Dark Laboratory is a collective at the intersection of scholarship, artistic praxis, storytelling, and non-profit local community-driven engagement that centers and Black and Indigenous histories and futures in New York State by way of its land. Animated by two central aims – racial ecological justice and immersive storytelling – we approach debates about stolen lands and stolen life at the crossroads of what it means to be part of the University in relation to the surrounding ecology of rural communities.

The Poetic Justice project digitizes the process of poetry to encourage students engaging with creative and critical thinking online during the COVID-19 Crisis. 

This project, spearheaded by the Cornell English Department and current graduate students and faculty at two local community colleges, aims for PhD students in the humanities to learn about the pleasures and challenges of teaching at community colleges.

A mixed method approach of both quantitative data analysis and personal interviews with local residents will not only help to identify harmful housing patterns, but also highlight the challenges faced by low-income and Black Ithacans and what the community is doing to combat detrimental trends and policies.

The overall aim of the project is to assess the extent of the archives of local history centers, strengthen existing relationships with staff and librarians, and explore the possibilities for collaboration between these centers.

As part of the ongoing Rural Humanities Initiative focusing this year on Rural Black Lives, The Learning Farm Podcast is an attempt to analyze and stimulate discussion around a highly relevant and important topic: food segregation and racial injustice in the agricultural-industrial complex.

The goal of this project is to share Latin American and U.S. Latino culture with the general community through educational artistic activities.

An initiative offering activities, practices, language, visions and values of what it means to survive and thrive as an artist and what it means to have a thriving arts sector and eventually, thriving communities.

Working with local schools and other organizations, the project entails giving teachers and students storytelling, media, and design skills to address issues in an informed and compelling manner.

The Cornell Farmworker Program seeks recognition for farmworker’s contributions to society and their acceptance and full participation in local communities.

Collaborative excavation of a Seneca Haudenosaunee town site occupied from approximately 1688 to 1715. Archaeological, textual, and cartographic data from this site documents cultural changes in the history of a single community.

This project integrates independent scientific dating with humanities scholarship in order to obtain an accurate and more neutral timeframe better constructed for the communities and region of NE North America.

Community Partnership Grants pair Cornell graduate students with a regional organization to support a campus-community collaborative public humanities project.