orillia and Thunder Bay, Ontario. Lakehead is a fully comprehensive university: home to Ontario’s newest Faculty of Law in 44 years, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and faculties of Engineering, Business Administration, Health & Behavioural Sciences, Social Sciences & Humanities, Science & Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management, Education, and Graduate Studies. Maclean’s 2019 University Rankings place Lakehead University among Canada's Top 10 primarily undergraduate universities and in 2018 Research Infosource named Lakehead Research University of the Year in its category for the fourth consecutive year. Visit www.lakeheadu.ca.