Related Coursework

Fall 2019 Courses

Cultures and Communities

LSP 2300, LSP 4300

Conceived as a service-learning course, the centerpiece here is targeted, engaged research and arts work with Latino/a culture-related organizations in Tompkins County like Cultura! No más lágrimas, and the Latino Civic Association. The core idea is that students will learn while participating in meaningful activities that will enhance arts and culture partnerships. Faculty will provide guidelines and resources for students to work within existing projects or to develop their own ideas; community partners will provide networks and planning assistance. All students will be asked to develop a comprehensive learning portfolio on their semester's work.

Global Engagements: Living and Working in a Diverse World

ANTHR 1900

The path to global citizenship begins with a facility for navigating cultural difference. How might we engage with communities, whether here in Ithaca or across the globe, whose pasts and present understandings are fundamentally different than our own? This course is designed to help students bring global engaged learning into their Cornell education. It introduces skills that are vital for intercultural engagement, including participant-observation research, ethnographic writing, and the habits of critical reflexivity. Students will complete projects with service learning placements in the Ithaca community. They will also begin an ePortfolio as they explore their identity and engage with the international community on campus.

Introduction to Public History

AMST 2792, HIST 2792

In this course we will examine how we have come to narrate social, cultural, and political history in the United States, investigating the ways scholarly, curatorial, archival, and creative practices shape conceptions of the American past, in particular understandings of racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression and resistance. Students will build skills in historical interpretation and archival research and explore possibilities and challenges in preserving and presenting the past in a variety of public contexts—monuments, memorials, museums, historical sites, movies and television, and community-based history projects. For their final project, students will conduct original research in a digital or material archive, chosen in consultation with the instructor, to produce a draft of an exhibit, providing popularly accessible historical context and interpretation.

Migration in the Americas: Engaged Research Methods and Practice

COML 4575, COML 6375, LSP 4312, LSP 6312

This course will introduce students to basic concepts and developments related to migrants and migration in Central America, Mexico, and the United States via engaged learning and research. The course will be organized around core themes such as the challenges and ethics of working with vulnerable populations, workplaces and working conditions, oral histories/testimonios, and immigration policy and enforcement practices. Students will learn qualitative methodologies for field research. All students will practice their skills through collaboration with the Cornell Farmworker Program on priority projects identified by immigrant farmworkers.

Ways of Knowing: Indigenous and Place-Based Ecological Knowledge

AIIS 3330, AMST 3330

Based on indigenous and place-based "ways of knowing," this course (1) presents a theoretical and humanistic framework from which to understand generation of ecological knowledge; (2) examines processes by which to engage indigenous and place-based knowledge of natural resources, the nonhuman environment, and human-environment interactions; and (3) reflects upon the relevance of this knowledge to climatic change, resource extraction, food sovereignty, medicinal plant biodiversity, and issues of sustainability and conservation.  The fundamental premise of this course is that human beings are embedded in their ecological systems.

Spring 2020 Courses

Race and Social Entrepreneurship: Food Justice and Urban Reform

AMST 4033, ASRC 4330

This seminar examines the issue of food justice in Ithaca and surrounding areas and explores innovative approaches for bringing about social equity and justice in relation to food availability, access and sustainability for those on a fixed or low income.  Working in concert with community stake holders and drawing on theoretical and historical scholarship, students will work with local farmers, non-profits and community activists to learn about area organizations and experiments that have sought to make interventions. The seminar will also offer students the opportunity to conduct hands-on research in order to propose workable approaches to solving food justice issues and problems.  Our central purpose will be to understand the conditions under which attempts to move from critique to sustainable solutions succeed and fail and to look at efforts to achieve sustainable development in the context of racism and social inequality with a focus on contemporary and historical efforts to build lasting institutions or movements. 

Service Learning for Democratic Citizenship: Literature of American Social Action Movements

WRIT 4130

To what extent is civic engagement fundamental to democratic citizenship? This course seeks to answer that question by exploring the components of service learning as a discipline and to strengthen the intellectual foundation of students who wish to incorporate civic engagement into their curriculum. Students will become familiar with the history of service learning, explore competing theories of social justice and social inequality, and develop a framework for social action that exists at the juncture of theory and practice. Readings will include texts by Dewey, Freire, bell hooks, Franklin, Jefferson, Thoreau, Addams, Baldwin, King, Dorothy Day, and Fanon. Weekly seminar papers as well as a term paper through which students develop their own philosophy of civic engagement. 

Underground Railroad Seminar: Grant Writing and App Building

ASRC 3434

This course offers undergraduates a unique approach to exploring the abolition movement of central New York. It is an experiential course that includes visits to specific known underground stations as well as Harriet Tuban's residence and the William H. Seward House in Auburn, NY. It is also a community-engaged course in which students will contribute research for grant writing for two sites: the St. James AME Zion Church in Ithaca and the Howland Stone Store Museum in Sherwood, NY. Readings include some of the classic slave narratives and studies of the underground railroad. Please send a brief explanation of your interest in enrolling in this course to Professor Gerard Aching [gla23@cornell.edu]  

Minors

Community Food Systems Minor

The Minor in Community Food Systems (CFS) is a university-wide program enabling undergraduate students to engage with critical contemporary issues relating to food security, food sovereignty, and food justice. In a context of diverse goals and approaches, the CFS Minor focuses on working with community partners to collaboratively understand and develop sustainable community food systems. Students are provided with opportunities to integrate learning across courses with social, ethical,ecological, and agricultural perspectives on local food systems and participate in an experiential practicum embedded in a real-world context. Learn more about CFS here.

Crime, Prisons, Education, and Justice Minor

Students in the Crime, Prisons, Education, and Justice minor will participate in one of the most pressing civil rights challenges of the 21stcentury: ending mass incarceration and the carceral state. The classroom component gives the students the opportunity for extended critical reflection on the complex phenomena of mass incarceration. As part of the minor, students will serve as Teaching Assistants for Cornell classes in the prisons. The University has a longstanding relationship with the Cornell Prison Education Program. For many years, Cornell faculty and graduate students have enjoyed the privilege of teaching some of the most eager, appreciative, and thoughtful students they will ever encounter: the men participating in the CPEP programs in New York prisons. Learn more about the minor here.