The Humanities Research Group will host author, academic, and activist Naomi Klein in cyber-conversation Tuesday, Jan. 26.

Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and author of the best-sellers No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000).

A senior correspondent for The Intercept; reporter for Rolling Stone; and contributor for The Nation, The Globe and Mail, and The Guardian; Klein is co-founder of the climate justice organization the Leap. Her new book, How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Earth and Each Other, will be published in February.

“We cannot think of a better time, in the midst of the shock of the COVID pandemic, and a changing of the guard across the border, to hear from this prescient and brilliant Canadian intellectual, activist, writer, and filmmaker, who has spent the last 20 years speaking to pressing issues of justice on the international stage,” said HRG director Kim Nelson. “We are thrilled to bring her to Windsor via our screen.”

She will moderate a conversation to be followed by a question-and-answer session.

“An Evening with Naomi Klein” will begin at 7 p.m. Tuesday on the Zoom videoconferencing platform. Admission is free but requires registration.

Live chat on Twitter a “pre-game” for Tuesday talk

In preparation for the event, doctoral candidate in sociology and social justice Jane McArthur will lead an interactive conversation about climate change in a live chat on the @HRGWindsor Twitter feed Friday, Jan. 22, at 7 p.m.

The #HRGWindsorPre-Game event is free. While some people have never been on Twitter, this is an excellent opportunity to learn what the platform can do. Instructions are posted are on the @UWindsor Twitter channel.

Get ready for #TGIF! In preparation for the Humanities Research Group’s - An Evening with @NaomiAKlein, UWindsor’s @JANEMCARTHUR11 will lead a Twitter feed about #ClimateAction in a Twitter chat this Friday, 7PM at @HRGWindsor https://t.co/6GRGgnkwPz#HRGWindsorPreGame pic.twitter.com/uABlI2i4Zd

— UWindsor (@UWindsor) January 19, 2021

The itinerary includes opportunities for the entire family to participate. For example, children can post videos about their wish lists for the environmental future. There will be room for retweets, quote retweets, memes, pictures, videos, and threads — in case 280 characters isn’t enough.

Isabella Anés doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t play basketball.

The 19-year-old point guard started dribbling when she was 5. She began playing competitively in elementary school in her home country of Venezuela after her gym teacher recognized her natural talent and said she was coachable. The school then sent home a note to her parents asking their permission to have little Isabella play with much older students.

The note is all she remembers.

“They attached a little paper to my wrist, stapled like a bracelet.”

This fall, Anés will join the roster of the Lancer women’s basketball team, one of five new recruits for the upcoming season. She is enrolling in the Faculty of Human Kinetics and hopes to one day become a physiotherapist, a trainer, or a strength and conditioning coach.

Head coach Chantal Vallée says she sees a great future for Anés, both athletically and academically.

“She just floored me,” said Vallée of why she recruited Anés. “It’s not just her athletic ability. I was taken aback by her maturity, her IQ, her work ethic, everything. She bases herself on very solid values. She has goals and she knows what she wants in her life.”

Anés attends a private high school in Markham, Ont. that boasts a 100 per cent university placement rate for its graduates. Her average consistently hovers around 97 per cent.

She is the captain of her school team and plays on another basketball team sponsored by Under Armour. She played on Venezuela national teams and participated in the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) South American Championship in 2015 and 2016, and in the FIBA Americas championships in Argentina the following year. In 2014, she was named most valuable player of the XIV Edition of the Cup of Latin-American Clubs.

When this year’s season was sidelined by COVID-19, Anés began putting out training videos for her teammates. She expected a handful of them to join her in the workouts. Instead, they’re nearly all participating and clamouring for her to host more.

Her goal has always been to attend university “in the north” as she calls Canada and the United States. So, at 15, she left Venezuela and moved to Witchita, Kansas on her own. She found a private boarding school there that offered her a scholarship, and she started following her dream.

Her father, meanwhile, left Venezuela for Canada where her older brother was already attending college in the Toronto area. Her mother later followed them. Anés joined them in 2019 after securing a scholarship at the J. Addison School where she is now.

Her father, who has a university degree in computer science, and her mother, who was a university-educated data analyst for a resource company in Venezuela, work as janitors. Anés lives with them in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. Her parents have one room, her brother, the other.

Anés sleeps on the living room sofa.

“It’s OK,” she says. “It’s what I have to do.”

Her defining moment, she says, came in 2019. It was the first minute of the first game of a showcase tournament in Indianapolis when she felt a pop in her knee.

“I knew it was something severe, but I didn’t want to accept it.”

She returned to Canada and found a sports doctor who sent her for an MRI. She had torn her ACL and damaged her meniscus.

With no private insurance and as a newcomer to Canada not eligible for government health care, Anés needed to find a way to get the $15,000 surgery that would save her basketball career. Her coach started a GoFundMe account that quickly raised $5,000, and Anés did research to find a surgeon who agreed to take monthly payments for the balance. Her parents skimped and saved to pay for the operation and the months of physiotherapy that followed.

“It was a setback, but it wasn’t a curse,” said Anés. “I see it as a blessing.” She was in Canada with her family rather than still back in Kansas, alone, she says optimistically. She had the support of her coaches, teachers, and teammates.

“For me, it’s an example of how throughout my entire story, everything has been aligned perfectly with what God wants me to be and the people he wants me to be surrounded with.”

Anés was playing pick-up games at George Brown College when the coach of the opposing team approached her about joining the Lancers. That coach was one of Vallée’s assistants, Nambogga Sewali.

Anés was being courted by Division 1 schools in the United States. She agreed to talk to Vallée to keep her options open.

In their conversations, Vallée offered advice on the recruitment process. A year later, when some of the problems Vallée had warned her about began to transpire, Anés called for more advice.

“She seemed to really care about what happened to me,” Anés said of Vallée. That’s when Anés came to realization UWindsor is where she should be.

“I said, ‘Coach, if you open the door for me, I’ll take it.’”

Vallée says Anés is wise beyond her years and a born leader.

“I know she wants to bring the Lancer program to new heights and I will do my best to support her, our fantastic recruiting class, and the returning players to achieve this dream together.”

Anés recently posted a video on YouTube she calls “The Next Chapter.” In it, she thanks her parents, and her coaches, friends and teammates in Canada, the United States, and Venezuela. She pulls on a Lancer sweatshirt and triumphantly announces her decision to attend UWindsor.

She said she has come to the realization that Division 1 basketball is not what’s best for her.

“My priority is to go to a place that will shape me as a human being and let me reach my full potential both on and off the court.”

Of attending UWindsor, she says, “I feel nothing but grateful, blessed, and so happy.”

—Sarah Sacheli

After a three-year hiatus, Windsor Law’s student newspaper Headnotes (formerly The Oyez) has been revived by law students and co-editors-in-chief Amanda Henderson-Jones and Anita Osmani. The shift to online learning inspired the pair to revive the student newspaper and deliver it in a new, digital format.

“As students, we've spent the past year learning how we can best adapt to the unique circumstances of online learning and with that, we’re given the chance to foster an online law student-life experience,” says Valerie Tan, the team’s director of media management.

According to Bridging the Law: Fifty Years of Windsor Law, the newspaper was originally launched in traditional print format during the spring of 1970 by student leaders who hoped it would showcase and build the reputation of the newest law school in the country. Today, the Ron W. Ianni Faculty of Law building is undergoing significant renovations, and the students hope the digital newspaper will build a stronger sense of community among the student body.

“We couldn’t have done this without the excellent, dedicated work of our student contributors and with the help and support of the Windsor Law community,” says Henderson-Jones. “With there being so many changes to the law school experience amid the pandemic, we felt as though this was the best time to bring back Headnotes, a publication that has historically brought students together.”

Assistant dean for student services Francine Herlehy welcomes the renewed publication.

“For 48 years, the Oyez was an integral part of the student experience at Windsor Law,” she says. “Written by students, for students, it provides remarkable insight into the law school experience and the issues of the day from their vantage point.”

The Headnotes team has released two issues to date featuring articles on topics ranging from international news and sports to lifestyle articles on the Zoom law school experience. View the latest issue on the Headnotes website.

—Rachelle Prince

COVID-19 has forced faculty and students to change and adapt to new ways of teaching and learning. Among the greatest challenges is re-learning to teach due to the movement from in-person to online learning.

André Narbonne is a sessional professor in UWindsor’s English department. Currently, he is teaching three classes: Writing About Literature, Western Comic Drama, and Windsor’s Literary Culture.

When Dr. Narbonne first started teaching 18 years ago, no one had a computer with them in class. Students would take note by hand, and Narbonne would measure their learning through their involvement in the class. COVID-19 has changed that and is creating an entirely different definition of a student.

Narbonne calls his classes “kitchen classes.” Many of his students have their video and mic off, and the level of interaction has diminished to black blocks on the screens.

For the first-year courses Writing About Literature and Western Comic Drama, this doesn’t lower class interaction as he has students post their thoughts on the readings in the discussion board, fostering an environment for engagement even if student faces aren’t always visible.

For his third-year classes, where discussion is supposed to be most important, he finds the ease of technology reduces the interaction. Students, rather than getting involved in the class conversation, instead post their discussion board assignments during class.

Online learning has also created new learning opportunities, however, and Narbonne has been able to introduce a series of voices from Windsor’s publishing companies that can be accessed far more easily virtually than in person.

He suggests we need to refine our definition of an online student.

How does a professor create an atmosphere that fosters online discussions when students can choose how anonymous they would like to be? Why is it that students are expected to show up for class in person and be present when we don’t ask them to be online? How is an online student defined in a way that best supports teaching and learning?

These are all questions that Narbonne proposes, and answers have yet to become clear. They will be determined by how permanent the shift from in-person to online will be.

—Bridget Heuvel

Women’s and Gender Studies is hosting sessions for Black-identified students to offer “radical collective care,” a starting point to support Black students and to address the structural deficit in care they experience.

A professor of sociology at Ryerson University, mediator Rai Reece is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist whose expertise includes Canadian Black feminism, critical race theory, anti-Black racism, punishment and misogynoir, critical feminist criminology, community-based ethnography, prison health, equity as social praxis, and abolition and activism.

These circle sessions will be held via Zoom on four Fridays: Jan. 22, Feb. 26, March 19, and April 16, from 5 to 7 p.m. Find more information and online at www.uwindsor.ca/wgst/RadicalCollectiveCare.