A Final Message from Dean Lisa Henderson

June 2025

Lisa Henderson standing outside on campus in a dark blazer with her arms crossed and wearing glasses on a sunny day.To the FIMS Alumni Community,

It is with a flurry of emotion that I draft my concluding message as FIMS Dean to our Alumni community. After six and a half years, my extended term comes to a close on June 30. I have taken to my role like a scholar-evangelist and it is honestly difficult to imagine life without the daily demands and delights of serving this faculty and university. I am proud of and grateful for so many things. We have new programs, new faculty, our first Research Centre—the Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies—and lively interactions with scholarly, professional and community-based networks. FIMS has soothed me and has kept me up at night. At this point I’m grateful for both, for the sheer life of working at FIMS.

As everyone at the Faculty knows, one of my deepest pleasures comes from talking to our alum across programs and eras. Our MLIS alum have such a big hand in library and information management and leadership in Canada and beyond—I encounter you everywhere and you do us proud. Our journalism alum lead both enormous news organizations and new experiments in journalism practice, and you are journalists on every platform and in every place. If it’s being covered near or far for a Canadian outlet—and many beyond Canada—trust that a FIMS alum has a hand in the coverage. A decade of MMJC graduates are out there now, making their marks across the interconnected worlds of journalism and professional communication, both as evidence-based storytellers with a conscience. Our MACS/MIT/MTP/MPI/DigiComm alum are in entertainment, marketing, cultural production, government, policy, professional communications and community development, among many other fields. If an issue addresses the policy or political economy of AI, you can find primary source scholars at FIMS. If your next gen family member seeks a university creative arts program that will train them about radical collaboration and ready them for a multi-disciplinary world of creativity, recommend Creative Arts and Production (CAP) led by Professor Sharon Sliwinski and a committee of participating faculty from FIMS, Arts & Humanities, and the Don Wright Faculty of Music. If you know someone who wants to complete an MLIS but can’t relocate to London, suggest our new, fully on-line MLIS program led by Graduate Program Chair Professor Heather Hill and long-standing LIS scholar and pedagogue Professor Pamela McKenzie. Our master’s and doctoral programs in Media Studies, Library and Information Science, and Health Information Science are in the forefront of worldly thinking and intervention. I couldn’t be prouder or more grateful to the legion of faculty, staff, students and University colleagues who make FIMS possible and keep it real.

I am especially grateful to Professor Susan Knabe, who has been our Associate Dean for undergraduate studies for over 10 years and whom we can credit with CAP development and our shift from MIT to MACS, Media and Communication Studies. It’s a new title that makes us legible and discoverable to students in Canada and abroad. Susan has warmly and bravely agreed to serve as Acting Dean while the search for FIMS’ next dean is underway. As I have communicated to the FIMS community on campus, there is no one I’d rather hand off to. Please read about Susan’s appointment (and note her bespoke FIMS t-shirt, designed in-house by our Academic Advisor Heather Maccrone) and join me in thanking her. I often call our undergraduate program “heads-on, hands-on, hearts-on”: with students and the whole community we think deeply, we make things, and we know the importance of feeling in mobilizing our worlds. Susan, too, is heads-on, hands-on, and hearts-on and will be a creative, insightful and fair leader. She will also be in touch with our alum through this newsletter, at our annual winter gathering in Toronto, and on the many occasions you come to campus in London. Our Development Officer Susannah Gergich will support Susan, as she has supported me.

Susan, thank you. FIMS alumni have a lot to look forward to!

Finally, a lively shout out to FIMS alum Brodie Fenlon (MA’99, Journalism), General Manager and Editor-in-Chief of CBC News and first recipient of our new Alumni Award of Excellence. Brodie, our thanks for your immense work at the CBC, for the impossible yet accomplished task of covering our recent federal election in every corner of the country, and for being—as many CBC colleagues told us—a mensch. FIMS looks forward to seeing you at the Homecoming Alumni Awards ceremony in September.

With that, colleagues, please know that it has been a privilege, an honour, a stretch and a gift to serve FIMS and Western as Dean. The Faculty is kaleidoscopic in its diversity of thought and practice, luminous in its heart. I will miss FIMS and I will miss you.

Lisa Henderson, Dean
Faculty of Information and Media Studies