Grad Student Lunch Seminar: Seattle’s Third Places, with Ash Kopetzky

Ash Kopetzky, a fourth-year graduate student in City and Regional Planning, will explore vacancy as a social and spatial condition in Seattle’s Chinatown–International District and Pioneer Square. The project seeks to understand how speculation, displacement, and uneven development shape neighborhood change, while also attending to how residents, small business owners, and communities sustain belonging, memory, and care amid urban transformation.

The Graduate Student Lunch Seminar is a recurring forum for graduate students connected to the Center to share their research and receive substantive, multidisciplinary feedback in a supportive setting. Each seminar features one fellow presenting their current work, creating space for the kind of engaged, cross-disciplinary conversation that enriches scholarship and strengthens intellectual community within the Center.

All are welcome, and undergraduate fellows are especially invited to attend, making the seminar a bridge across stages of academic development. For undergraduates weighing whether to pursue graduate study, these sessions offer something rare: an honest, up-close view of how research actually unfolds, alongside the chance to learn from near-peers navigating that path.

Lunch seminars take place from 12–1:30pm at the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures at 235 Garden Street (3rd Floor, CCC Building). Lunch will be provided free of charge. Please register in advance to let us know you’re coming and tell us if you have any food allergies we should be aware of.