All interested faculty, staff, students, alumni and community partners
See below
The Engaged Speaker Series invites visiting scholars and Cornell faculty, staff, community partners, alumni and students to learn with and from one another to advance our shared understanding of community engagement, its potential and challenges.
The Engaged Speaker Series is part of the Einhorn Center’s Engaged Conversations Series. The series is co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching Innovation.
How Can Community Outreach Transform Medical Students Attitudes?
Thursday, March 6, 2025
5 – 6 p.m.
Location: Malott Hall, Room 224
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.
Since August 2015, Dr. Palacios has led the Community Outreach Program, establishing the Primary Health Care internship for third year medical students. This initiative, recognized by PAHO/WHO, focuses on health promotion and disease prevention, earning accolades from the United Nations Global Compact Ecuador for its contribution to Sustainable Development Goal 3 (in 2021 and 2023).
With extensive experience in healthcare, Dr. Palacios is dedicated to preventive medicine, health equity and medical education. He has spearheaded impactful public health projects in 17 communities, addressing child malnutrition, teenage pregnancy prevention, cervical and skin cancer and healthy aging. His work integrates service-learning, fostering humanism, empathy, and compassion in future physicians.
As Global Health director, he has built partnerships with universities worldwide to develop collaborative research and educational programs, strengthening global health efforts.
Migrations, History, Storytelling, Teaching, Research in the Uptown Chicago Neighborhood
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
noon – 1:30 p.m.
Location: ILR Conference Center in King-Shaw Hall-Room 225 (in-person only)
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.
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.
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.