Workshop
A Time for Critical Reflection & Engagement: Processes, Tools and Strategies for Challenging Conversations

November 10, 2025

Presenter: Katrina Nobles, director of conflict programs, Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution, School of Industrial Labor Relations, Cornell University

In today’s evolving academic and professional environments, the ability to engage in meaningful, inclusive dialogue is essential — within campus communities and in partnerships beyond the university. This interactive one-hour session invites participants to explore how personal reflection connects to conflict, communication and collaboration. Through experiential activities, small group discussions and real-world scenarios, attendees will learn how restorative practices and mediation techniques can strengthen dialogue in classrooms, student organizations, engaged learning and external partnerships. Participants will leave with practical strategies for critical reflection and engagement across diverse settings. This session offers a timely opportunity to build relational skills that support resilient, reflective engagement — on campus and in the wider world.

About Katrina Nobles

Katrina Nobles is the director of conflict programs for the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution at the Cornell University ILR School, designing curriculum, teaching on-campus credit-bearing courses, instructing professional and customized programs, and facilitating discussions for organizational workplace conflicts. On campus, Nobles leads the campus mediation program, which includes a partnership with the Office of the Judicial Administrator to mediate minor code of conduct violations by students. The program includes a 4-credit course and a 2-credit course to train students to be peer mediators. These students then mediate actual code violation cases. In the private and not-for-profit sectors, Nobles has worked with multiple clients to provide facilitation among conflicted teams and departments. In this area, she has also designed and provided training regarding employee relations, collaborative problem solving, cross-cultural communication, performance management, unconscious bias, mediation, facilitation, diagnosing conflict, and leading difficult and heated conversations.

Speaker Series
Restorative Practice as a Framework for Critical Reflection

Friday, September 26

During this highly interactive session, participants will learn the fundamentals of Restorative Practices, including ways to engage WITH self and others through critical reflection and inclusive process and decision-making. Participants will gain skills in circle facilitation and planning that can be incorporated into academic, community, and work team settings.

About Jeff Godowski

Jeff Godowski is an Assistant Dean at Cornell University and instructor at the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) Graduate School. Jeff was introduced to restorative practices in 2013 at the University of Vermont through one of the earliest applications of restorative practices as a community building and response framework for residential life in higher education. Since then, Jeff has implemented restorative frameworks at numerous institutions of higher education. As an instructor, Jeff facilitates in spaces where teams and individuals can practice vulnerability to understand more about themselves and others, opening doors for communication across difference. They are also currently Ph.D. Candidate in Community Research and Action at Binghamton University’s College of Community and Public Affairs, where they are researching the impact of restorative practices among students, staff, faculty, and administrators in college and university settings.

Speaker Series
How Can Community Outreach Transform Medical Students Attitudes?

March 6, 2025

Since 2015, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) School of Medicine, in collaboration with Ecuador’s Ministry of Health, has implemented a Community Outreach Program in 16 communities across the valleys of Tumbaco and Los Chillos. The program has dual objectives: outward-facing social goals, such as strengthening health promotion efforts in the community and student-focused academic objectives, including the development of technical competencies in prevention and health promotion.

The USFQ Community Outreach Program places a strong emphasis on the humanistic aspects of medicine, fostering empathy, compassion and social responsibility through hands-on engagement with the communities it serves.

Iván Palacios a faculty member of the School of Medicine, leads this ambitious program and will share with us some valuable lessons learned from its implementation.

About the speaker:
Dr. Iván Palacios, M.D., Master in Public Administration
Dr. Palacios is a professor of health prevention and promotion at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Medicine at Hofstra Northwell Health. He leads the USFQ Med Community Outreach Program and serves as Global Health director.

Speaker Series
Migrations, History, Storytelling, Teaching, Research in the Uptown Chicago Neighborhood

February 12, 2025

Speakers:
Anna Romina Guevarra, Professor and Founding Director
Co-PI, AANAPISI Initiative; Co-PI Social Justice and Human Rights Cluster
Global Asian Studies

Gayatri Reddy, Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies for Gender and Women’s Studies
Anthropology, Sociocultural and Medical
Gender and Women’s Studies

Are you curious about working with a community partner or thinking about innovative and authentic ways for students to represent and share their learning? Come learn from Drs. Anna Guevarra and Gayatri Reddy from the University of Illinois Chicago, who’ve led a unique and enduring community-engaged public history project with undergraduates, Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown Chicago, since 2017.

As an example, they “have been learning from members of the Winthrop Avenue Family” who have shared with them “stories of displacement, racism and segregation…but also of joy, community and collective care.” Drs. Guevarra and Gayatri’s students’ work highlights the power of narrative and visuality in many forms, from digital storytelling to XR/VR, community mapping, photography and more. How have they shepherded the relationships and the teaching of these successful and tricky assignments? Join us in community for lunch and a presentation.

Publication Talk
Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need

February 5, 2025

Author and speaker: Michael Hoffman, Professor Emeritus, Department of Entomology

Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need explains the causes and impacts of climate change, how it’s affecting our food and who’s working to keep the menu stocked. A typical dinner menu is used — from appetizers to desserts — to explain how a warming world is changing everything we eat. The book also features brief interviews with farmers, ranchers, fishers, educators and company managers who are on the frontline of climate change. The reader will discover many more reasons to confront this grand challenge. The book is available from Cornell University Press and anyone can use this discount code 09SAVE.

About the author: Michael Hoffmann is dedicating his life to confronting the grand challenge of climate change by helping people understand and appreciate what is happening through the foods we all love and need. He has published climate change articles in the popular press – The Hill, Fortune, Medium, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Daily News and USA Today and is lead author of Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and nNeed (Cornell Press 2021). His TEDx Talk – Climate change: It’s time to raise our voices has been well received along with the >150 climate change-related talks he has given. Mike’s life’s experiences include growing up on a one-cow dairy farm, serving in the Marines during the Vietnam War and being a father and someone’s partner for 52 years.

He held multiple leadership roles in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) including executive director of the Cornell Institute for Climate Change Solutions, director of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, associate dean of CALS, associate director of Cornell Cooperative Extension and director of the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program. He received his BS degree from the University of Wisconsin, MS from the University of Arizona and PhD from the University of California, Davis. He now holds the title of professor emeritus. He will tell the climate change story, until he no longer can.

Speaker Series
Transformative Co-Creation: Epistemologies and Strategies for Collaborative Writing with Community Partners

Speaker: Rachael Shah, Associate Professor of Writing Studies, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Our engagement partnerships often call for texts that incorporate community partner insights—from syllabi for community-based classes, to grants that secure funds, to social media posts that showcase our partnerships, to academic articles about engaged research. The way we write these texts is the way we write our partnerships themselves. What might change if we were to reimagine how these texts are produced to more deeply synthesize community and academic insights?

In this talk, Rachael Shah will draw on interviews with people who have co-created across university-community lines to explore not only the transformative potential of deep collaboration, but concrete techniques that have been used to infuse democratic ideals into the collaboration process.

Speaker Series
Reciprocity, Mutuality and Solidarity in Community Engagement

Speaker: Aurora Santiago-Ortiz, Assistant Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies and Chicane/Latine Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This talk highlights central considerations when establishing reciprocal, horizontal, and solidary community-university partnerships. By examining a case study of an interdisciplinary research course, Santiago Ortiz will delve into the ethical considerations, as well as critical dilemmas and possibilities when engaging in critical and anticolonial approaches to service learning, as well as participatory action research processes.

Publication Talk
Community-Engaged Performance Tours

Author and speaker: James Spinazzola, Barbara & Richard T. Silver ’50, MD ’53 Associate Professor, Director of Winds

Community-Engaged Performance Tours addresses the role of performance touring as a form of classroom and community engagement. Performance tours have long been a part of the collegiate and high school music ensemble experience, bringing student bands, choirs and orchestras into connection with a wide variety of audiences, venues and cultural contexts. This book presents a new approach to the performance tour that integrates touring with community engagement and service-learning.

Emphasizing reciprocity, cross-cultural exchange and global awareness, the author addresses how visiting ensembles can work with host communities instead of performing for them. The book includes student and community perspectives and case studies from the author’s experience leading university wind symphony tours in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and provides a practical and hands-on model for ensemble leaders and educators.

About the author: James Spinazzola is an active conductor, ensemble clinician, saxophonist and arranger. In addition to directing the Cornell wind program, James teaches undergraduate courses in conducting, music theory and chamber music, and he serves as faculty adviser to CU Winds, a student-driven organization devoted to the performance and promotion of wind band music.