Upcoming Centre Talks

'Aging Playfully: Reimagining Later Life Through Play and Planning', Associate Professor Maxx Hart

Monday 6th October @ 3pm in D301 Newman Building

In city Planning, as in sciety, play is considered to be an activity only for children. But why? Play is a fundamental aspect of human nature. Moreover, it has incredible physical and mental benefits for people of all ages. In the public realm, play can cultivate, connect, and support relationships and community cohesion. I argue that play is particulary well suited to support the health and well being of people as they age in older adulthood and should be considered a key planning consideration of age-friendly communities. Investigating the relationship between play, space, and older adult wellbeing offers an opportunity to challenge societal assumptions and expectations regarding later life, to reimagine the possibilities of play, and to rethink the potential of age-friendly communities.

Associate Professor Maxx Hart is the Director of the Population and Place Research Lab and Queen's University, Canada

'A Great Ox Stands in Your Mind: Decolonial Caution about Epistemic Reparations and the Right to be Known', Associate Professor Yann Allard Tremblay

Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that victims of gross injustice and epistemic harms not only have a right to know, but akso a right to be known i.e. to share and have their experiences heard. This right is associated with a duty to provide epistemic reparations, notably in bearing witness to victims. The epistiemi harms with which Lackey is concerned are features of settler colonialism that call for such epistemic reparations. I seek to raise caution about the pursuit of epistemic reparations, however, especially through bearing witness and testimony, in settler colonial contexts. I argue that settler coolonial epistemic environments constiture morasses of unknowing, where settlers are subjectified in ways that severely burden their capacity to properly understand and know victims of epistemic harms. In settle colonial contexts, I argue, epistemic reparations through bearing witness and testimonies risk being both unproductive and pernicious. They risk being pernicious given settler colonial dynamics that tend to defuse the critical potential of testimonies. To ensure a more thorough pursuit of the right to be known, we must therefore also consider the required decolonial transformation of the structures and subjectivities that make epistemic harm possible.

Associate Professor Yann Allard Tremblay is a professor of Political Science in McGill University, Montreal, Canada