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Steve Tu is a third-year PhD student in higher education (HE). When the old stories he lived by proved no longer satisfying, unable as they were to hold up amid crumbled plausibility structures, Steve thought the university might be a good place to find new narratives to (re)orient his life. After all, what better place—what other place—to encounter as much diversity, curiosity, and inquiry?

He loves that OISE is a place that allows for such exploration, and is especially grateful for the immense wisdom, generous instruction, and collaborative spirit of his professors in HE. They, along with the best (first-team all-star!) staff, have helped him immensely with every aspect of graduate education. He is also thankful that faculty across the University of Toronto have kindly allowed him to audit courses in gender studies, history, English, anthropology, landscape ecology, sound studies, and Indigenous place and research, all of which have helped him rethink the things he thought he knew about the world.

It was during one of these classes that his current work took root. In the spring of his first year of doctoral studies, while sitting on the lawn beneath a Sugar Maple on Philosopher’s Walk, the tree told him to change the topic of his research, which had been focused on the mutating role of the professoriate. Under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Buckner, along with his committee members Dr. Brenda Wastasecoot (Centre for Indigenous Studies) and Dr. rosalind hampton (SJE), Steve is now conducting a multispecies ethnography of the university. Believing the story of humanism to be long past its best-by date, he is seeking to hear and share the other-than-human stories (arboreal ones in particular) that are told on campus green spaces.

Steve is a SSHRC CGS-D scholar and Digital Research Alliance of Canada-funded ethnographer, a graduate fellow with the School of Cities, and affiliated with the Oxford-Penn-Toronto Environmental Humanities International Doctoral Cluster, the Centre for Urban Environments at UTM, SDGs@UofT, and DIVERT Mental Health. He is also a member of the School of Graduate Studies’ Mental Health Advisory Committee. In addition to his doctoral work, his other academic interests include philosophy of higher education, posthumanities, ecocriticism, “artificial” intelligence, post-qualitative inquiry, research-creation, terror management theory, possibility studies, anti-Asian racism, and student mental health. 

Since coming to OISE, Steve has presented his scholarship at over a dozen conferences. He was recently published in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education and has forthcoming articles in that same journal, as well as in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies and World Futures Review. He is always interested in good stories. Sometimes he tries to write them.