Fellows come from all over the university, bringing their particular passions and living out the public purpose of their discipline through teaching and researching in, with and for community.
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Blanchfield’s faculty fellows community-engaged learning project is a course taught in fall 2025 called “Architectures of Settler Colonialism, Resistance and Protection.” The course introduces students to scholarly literature from architectural history, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and other interdisciplinary fields to understand the role of the spatial disciplines in the settler colonial history of North America and the globe. Together, they learn about and discuss how landscape and the built environment have been, and continue to be, part of Indigenous practices of resistance, repair and resurgence. Students engage with their immediate surroundings — Haudenosaunee territory of what is now central New York — through community-engaged work on Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ lands in Canoga, about 45 minutes north of Ithaca. In conversation with traditional leaders of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ, students help to reimagine a barn as a space of community gathering, seed storage and youth education. In a series of workdays, students learn on the land and from Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ community members while rehabilitating the barn. They also learn from colleagues at Cornell and Indigenous Dispossession Project about the Morrill Act and its ongoing legacy at Cornell, in the region, and nationally. Through these conversations students learn long histories of Indigenous land use, dispossession and return and bring their ideas as designers to collaborative conversations with the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ community.
The purpose of this course, and the community engagement elements of it, is to expose students to the state of the field in work on Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies and architectural history while also showing them how these histories manifest and continue in the place where they currently live and learn. The course invites students to engage and grapple with legacies of dispossession and ongoing movements for sovereignty locally through writing, designing and work on the land.