Short Reads - Fall 2020 Archives | Raven Magazine

Real News

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 14:00:01 +0000

Celebrating its 75th anniversary this fall, �Ӱ�ԭ��’s journalism program covers the COVID-19 crisis, confronts its past and forges bold partnerships for the future.

Photographs by Rémi Thériault

Essential Listening
How Two Viruses Shaped My Journalism Experience
The Stories Behind the Stats
We Will Remember You

Essential Listening

Radio host Robyn Bresnahan helps hold the city together

By Sissi De Flaviis

was making supper when she heard small footsteps climbing up the wooden steps of her house in Old Ottawa South, just a few blocks from the �Ӱ�ԭ�� campus. The host of CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning opened the door and saw a seven-year-old girl looking up at her.

“This is for you,” the visitor said, dropping a small envelope on the doorstep and dashing away. “Dear Robyn,” the card read, “thank you for bringing us the news every morning.”

The girl’s teacher had asked students to write letters to workers who were helping people cope with COVID-19, Bresnahan learned later — a memory she is sharing with watery eyes, sitting on a red Adirondack chair outside her house on a late-summer morning.

Bresnahan may not be a doctor or a nurse, but she dutifully sets her alarm for 3 a.m. these days, rising before dawn to make a pot of coffee and spend two hours in her home office reading newspapers and tweaking radio scripts. At 5 a.m., she corrals her hair into a ponytail and bicycles 11-and-a-half minutes to CBC’s downtown studio, arriving just in time for the 5:30 a.m. news and current affairs program that’s billed as the city’s most listened to morning show.

Bresnahan has followed a similar routine since 2011, when she moved back to Canada from London, England — where she had worked for the BBC World Service — to take the CBC job. And it’s a routine that didn’t really change when the pandemic dramatically upended the world.

“We have been essential in so many people’s lives,” she says, “during all of this.” Since mid-March, Bresnahan — who graduated with a journalism degree from �Ӱ�ԭ�� in 2001 and was steered into radio by professor Mary McGuire — has been part of the glue holding the city together by sharing important information and inspiring stories.

Over the past few months, she has covered a wide swath of the pandemic: a local nurse who became homeless because her landlord was concerned about COVID-19; parents whose children went back to school in September; a heated exchange with Mayor Jim Watson in a segment about bylaw enforcement when it was still illegal to sit in parks.

“In the early days, I think we were a crucial lifeline,” says Bresnahan, “but then I worried whether people would be oversaturated. So it became a balance. ‘Are people ready for a band interview? Are people ready for sunny, happy stories?’ Some days maybe we did too much pandemic news. Other days maybe we got the mix wrong. It’s been kind of a dance, but our team does the best we can.”

Although Bresnahan loves her job, building a relationship with the audience and earning respect from Ottawa’s movers and shakers, doing journalism during the pandemic has been draining. She has two young children and had to stop trying to be the perfect parent (i.e., more screen time for the kids equals more rest for mom). And when the boundaries between home and work blurred and she began to have nightmares about COVID-19, Bresnahan traded reading newspapers before bed for novels and reduced her workweek to four days for a few months.

These two changes, she hopes, will help her find the equilibrium and energy she needs. “There were times when the news was so heavy,” she says. “People would burst into tears on air. I felt like a therapist, soaking up all this stress. Then I’d come home and try to shake it off and be a mom. That was hard. The kids don’t care that I’ve been up since 3 a.m., and nobody does well when they’re tired.

“But I’m lucky, because in a way, when I go to work I’m still in the home — my kids can turn on the radio and listen to me. I’m still there even though I’m not.”

How Two Viruses Shaped My Journalism Experience

By Devon Platana

Who could have predicted that my Master of Journalism degree would end with my bedroom playing the role of both classroom and newsroom.

COVID-19 shook up not only our education but also the job plans that a lot of journalism students had for the summer. As a response, the program hired around 20 of us to work for , its online publication.

While I was accustomed to covering stories face-to-face, I had to adapt to Zoom and telephone calls becoming the norm for interviews. This took some getting used to, but I pushed through because I felt a responsibility to help people understand how COVID was changing lives.

I covered stories ranging from what Ontarians thought about social bubbles to a piece about a seniors’ community centre that sent food and crafts to its clients so they wouldn’t feel alone while social distancing. Doing this work has been demanding — a challenge magnified by a second virus that many other journalism students and I have had to deal with: systemic racism.

Last May, several current and former �Ӱ�ԭ�� journalism students who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) spoke out about how racism within the program has impacted their experiences. I was one of them. While I felt a need to cover COVID-19, as a half-Black student I felt a bigger responsibility to share stories about people like me.

I started to write about my experiences, such as how some people didn’t believe that I’m half-Black because I didn’t “look like it” and how learning about BIPOC issues in journalism was treated like a special attraction — we’d discuss them in one class and never talk about them again.

I wanted to use my platform to speak for people who didn’t have the same opportunity as me. It felt weird at first because . That feeling soon transformed into a sense of duty: I needed to share my stories and those of others because they must be heard so things will change.

Everyone wants to know what their purpose in life is — it took COVID-19 and BIPOC students voicing their frustration for me to find mine. As I continue my journey into the journalism industry, I don’t know what role either virus will play in my life, but I know that neither will stop me from covering the issues that people need to hear about.

The Stories Behind the Stats

By Erica Endemann

In my adulthood, the topic of math has thankfully not come up often in conversation. On the rare occasion that it does, I feel the need to preface any discussion about numbers with a quick disclaimer to keep expectations low.

Over the last few months my state of comfort, along with the rest of the world, has been significantly disrupted. But for me, it was also because I began every morning hunting for patterns on spreadsheets full of figures.

The (IIJ) is a non-profit newsroom based at Concordia University. It brings journalism schools and media organizations together to collaborate on investigations too large for individual organizations to pursue alone. I first encountered the IIJ in the second year of my Master of Journalism program at �Ӱ�ԭ��. At the time the IIJ was working on an , which revealed that provincial regulations were not adequately addressing lead levels in municipal drinking water.

The IIJ’s second investigation is focused on Indigenous drinking water. This was how I thought I’d spend my summer when I applied for a four-month fellowship with them in February. Instead, much of my time has been focused on a new project: .

All summer I was immersed in numbers from throughout the province — the number of outbreaks, the number of deaths, the number of recoveries and hospitalizations — so I could make interactive maps showing the geographic impacts of coronavirus. These numbers have frequently felt overwhelming.

Initially, all I could see when looking at a spreadsheet was a snapshot of grief and confusion. But at some point, the disorienting columns and rows of figures morphed into stories, which have been written and broadcast to tens of millions this summer through the IIJ’s media partners.

The data I’ve been sifting through has culminated into several different maps, viewed more than 600,000 times, highlighting the most vulnerable populations in Canada, from Indigenous communities to farm workers, which has cast a glaring light on the cracks in our society that force certain populations to face more risks and hardships than others.

I pursued journalism because I want to tell stories, an ambition that doesn’t seem synonymous with numbers. But as I complete my master’s degree, I’m grateful that the importance of data journalism has been made evident to me early on in my career. And I no longer have to offer disclaimers when talking about math.

We Will Remember You

By Brett Popplewell

On Sunday, March 8, 2020, a B.C. man in his 80s died while receiving care in North Vancouver. His was the first confirmed death caused by COVID-19 in Canada. By the end of March, 126 Canadians had lost their lives to the virus, and as the obituaries piled up the sheer loss of human life proved impossible for any individual news outlet to keep up with.

Prof. Brett Popplewell

As of September, more than 9,000 Canadians had died from COVID-19 and public health officials estimated that more than twice as many will succumb before a vaccine is found. But the numbers fail to capture the fullness of what has been lost and what is at stake.

That’s why �Ӱ�ԭ��’s Future of Journalism Initiative (FJI) has taken a lead role in an unprecedented national project that aims to share the stories of everybody who has died. The FJI is a new collaborative research hub that has been established to help mark the 75th anniversary of �Ӱ�ԭ��’s journalism program. The initiative links working journalists and visiting scholars with �Ӱ�ԭ�� journalism students, fostering creative and academic partnerships around projects that serve a public interest.

The FJI, in collaboration with magazine and J-Schools Canada, an umbrella organization for the country’s post-secondary journalism schools, has launched one of the most ambitious reporting efforts imaginable — a nationally focused obituaries project called They Were Loved. With support from the Giustra Foundation, the project has mobilized hundreds of journalism students from across the country who are currently writing obituaries and building a comprehensive tribute to the victims of COVID-19. The obituaries are being published by �Ѳ��𲹲�’s.

Katherine Laidlaw

The FJI has also appointed award-winning writer Katherine Laidlaw to serve as its inaugural journalist-in-residence. Laidlaw has helped spearhead They Were Loved, forging partnerships with students from a dozen journalism schools to work independently and collectively on this lasting endeavour.

Founded in 1945, �Ӱ�ԭ��’s journalism school was the first of its kind in the country and has been the standard bearer in Canadian journalism education through decades of technological disruption and tremendous social and economic change. Key to the school’s success has been its capacity to evolve and shape its pedagogy to ensure that every generation of journalists to graduate is able to succeed in an ever-changing industry.

The FJI is part of this tradition — and part of the program’s future.

Brett Popplewell is a �Ӱ�ԭ�� journalism professor and director of the Future of Journalism Initiative.

—
Raven Magazine

Rapid Responders

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:59:46 +0000

Last spring, when work at universities around the world was put on pause, researchers from every field imaginable asked an important question: What can we do to help?

At �Ӱ�ԭ��, the sprang into action. In collaboration with the university’s five faculties, it launched the $800,000 CU COVID-19 Rapid Response Research Grants program to solicit proposals and swiftly support projects that address the pandemic.

Vice-President (Research and International) Rafik Goubran

Within weeks, 59 professors were awarded up to $25,000 to conduct timely research in areas such as e-health, autonomous systems, data science, machine learning, eldercare, epidemiology and more.

“When a crisis touches every aspect of our lives, researchers from all academic backgrounds have a valuable contribution to make,” said Rafik Goubran, �Ӱ�ԭ��’s Vice-President (Research and International).

“The COVID-19 pandemic is multifaceted, and our response to it must be equally so.”

From engineering and architecture to food security, here’s a small sampling of stories about how �Ӱ�ԭ�� faculty are gearing up to help.

Dr. Robot

Practising medicine wasn’t meant to be an occupational hazard, but hundreds of thousands of health-care workers have already been infected by COVID-19 globally, and the pandemic is far from over. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professor Mojtaba Ahmadi wants to help these workers stay safe by developing a robot that lets doctors assess people remotely, so they can maintain distance while treating COVID-19 patients.

“It’s an intelligent telepresence device that allows remote presence, but it’s also able to assist with certain tasks,” says Ahmadi.

The device enables live video communication between a patient and a doctor in another room. It is equipped to take a patient’s vital signs, including heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation levels, which can be an indicator of declining health.

Prof. Mojtaba Ahmadi

The unit is remote controlled and omnidirectional, so it can navigate cluttered hospital environments. Initially, this work started as part of an undergraduate capstone project led by Ahmadi, rooted in his research on medical robotics, but the pandemic created additional urgency, so it has become the main focus for three grad students.

“We should have a physical robot before the end of the year,” he says, “and we’re hoping to do some tests in the hallways at �Ӱ�ԭ�� and see how it works. We want to get feedback on the user interface, because that’s how it’s controlled. After that, we hope to make a clinical version of the robotic system that can be used in a hospital and help keep health-care workers safe.”

Safe Shopping

Sleek minimalist lines and well-ventilated airy spaces are a hallmark of modern architecture, but modern buildings don’t only look clean — they have provided sanitary living conditions on an unprecedented scale.

“There is a way to read modern architecture as a reaction to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and multiple tuberculosis outbreaks around the same time,” says architecture professor Zach Colbert.

“Open spaces, window walls, mechanical ventilation and building codes are all partly responses to public health concerns. Now that there is another major health crisis, I’m really curious about how architecture and urban design will respond.”

Prof. Zach Colbert

Colbert received a grant to explore how architectural interventions can help businesses adapt to COVID-19. Some changes are relatively easy to implement, such as touch-free doorknob alternatives and using antimicrobial materials. Others involve more substantive changes, including novel ventilation strategies and making greater use of outdoor spaces.

Some industries are better suited to adaptation than others. Restaurants have struggled, but for cities themselves, there might be a silver lining. As streets incorporate more patios, they become more lively and walkable.

“We needed pedestrian streets long before the pandemic,” says Colbert.

“They promote a healthy urban lifestyle. For architects, there is a real opportunity to take a leadership role and consider how public life can still be excellent, even when a two-metre radius is maintained.”

Autistic Adaptation

More and more autistic students are enrolling at universities worldwide, but many experience challenges with traditional classroom-based courses that were developed to meet the needs of the non-autistic majority. The pandemic has forced the rapid adoption of new learning platforms and online tools, and this provides an opportunity to assess whether some of these tools could work better for autistic students than traditional teaching methods.

Prof. Natasha Artemeva

Professor Natasha Artemeva from �Ӱ�ԭ��’s School of Linguistics and Language Studies is studying how autistic students have adapted to the changes caused by COVID-19 and, with speech pathologist and PhD candidate Jacquie Ballantine, is conducting interviews with autistic students, non-autistic students and instructors.

“Autistic students are usually asked to produce work and communicate according to a non-autistic way of being,” says Artemeva, who wants to use this unique moment to identify which adaptive course delivery strategies autistic students prefer, with the aim of understanding what steps can be taken to improve the retention of autistic students in the future.

“There are some autistic students who find large lecture halls and crowded campus spaces exhausting,” says Ballantine, “and they’re telling us that the changes caused by COVID have removed some of the anxiety and stress of being surrounded by so many people.”

Healthy Hospitals

Hospitals have put strict cleaning protocols in place to prevent coronavirus transmission, but they have not yet been able to evaluate how well these protocols work.

Prof. Alex Wong

“In a health-care setting, if you have sick patients coughing and sneezing, they can expel droplets that contain the coronavirus on the floor, railings, elevator buttons and door handles,” says biology professor Alex Wong, who received a grant to develop and validate protocols for detecting the virus in health-care settings.

The most direct application for Wong’s research will be for hospital cleaning, and whether there are areas or pieces of equipment that should be cleaned more frequently. But the same techniques could also help determine if the virus lingers in outdoor public spaces, and even whether the airborne virus is circulating in ventilation systems.

“We’ll be sampling in both low-density and high-density areas,” says Wong, who also received an NSERC grant for the development of an ultraviolet light-based decontamination system for N95 masks.

“If we turn up a bunch of positive samples areas where there is not a lot of traffic from the coronavirus ward, it could suggest that there are other mechanisms of transmission.”

Farm to Table

When the pandemic struck, Canada’s food systems were disrupted. Gallons of milk were dumped and thousands of chickens were slaughtered. Large industrial farms suffered major COVID outbreaks. Nearly 1,000 employees at one Alberta beef processing plant contracted the virus. Hundreds of temporary foreign workers in Ontario and Quebec tested positive.

“Nobody’s saying we should get rid of industrial farms, but we also need to find ways to support smaller farms,” says communications professor and food systems specialist Irena Knezevic.

Prof. Irena Knezevic

“They provide resilience when there are shocks. It’s a conversation that’s been going on for years in food systems research, but it was often treated as a bit of a pipe dream. With the pandemic, these issues are starting to become part of the public discourse.”

Knezevic was awarded a grant to study the pandemic’s impact on consumer purchasing habits. She’s working with researchers from Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Institute for Sustainable Food Systems to collect data from B.C., Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. One survey was conducted over the summer and a follow-up will determine whether the changes consumers made continued.

“We’re looking at how access to food has changed and trying to understand if people are able to discern between industrial food and smaller-scale alternatives,” says Knezevic.

“We want to understand where people are purchasing food and whether they’re supporting smaller producers. We want to know how people are accessing food in practical terms, but also whether a certain set of values is represented in their purchasing habits.”

Viral Defence

There has been plenty of buzz about a possible vaccine for COVID-19, but it is entirely possible that researchers will devise effective treatments before a vaccine is ready.

Prof. Ashkan Golshani

Biology professor Ashkan Golshani is developing peptides — chains of amino acids — intended to interfere with the reproduction of SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Golshani is working with researchers at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and University of California San Francisco to design peptides that bind to a protein tied to the reproduction of the virus. This would prevent the virus from replicating and causing the heavy viral loads that are often present in the most severe forms of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, fellow biology researcher Kyle Biggar and Systems and Computer Engineering professor are also working on peptide treatments. They’re seeking to prevent the virus from interacting with humans.

Green’s lab is using algorithms to model how the virus interacts with its host, while Biggar’s lab will be testing potential treatments identified by the algorithms with the aim of developing peptides that prevent these interactions from occurring at all.

—
Raven Magazine

If These Walls Could Talk

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:58:18 +0000

Linda Grussani is an Indigenous art curator with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from �Ӱ�ԭ��. After working at the Canadian Museum of History for three years, she went back to school in 2019 to continue her PhD in cultural studies at Queen’s University, looking at Indigenous representation in museums.

Her husband, , became Ottawa’s first Black city councillor by winning a byelection in Rideau-Rockcliffe in April 2019. King has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in communication from �Ӱ�ԭ��.

He got to know Grussani almost 25 years ago when they studied together for the final exam of a first-year film studies class, and they became closer over a summer of email correspondence in the early dialup era of the internet. In this new regular feature in Raven, we explore the intertwined professional and personal lives of a couple with strong connections to the university.

Linda Grussani and Rawlson King

Like many people, you’re both working at home these days. What has that been like?

King: It’s good that we don’t have kids because we’re both really busy all the time. We live in a neighbourhood in my ward in a reasonably sized townhome with two primary bedrooms. This gives us both de facto offices. My busiest days go from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., talking to people in the community and to staff from my office and the city, and sometimes popping out for brief physically-distanced meetings. The frustrating thing for me, of course, is that as a politician you want to be out talking and listening to people directly. But these are abnormal times. I’m not going to City Hall in the morning and travelling around Ottawa for meetings, but instead am having meeting after meeting electronically.

Grussani: Rawlson’s easier for me to find right now. In the morning, I’ll ask, “What’s your schedule like?” and “Do you have time for lunch?” Because we have the privilege and luxury of having two separate workspaces, we’re not together throughout the day, so when we are together, we actually want to see each other. I’ve taken on a lot of the cooking since we’re not eating out much and am getting the chance to experiment. I have this flexibility because of my studies. I’m basically reading, writing and participating in online lectures and workshops for seven or eight hours a day.

King: Even if it lacks the intimacy of dialogue in the community, we’ve still been able to do amazing things, especially around support for vulnerable people. My office secured an emergency $40,000 investment from the city for the community resource centre in my ward that provides food bank services to vulnerable residents. I also successfully pushed for race-based and socio-economic data on COVID-19 and advocated for more testing in vulnerable neighbourhoods. And my office has supported innovative, grassroots-driven initiatives that include a project that purchases food from local businesses and gives it directly to the food bank. I get wrapped up in these kinds of things and try to ensure they get the support they need from the city.

Grussani: Last March, when lockdown began, I was sort of numb. Then I went into planning mode. I ordered a hydroponic garden and a seed sprouting system and revived a sourdough starter that had been languishing in the fridge. I began drawing on the teachings I had received from my parents. My mom is from the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation; my father came to Canada from Italy in 1960. They have both passed on, but I found myself channelling the things they had taught me. My mother was an accomplished seamster and left me her sewing machine. Prior to COVID, I had not been able to bring myself to learn how to use it. COVID gave me the motivation to take it upstairs and I taught myself how to use it in one day and started sewing masks. I’m also channelling my father’s gardening prowess. Growing up we had a large garden and he put a lot of effort into growing the produce he missed from Italy that you couldn’t find in Ottawa 40 years ago. It seemed like my mind just went, “OK, we’re going to grow and make things now.”

It must be surreal to be doing all of these things — some of which are stressful and demanding — from home.

King: Ottawa is still in a state of emergency. The city had to transition the majority of its 17,000 employees to remote work and then continue on with the business of the city. I give credit to city staff because we didn’t see any disruption of essential services. The garbage was picked up, we had power, we had water services. We were continuing operations while dealing with the biggest public health emergency in a century. There are other challenges that we’re focused on, including social justice issues, transit and a range of health issues. I read a report every morning that tells me how many people are sick and how many people have died. I need to balance these concerns this position to help improve my community. So, yes, it is more work and it’s way more stressful, but that’s the nature of this role. And we are making progress, even though there’s a pandemic. In June, . There have been demonstrations around criminal justice and racial issues in our city and across North America and there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done.

Grussani: Even before the pandemic began, I had been seeking and building online communities so that I could work from home and not feel like I was missing everyday contact. I joined a writing group in January with women from all over the world. Even if it’s on Zoom, it’s important to have a space to talk about our experiences and share concerns. The women I write with are in South Africa, Europe, the U.K. and U.S., and despite our geographic differences, we’re all united with the same goal: completing our PhDs during these uncertain times. Within online Indigenous communities, there have also been a wealth of online workshops and conversations bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous people together. It was such a comfort at the beginning of the pandemic to participate in beading circles, cooking demonstrations and virtual pow wows and to feel connection, despite our shared isolation.

What do you think the next few months will hold for you?

Grussani: I’m working on two projects that I’m hoping will help Indigenous arts communities. One is with the Hnatyshyn Foundation to develop a national Indigenous art market event, which we’re planning to bring to Ottawa. It will be an opportunity for artists to promote their work and receive recognition and support. It’s early and we’re still looking for funding partners, but we’re envisaging a two-day event late next year or in early 2022. The other project is organizing an Indigenous Archives Summit for fall 2021 with the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and other partners. I’m also working on my dissertation, learning more about bead sewing — and trying to keep that sourdough starter alive!

King: There is no shortage of things to keep me busy. The anti-racism initiatives we’re working on as a city are timely and necessary. We’re pushing for equity of opportunity and equity of outcomes for all people, especially when they’re dealing with services around employment, economic development, youth and health. I think we’re really at an inflection point of meaningful change. We’ve seen a sliver of change but we’re heading in the right direction. Dealing with so many important and interesting issues, I don’t have time to get cabin fever. There’s less delineation between work and personal time. That might not be the healthiest thing, but I don’t feel like I’m constrained within these walls, though I am looking forward to when we’ve moved beyond the need for social distancing and have a greater semblance of normalcy. One of my targets is the opening of that Indigenous art market in 2021. Hopefully we can hold a celebratory event in my ward that I could attend and maybe, just maybe, speak at. If we get to that point, I’ll be very pleased.

—
Raven Magazine

Nascency

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:57:13 +0000

I was born for the second time on September 20, 2014. In a faux grass colosseum, with five seconds remaining in what would go on to define much of what I am, or was, quarterback Jesse Mills heaved an oblong piece of leather into the sky and . As one-twelfth of the offensive unit on the �Ӱ�ԭ�� , we did the improbable — winning the annual against our rivals at the University of Ottawa in a dramatic dying seconds comeback — and my new identity took shape. Nate Behar was a football star now. A boisterous and arrogant one. It was not a complex role to assume, nor a mask I ever struggled to don.

If that game was my birth, then the 2017 CFL draft was my high-school graduation. Selected fifth overall by Edmonton, I spent two years playing wide receiver out west. Then came free agency and I returned to Ottawa, proud and excited, to join the . Yet 2020 has chosen a new path for us all. Like so many on this planet, my livelihood has been put on pause while we recoil and recover as a society from the ongoing earthquake that is COVID-19. A football player with no season on the horizon. So who am I?

The first time I was born, it was to an Israeli mother and a Jamaican father in London, Ontario. I was darker than the vast majority of my city. Vast majority. My father had the mind and soul of an artist; my mother had the heart and capacity for love of a goddess. But as we all know, that’s not always enough. So she raised me in London, and he coached me on from Toronto. I started football at age six, enthused and motivated. Then it happened.

Nathanial Behar-Walker

I was taught as a nine-year-old how Black athletes are seen. I learned from four opponents my age one brisk evening, on the field that until then had been my safe place, that the answer is a nigger. They taught me with loud voices and wry smiles, surrounding me and thrusting the word deep into my heart, to ensure that time wouldn’t soften the jagged edge of their dagger. So how then are the Black men and women of sport to see themselves in a society absent of their sport? A society that puts its knee to the throat of those who look like you, a society that lets you die disproportionately in the hands of health-care workers, a society that locks you away quicker, for less, over and over again. Who can we be when, even while thousands cheer us on, we strain to feel valued past the price of admission? There’s no single blanketing answer, because we are not a hegemonic people. But the one clear answer is that we cannot be silent.

The third time I was born was a long and laborious delivery. The birth certificate reads June 2020, but conception occurred over years of experienced microaggressions, macroaggressions and the online murder-porn stream of Black bodies. Without the physical and emotional outlet of football to bury my head into — a coping mechanism I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve used too often — I saw that silence was no longer an option. As the child of an artist and a goddess, I began to respond the only way I knew how. With words. Sometimes in this form, written in , and sometimes in .

No person of a subjugated race wants to grow into an expert on race due to their own subjugation. But as we’ve all been taught in 2020, the universe does not care one iota for what you do or do not want.

This is who I am now. Outspoken and unapologetically me, which is to say unapologetically Black. But not a day goes by that I don’t miss the boy who lived for nine peaceful years unaware that he was seen as less to some for his pigment. And every day, I look forward to the time where all three of me can exist together — looking on at a world that accepts and values me, screaming in joy in my safe space on the field, and writing about a society that invests its energy into love and creativity. But until then, I write in the face of the storm we collectively stare into, as 2020 tests us again and again. Reborn.

—
Raven Magazine

Surround Sound

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:55:08 +0000

Jesse Stewart is an amateur. He’s a multi-talented performer and composer, sure, as well as a Juno Award-winning percussionist and a music professor at �Ӱ�ԭ��. And he has built more instruments than he can count, including a xylophone made of ice and another from books.

But Stewart is an amateur, nonetheless, in the truest sense of the word: a devotee, an admirer. He is in a steady state of awe at the melodies and rhythms hidden inside everything, just waiting to be tapped out.

Under the banner of his interdisciplinary (WAAM) project, Stewart has long sought collaborators among people who have limited opportunities to make music. His latest creation, WAAM WEB — 48 aluminum discs built into a modular wooden frame, and an app to play them — is a natural progression in an increasingly digital world, allowing Stewart to orchestrate inclusive online jam sessions.

Prof. Jesse Stewart

The largest disc is as wide as a yoga ball; the smallest has the diameter of a grapefruit. Mallets triggered by electromagnetic strikers are poised over the grey metal gongs, waiting for a command from … anyone, really. Which is the point.

“Music has the capacity to bring people together,” he says, “even when it is mediated by computers and the internet.”

In the Before Times, Stewart was doing just that across the �Ӱ�ԭ�� campus and beyond. He regularly staged pop-up interactive music installations and worked, for example, with patients at Ottawa’s Saint-Vincent Hospital who had limited motor control.

Because it’s likely that hospitals and care facilities will be the last places to reopen to non-essential activities, Stewart applied to the university’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Research Grants program to get the band back together in a unique way.

Stewart’s first few weeks of coronavirus quarantine consisted of recovery and rediscovery. After a successful operation to remove a benign brain tumour in February, .

The idea was to offset bad news and boredom and to practice doing what he loves: making music out of anything, from mixing bowls and saw blades to bicycles, floor tiles, canoe paddles and even rock core samples. (Stewart once performed a concert using a cardboard box.)

Next, with the COVID grant, he built the WAAM WEB prototype and tuned the four dozen gongs. Not only does Stewart believe that anything can be a musical instrument, he’s also convinced that anyone can be a musician, no matter their skill level or abilities.

WAAM WEB’s online interface allows people to interact and control the percussion system 24 hours a day. Shriya Satish, a �Ӱ�ԭ�� computer science master’s student, designed the instrument’s interface with a video game engine, and local graphic designer firm helped with coding.

Players can tap or click on their computers and hear the notes made by the gongs through a live multi-camera video feed. People who can’t move a mouse or touch a screen can participate via Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) software, which allows users to play sounds and musical phrases through movement and gestures.

AUMI was developed in 2006 by American composer and improvisor Pauline Oliveros, a good friend of Stewart’s who passed away in 2016. The tool is used by musicians and educators throughout North America to let children and adults with disabilities improvise music.

One of the big questions about online musicmaking is whether it can build bridges between disparate populations. “To what extent,” wonders Stewart, “can it actually foster a sense of community that’s not based on sameness but rather on difference?”

When it’s ready later this year, WAAM WEB will allow people young and old, with diverse bodies and minds, from different backgrounds, to interact musically with one another. Non musicians who have never played an instrument might think, “Oh, I’m making this sound.”

But Stewart will likely smile and say, “No, you’re making music.” Anyone can be a musician, after all. Even an amateur.

—
Raven Magazine

Practice Makes Perfect

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:54:13 +0000

The melodic rhythm of basketballs bouncing and running shoes squeaking on the hardwood floor reverberates through the Ravens’ Nest gym in Alumni Hall on an early September afternoon. But when the masked 41-year-old speaks, the sounds go silent mid-pivot.

Even though the new head coach of the �Ӱ�ԭ�� , has yet to lead her squad into a game — and may not do so for some time, amid one of the most unconventional starts ever to a coaching job — the players’ respect is already apparent.

Sinclair, who had been behind the University of Victoria Vikes’ bench for eight years, started at �Ӱ�ԭ�� on May 1. She was introduced by video from the west coast and oversaw online team meetings and individual fitness workouts from remote until August, when players were permitted to begin practicing.

Coach Dani Sinclair

They can remove their masks when they’re on the court — Sinclair keeps hers on — but must maintain distance from their teammates. Fortunately, the gym has eight hoops, so there’s plenty of room to spread out, and the balls are sanitized after each session.

The backdrop to these safety protocols, of course, is Ontario University Athletics’ decision to , in line with provincial public health guidelines.

Because practices are an hour shorter than they used to be and players cannot scrimmage, Sinclair is instead focused on basketball fundamentals: shooting, passing and ball handling. She also has more time to analyze video with the team and discuss strategy.

“We haven’t got bogged down by what we can’t do,” says Sinclair.

“Timelines are different, but I can still plan a season, and we’ll continue to challenge our athletes in whatever ways possible. We usually have to balance skill work with putting in team systems. Now there’s a real opportunity for these women to get better both offensively and defensively.”

The ability to build competitive spirit — even in this stifled environment — has defined Sinclair throughout her basketball career.

Growing up across the street from the University of Guelph, her family would rent out their basement to students. One of those students, Caroline Kealy, played varsity basketball and helped coach Sinclair’s Grade 8 team. Kealy taught Sinclair how to shoot and instilled a love of basketball while she practiced every day on her driveway.

“I played every sport I could until I was out of high school, but I was always pulled just a little more to basketball,” says Sinclair, who was a national rookie of the year and a provincial all-star at McMaster University for three seasons before transferring to Victoria, where she captained the Vikes to a national championship in 2002- 2003 and was named a first-team All-Canadian in 2003-04.

“I love how many different skills are involved and love the pace of the game. There are so many nuances; if you want to be the best, you can never stop working on your game. I loved that idea as a player and still do as a coach. The opportunity for growth is infinite.”

Sinclair, who had wanted to be a teacher as a kid, began coaching with Basketball BC in 2004. A string of assistant roles, including stints at Dalhousie University and with the national women’s team at the 2011 Pan American Games, paved the way to her head coaching position in Victoria.

The Vikes women’s basketball program is incredibly successful — winning a record nine national titles — but Sinclair was drawn to �Ӱ�ԭ�� by the opportunity to help develop a team that captured its first Canadian championship in March 2018 and to work with director of basketball operations Dave Smart.

“There are very few opportunities for professional development in this job, and I don’t see much better than working with Dave,” says Sinclair, who moved her three young sons across the country to come to Ottawa and has relatives within driving distance.

“It’s a good fit for me because I’m also pretty intense as a coach. I have experience working in a program where there were extremely high expectations not just of success, but of working hard to earn success.

“I wholeheartedly believe that sports can develop resiliency and character in a way that not many other experiences can. I’ve benefited so much from basketball and still do today, and I love seeing how that gets passed on.”

No wonder the players stop dribbling and shooting to listen closely when their newfound masked mentor speaks.

—
Raven Magazine

Since We Last Spoke

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:46:45 +0000

Akintunde Akinleye, “Shifting Perspectives,” page 30

A former turned anthropology PhD candidate at �Ӱ�ԭ��, was planning to spend much of this year in the Republic of Benin conducting research on the Vodun religion. Instead, remaining in his native Nigeria, Akinleye is documenting how people are coping with restrictions on movement and questioning power relations between the state and religious groups in a pluralistic society where some people believe coronavirus is God’s punishment for the sins of humanity. “The lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus in Nigeria,” he says, “opens a fresh perspective in my doctoral fieldwork and as an anthropologist-in-training.”

Charlotte Smith, “Eye of the Needle,” page 56

Sociology master’s student Charlotte Smith, who is doing research on and with homeless youth, has found it difficult to concentrate on writing her thesis when confronted with so many immediate needs in the community — things she can contribute to in practical ways. Since last spring, she has been delivering food, phones, tablets, art supplies and other helpful and necessary items to homeless and precariously housed youth she knows through her advocacy and activism networks, an inspiring volunteer effort that earned Smith a and local arts and culture blog Apt613. “We can all be kind and listen to one another,” she said in an interview on CBC radio, “and really listen to the needs of our neighbours.”

Michael Runtz, “Paragon of the Air,” page 7

Winding up his sabbatical, �Ӱ�ԭ�� biology professor and naturalist Michael Runtz and his partner Britta Herrmann have immersed themselves in “the reality of nature” just about every day since the pandemic began. “When out in the wilds, every sound, every motion and every aroma absorbs my attention,” says Runtz. “I feel exhilarated and stimulated by the never-ending stream of discoveries, many familiar and always new. Nature relieves me of all stress and keeps me sane and profoundly fulfilled.” But this wasn’t idle bliss for Runtz. He photographed rare birds and mammals (such as white-tailed jackrabbits and woodland caribou) in western Ontario and eastern Quebec, released his 14th book () and for the 27th time led the , albeit this year as a virtual online event. See more of his pics at .

Shelby Lisk, “Amplifying Untold Stories,” page 14

, the at �Ӱ�ԭ�� , has had a busy few months. She took a podcasting and Indigenous protocols course, produced and hosted a show about the Haudenosaunee sovereignty movement (which includes her own family and community) and did interviews with industry professionals for TVO about how Indigenous stories are told in journalism. Lisk also contributed to a major October story marking the first anniversary of TVO’s Indigenous languages translation project and, stepping away from her main beat, did a photo story about the resurgence of drive-in theatres over the summer. “You pull into a field surrounded by the golden rays of a summer sunset, park your car in front of the big screen, and tune your radio to the right station,” she writes, “anxiously waiting for the sun to go down.”

—
Raven Magazine

Book Excerpts

jesseplunkett — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:43:34 +0000

Reality Fiction: �Ӱ�ԭ�� alumnus Saleema Nawaz’s new novel eerily predicts the pandemic

It was ten minutes before the start of his shift and Elliot was hungry. Half of the businesses in Washington Heights had shut down in early October, but the restaurant closures were the biggest pain in the ass. Elliot had been forced to revive cooking skills he’d repressed since college: scrambled eggs, pasta, sloppy joes. There was a booming commerce in food delivery for intrepid couriers, but sitting and waiting at home reminded him too much of his quarantine. Now even the grocery aisle at the drugstore was picked over. He leaned down to inspect a lone instant ramen bowl on the bottom shelf while a woman in a purple raincoat edged over to move away from him. He noticed she had peanut butter and pickles in her basket, and his stomach spasmed.

The centre display of Halloween candy at the front of the store was the one thing left untouched. Usually there’d be slim pickings the day after Halloween, but this year the mayor had called off trick-or-treating — just in case there was anyone living under a rock somewhere who still wanted their kids to go door to door in the midst of a pandemic.

Elliot grabbed a fifty-piece variety box with Kit Kats and Milk Duds. Better to get fat than to starve.

Bryce loved Kit Kats. Elliot’s partner had come down with ARAMIS [Acute Respiratory and Muscular Inflammatory Syndrome] after they’d worked a quarantine relief shift at a big apartment building with sixty confirmed cases. Quarantine relief was a constantly evolving role that entailed food delivery, warning off visitors, and, increasingly, issuing tickets to people registered under a Q-notice who refused to stay home. Though quarantining was technically still voluntary, the city’s top medical advisors had recommended enforcement given the long incubation period of the virus. For police officers like Elliot, this meant trying to strike a delicate balance between respecting the personal liberty of thousands, and guarding against the potential damage that could be wrought by a single infected individual on an ordinary day. What happened to Bryce was a reminder of how badly — and easily — things could go wrong. A feverish, stir-crazy woman adamant on leaving the building had pulled off his mask and coughed in his face to prove she wasn’t infected. Forty-eight hours later, Elliot had watched as her body was carried out in a biohazard bag, while Bryce stayed home under his own Q-notice. A week later, he was symptomatic. Public visiting hours at all hospitals had been suspended, although according to the latest daily update from Bryce’s wife, he was still conscious but breathing with a ventilator.

The self-checkout kiosk was slow; in the store’s far corner, an idle cashier blinked up at a wall-mounted television blaring ongoing coverage of the deadly aftermath of the big fundraising concert in Vancouver. Even when people were trying to do the right thing, Elliot thought, things could still go spectacularly wrong. He stood well back from the person ahead of him in line. It was no longer considered polite to get closer than three feet of someone, though it made for some unruly queues that nettled his sense of public order. Behind him, there was a scraggly row of gloved and masked customers extending all the way into the shampoo aisle.

Everyone in line, Elliot realized, looked like they were steeling themselves for the worst.

Excerpted from a chapter set in November 2020 in by . Copyright © 2020 by Saleema Nawaz. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Looking in the Mirror

Hate has a name. Hate has a face. Hate has an address. It lives in Canada. The Ku Klux Klan’s more than one-hundred-year presence in Canada demonstrates how hate lived and flourished and still endures in the nation sometimes known as the Peaceable Kingdom. Our neighbours were partly to blame, but Canadians can also blame themselves.

“Because we believe that it can’t happen here, we are too hesitant to talk about the way in which some people — and politicians — are already admiring the reflection they see when they look south,” novelist Alexi Zentner wrote in the Globe and Mail in the summer of 2019. “We think of virulent hatred as a thing that comes from the history books. And yet, the history books are coming to life again.”

The challenges of writing a book on the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Canada go beyond creating a narrative. There is the concern that to write about hate is to condone it. To write about the leaders and their followers runs the risk of glorifying them or ridiculing them or magnifying or minimizing their ideas and impact. The odious reality of the Ku Klux Klan and its imitators over the decades speaks for itself. We need to confront that reality.

From the preface of (Formac Publishing, 2020), by Allan Bartley, an adjunct political science professor at �Ӱ�ԭ��.

Breaking Barriers

My master’s thesis, on the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), between Canada, the United States and Mexico, on Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean, was published in book form, which is how my friends in Grenada found it. My goal in all this effort was a worthwhile and stable career with the government of Canada, and particularly its international development agency (CIDA). Before I could apply for work in international development, I was persuaded by another branch of the Canadian government to manage an anti-racism campaign, which I did for three years in the early 1990s. I then turned my attention to the field in which I was trained, joining CIDA and working on environmental projects in several developing countries, including Eritrea, Ethiopia, India and Thailand.

While there, I was approached by Caricom (short for Caribbean Community) consultants who were formulating options for dealing with NAFTA’s impact on the islands. There was anxiety among English-speaking Caribbean nations that they would be left out in the cold as North America consolidated its trade. My thesis had argued that the appropriate response for the Caribbean region was to integrate its own trade. Otherwise, it would always be waiting for handouts from so-called developed countries. The issue was right up my alley.

From (Southerland House, 2020), by — the first Black woman to win the Miss World Title, who later served as Grenada’s High Commissioner to Canada and earned a master’s degree in political science at �Ӱ�ԭ��.

—
Raven Magazine