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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
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.
High school counselors and teachers — Bring SFU and FASS to your classroom with our guest speaker opportunities!
Dumped! An Exploration of Landfills and Dump Sites
Ideal for: Human Geography, Social Justice, and Urban Studies
This presentation explores dumps and landfills as sites of hidden value. While often transported to the outskirts of cities or to neighbouring towns, the trash we dump becomes an archive and a place of life and livelihood. Garbologists examine our former lives at dump sites; biologists track their micro-ecologies; and informal recyclers clean the waste stream by picking out materials that will have a second life.
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).