For several years, Ed Baptist and Cornell students have been working with the Petersfield-Galloway Benevolent Society, a community organization in rural Jamaica, to better understand the history of the community’s relationship to wider global circuits of trade, commodification, exploitation and resistance. From colonization and slavery, to emancipation and labor struggles, to independence and then neoliberal structural adjustment, the working people of this community have repeatedly organized in the face of outside forces. Baptist uses community-engaged learning and research to support students’ understanding of how the history of one community can be different from and yet linked to their own histories of self-organization and alliances of solidarity, while also taking a historically-informed, critical look at traditional service-learning.

As a Faculty Fellow, Baptist will be adding new elements to the course and deepening the faculty-community partnership.