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For further information, please contact the FASS Coordinator, Recruitment, Community Outreach and Engagement at fass_rec@sfu.ca.

FASS in the Class: The Off-Campus Visit

High school counselors and teachers — Bring SFU and FASS to your classroom with our guest speaker opportunities! 

We have a roster of highly successful FASS graduate students who are keen to share their research and career journeys with your students. Each speaker will bring a unique perspective to their presentation and will add value to the learning experience by sharing their knowledge and expertise in a humanities and social sciences subject. 

Presentations are subject to change and limited to availability.

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Street Trees? 

Ideal for: Human Geography and Urban Studies

Are street trees part of the urban forest? What valuable services do the trees on our streets offer the city and the humans within it? As we look at street trees in the Lower Mainland, students will explore the many roles these trees play, the benefits they offer if appropriately selected, and the damage that can result if they are not.

Speaker

Kate Elliott (she/her) is an Interdisciplinary PhD student at SFU. Her past research through SFU has examined working lives of informal recyclers, cemeteries as public green space, journeys of homeless people seeking housing, and food security through community engagement. Currently, Kate is tracking the life stories of shopping carts in urban spaces. Her interest in biographies of objects ("things") is supported through membership in global biography research networks and active participation in hybrid and virtual writing groups at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing (OCLW) at Wolfson College. She is also director of Wayfinding for Restorative Methods, an initiative supported by the Low-Carbon Research Methods Group, an international collective of scholars and artists working to lower carbon in academia. A former high school teacher, Kate has been an instructor for SFU’s Continuing Studies (Urban Dirt and Object Biographies: Exploring the Secret Lives of “Things”), FASS Forward (Write-Minded), and for a graduate course in Urban Research Methods. She has worked as a public health researcher, translator, editor, and cemetery assistant. Kate holds degrees from SFU (M.Urb), the University of Ottawa (B.Ed), and UBC (BA).