SFUCOVNET reflections and recaps – Fall 2020

Back in February, Diane had the chance to give a 10-minute presentation on the story of the SFU COVID-19 Community Resilience Network at the 2021 International University Social Responsibility Summit. Check it out.

We were honored to have SFU President Dr. Joy Johnson as our last call guest, discussing SFU’s role in transformational change. The dialogue was short and rich, offering inspiration for the kinds of changes we might start to make.

Ele Chenier, President, SFU Academic Women and Julia Smith, Research Associate at SFU, joined us for a conversation about how radical inclusion might address the issue of women academics falling behind.

Thank you to our guest speaker this week, Kim Van Der Woerd, Founder of Reciprocal Consulting, an award-winning and leading Indigenous-run consulting firm specializing in program evaluation and research. Kim joined us for a dialogue on the colonial nature of current systems of research and evaluation, exploring how to transform these systems.

This week saw a focus on the position in which precarious instructors find themselves in the post-pandemic academy. To help us better understand this point, our guest speakers Anis Rahman, Asst. Prof University of Washington and Nicole Stewart, sessional faculty at UFV and term instructor at SFU offered a raw look into the lives of precarious instructors, highlighting fears concerns and possible solutions.

This week we were grateful to be joined by Mitchell Reardon and Emma Clayton Jones from Happy City in a conversation about building resilience on Main Street.

This week we had a poignant discussion about the BC election and the debate held Tuesday, October 13. To dig into the issues, Janet Webber of SFU Public Square hosted Frances Bula, a respected journalist specializing in urban issues and city politics in the Vancouver region in a conversation that probed many of the issues.

This week we discussed two main topics, hosted by two participants from our network. Instead of breaking into two separate discussions, we all participated in each discussion, one after the other. This blog post will offer a brief overview of the discussion and resources shared throughout the dialogue. Thank you to everyone who attended!

Thank you to everyone who was able to attend this week’s Zoom call. I would especially like to thank Ele Chenier for leading the discussion on radical inclusion. This post will offer a quick summary of resources and links that where brought up throughout the meeting. I highly recommend taking a closer look, yourselves.

The Zoom meeting held this Wednesday, September 23, was an eventful one, thank you to everyone that attended for making it a fun discussion. This post will offer a quick summary of resources and links that where brought up throughout the meeting.