Bringing world-class scholars to Trent, the Stephen Katz Distinguished Visiting Scholar series invites thoughtful public conversation that challenges ageist assumptions and deepens our understanding of diverse aging experiences.

Upcoming Lecture

What can we learn from dementia as preventable? Thoughts, debates, provocations

Dr. Annette Leibing
  • calendar iconTuesday, November 10
  • time icon7:00 p.m.
  • location iconErnest & Florence Benedict Gathering Space (ENW102), First People's House of Learning

Lecture Abstract

Dr Leibing will discuss the important development of the preventive turn in dementia research, as a shift from mostly genetic explanations to more hopeful ones based on managing risk factors. Dementia prevention can be a real chance for better aging, but this talk also looks critically at the framing and contexts of recommendations, scientific debates and public health campaigns. This will be an exciting opportunity for discussion about what dementia prevention means today and into the future for the everyday experience of aging.

About Dr. Annette Leibing

Headshot of Annette LeibingAnnette Leibing is a medical anthropologist (PhD U Hamburg, Germany), who had her first academic position at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. There she founded and directed, for five years, the CDA - a multidisciplinary centre for mental health and aging, with a special focus on dementia. After a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University, while holding a Guggenheim fellowship, she is now a full professor at the Nursing faculty at Université de Montréal. Her research focuses mainly on issues related to aging, by studying, among other topics, and as an anthropologist, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, aging and psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, elder care and, more recently, futurities.  She is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Germany. She has also recently finished, together with two writers and a composer, a book of short stories about forgetting.

For more information please contact aging@trentu.ca.

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Stephen Katz

About Dr. Stephen Katz

Dr. Stephen Katz is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Trent University, a recipient of the Distinguished Research Award, and a founding member of Trent’s Centre for Aging and Society. He played a central role in academic life at Trent, serving as Chair of the Sociology Department and contributing extensively to university and college governance.

Widely regarded as a leading thinker in gerontology, Professor Katz has made significant theoretical and methodological contributions to the global sociology of aging. He is the author of landmark publications that reshaped the field, including Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge, now considered a classic and among the most cited works in aging studies. His scholarship deepened understanding of aging by examining its connections to social processes, power, and lived experience.

Launched in 2017, the Stephen Katz Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies honours his transformative contributions to the field.