Established in 2017, The John Meisel Lecture Series celebrates Professor Emeritus John Meisel, one of Canada鈥檚 leading and influential political scientists, by providing a forum for addressing controversial major political issues facing scholars, policy-makers, and the public. Each year, the Department of Political Studies invites a mid-career scholar to Queen鈥檚 University in Kingston, Ontario to deliver a major public lecture that addresses a timely political controversy, followed by a 鈥渢own hall鈥 style interactive discussion that is open to both the Queen鈥檚 and Kingston community.
In 2017, delivered the inaugural lecture on the topic of 鈥Controversies in the Making: Trump, Race, and Time,鈥 and offered a compelling analysis of the role that race and the politics of time played in the US President Donald Trump鈥檚 2016 election campaign strategy. In 2018, delivered the second annual lecture on the topic of "Canada's Oldest Controversy: The Pretense of Reconciliation," in which he argued that attempts at reconciliation are part of an enduring cycle within the traditional Indigenous-state relationship and should be viewed neither as a contemporary phenomenon nor as a challenge to the status quo. In 2019, delivered the third annual lecture on the topic of "Excluded and Enraged: On Gender, Anger, and Violence," and interrogated how gendered forms of anger can inform our understanding of historic and contemporary acts of violence against women.
Following a two-year hiatus for the lecture series due to the global pandemic (2020 and 2021), the lecture returned in 2022 with Queen's alumnus (ArtSci'11) speaking on the topic of "Vibe Shift: The Contentious Problem of Liberalism," where he surveyed our modern relationship to liberalism and its promise, and interrogated how the social and political institutions tasked with protecting and reinforcing liberalism have come up short.
The 2023 lecture took place on November 2nd and was particularly special as John Meisel celebrated his 100th birthday ten days earlier, on October 23rd. Our lecturer was , Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, with the topic "Social Media Influencers Are Getting Political and We Aren't Ready." In this talk Dubois tackled the contentious impacts of social media on politics by focusing on online political influencers, questioning their political roles, their power, and which voices we pay attention to.
We look forward to welcoming our sixth John Meisel Lecturer in 2024 - stay tuned for an announcement of our next event this fall! In the meantime, you can visit our for recordings of our last four John Meisel Lectures in Contemporary Political Controversies.