Volleyball Warriors hunt for golden spike

This is an excerpt of a piece published on the Athletics department's website.

The Waterloo Warriors men's volleyball team has already written a Hollywood-worthy script en route to the CIS Championships this season. Now, they're hoping to author a golden final act.

After claiming a silver medal at last week's OUA championships in Hamilton, the Warriors will make their first appearance at the national championship tournament in 20 years. They've been seeded 6^th in the 8-team field, and they will open their quest for a CIS title against the defending national champion Alberta Golden Bears on Thursday in Saskatoon.

"We have a good mix of seniors and sophomores that never give up on any set or point," said Waterloo head coach Chris Lawson. "They are a very talented group of guys, and it has all come together down the stretch for us."

Like any national championship tournament, the field is full of great teams from across the nation. But the team the Warriors might be thinking about most is one that's not at the tournament – the Western Mustangs.

In each of the past three seasons, Waterloo saw their bid to compete at the CIS Championships end one match short – and all three times, it was at the hands of the Mustangs. Finally, in the OUA quarterfinals on February 14, the Warriors slew the dragon and topped Western in a five-set thriller, earning a trip to their fourth straight OUA final four.

The Warriors toppled the York Lions in the OUA semifinal to punch their ticket to Saskatoon, before falling in straight sets to the McMaster Marauders in the conference championship. But when the seedings for the CIS championships were released, the Warriors were once again intertwined with the Mustangs.

Last season, Western lost the OUA championship match to the Marauders, and they were given the same 6^th seed at the national tourney. But despite the low seed, the Mustangs went on a Cinderella run to the finals, where they were eventually knocked off by Alberta in the gold medal match.

It's a bit of irony for the Warriors – for years, all Waterloo wanted to do was to beat Western. Now, they want to be like them, complete with their own run through the CIS championship tournament. But the Warriors will try to make it one step further than their rivals, and claim a national title.

The time might be perfect for the Warriors, both in the scope of their season, and their development as a program. They are a blend of seasoned veterans and young talent, perfectly suited to handle the pressures of playing on the national stage. Waterloo is also riding a hot streak in 2015, going 8-4 since the exam and holiday break – including a five-match winning streak that set up their playoff run.

Read the rest of the article on the Athletics website.

Back to top

Hear that? Students are Echoing Green

by Eugenia Xenos Anderson.

Three Waterloo students are in the semi-finals for the Echoing Green Fellowships, which bestow up to $90,000 over two years to emerging social entrepreneurs so they can launch their social endeavour.

This year, Echoing Green – a global non-profit organization that provides fellowships, seed-stage funding and strategic support to social entrepreneurs – says thousands of candidates applied for the prestigious fellowships.

The three Waterloo semi-finalists, all affiliated with St. Paul’s GreenHouse, are: 

• Christina Marchand, an Applied Health Sciences grad who is now pursuing a Master’s of Public Health at Waterloo. Her startup, Fullsoul Canada, raises money for maternity care medical kits for Ugandan hospitals so that women giving birth need not die or have their babies die from lack of sterilized and appropriate equipment.
• Ashutosh Syal and Daxal Desai, both Engineering graduates who have launched EyeCheck, a mobile app and standalone camera that aims to eliminate preventable blindness in the developing world by making vision assessments easy and accessible.
• Lexi Salt, an International Development student currently on her eight-month overseas placement in Senegal. Lexi’s project, Youth Consent Education, focuses on educating young people about consent education and rape culture.

The finalists will be announced in mid-May, when they will perform a 60-second idea pitch and be interviewed by a panel in New York City.

Back to top

Grand Commons open house today

by Jane Kolb.

Drop by and help the Department of Housing and Residences celebrate the grand opening of their new lounge space at UW Place, the Grand Commons.

What used to be the Paintin’ Place Daycare Centre at UW Place has been transformed into useable student space to study, spend time, and host events in the community.

If you’re free between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. today, head over to the Grand Commons to see the new space and sample some tasty food from the new Food Services location on site.

Back to top

Thursday's lectures and conjectures

The next event in the Gender and Equity Scholarship Series will take place today 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the Lyle Hallman Institute’s Room 1703. Professor Bryan Grimwood of Recreation and Leisure Studies will present “Disrupting ‘Nature’ and ‘Responsibility’ for Just and Sustainable Arctic Tourism.”

"Perceptions and representations of Arctic tourism that reify pristine nature tend to obscure contemporary livelihoods of indigenous inhabitants. Drawing on case study research of the Thelon River in (sub) Arctic Canada, this presentation calls into question norms associated with responsibility in nature-based tourism," says the talk's abstract. "In doing so, it seeks to open more equitable and culturally sensitive spaces within tourism's discursive arena."

Later today, Professor Kelly Hannah-Moffat of the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Centre of Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto will deliver the 2015 Jim Curtis Memorial Lecture hosted by the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies. Hannah-Moffat's talk is entitled "Moving Targets: Framing Ashley Smith’s Death in an Era of Rights, Risk and Institutional Protectionism."

The lecture "focuses on recent rights violations and deaths in custody and examines the institutional responses to these incidents to explore systemic issues of accountability, institutional accessibility, and the reframing of correctional policy and prisoner's rights" and will  examine "the subtleties of rights and accountability in punishment and concerns that can apply to a variety of public institutions. Using the specific story of Ashley Smith, it offers an analysis of how a country like Canada that sees itself as an international leader in human rights and has genuinely worked hard at integrating human rights norms into law, policy and institutional procedures, fails to ensure substantive justice consequences."

The lecture will take place at 5:30 p.m. in PAS 2083. A wine and cheese reception will follow in the PAS Psych Lounge. This is the sixth annual Jim Curtis Memorial Lecture, established in memory of James Curtis, a longtime professor in the Sociology and Legal Studies department who died in 2005.

Tonight, the latest entry in the Winter 2015 Arriscraft Lecture Series will feature Aaron Betsky, the new Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin. His lecture is entitled “Hunting and Gathering: Tactical Urbanism, Collage Architecture.” The event begins at 7:00 p.m. tonight in the Lawrence Cummings Lecture Theatre at the School of Architecture.

Tomorrow, the English Language and Literature presents Professor Bruce Robbins of Columbia University for a talk entitled "The Absence of Imagination." The lecture promises to be a discussion of constructionism, with an eye toward the thought of Immanuel Kant and theories of narrative. The lecture is scheduled to take place at 3:00 p.m. HH 150.

Also on Friday, the third Bridges Lecture, part of a series that aims to overcome the gap between mathematics and the arts, will feature guest speaker Steven J. Brams, Professor of Politics at New York University and D. Marc Kilgour, Professor of Mathematics at Wilfrid Laurier University, in a talk entitled "Mathematics and Democracy." The event takes place Friday, February 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Siegfried Hall at St. Jerome's University.

Back to top