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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.
Urban Dirt
Ideal for: Human Geography and Urban Studies
Where do cities hide their dirt? Who performs urban "dirty" work? Why do we cover so much of the soil in our cities with pavement and asphalt, and how does this affect the quality of the dirt in our cities? This presentation will look at why the idea of "dirt" carries stigma when, as a finite resource, it is so valuable. After a quick look at organizations like the Depave movement that uncovers and cares for dirt in urban spaces, students will be invited to think about how they might care for the soil in their own communities.
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).