Engaged Speakers Series – Einhorn Center for Community Engagement

Engaged Speakers Series

Advancing understanding of community engagement, its potential and challenges

This Opportunity At a Glance

Open To

All interested faculty, staff, students, alumni and community partners

2024-25 Schedule

TBA
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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.

Previous Speakers

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.

About the speaker

Dr. Rachael Shah, a former community literacy worker, Rachael Shah is an associate professor of writing studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Nebraska Writing Project engagement initiative and teaches classes on community-based pedagogies, public rhetorics, and teacher education. Her book Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning won the IARSLCE (International Association for Service-Learning and Community Engagement) Publication of the Year Award, as well as the Coalition for Community Writing’s Outstanding Book Award for 2020. Her first publication was a participatory action research project co-authored with local youth researchers, and much of her academic and public work continues to be co-written with community partners or students. Shah has coordinated community-based learning programs for over 15 years, including guiding the Wildcat Writers program as it grew from a handful of teacher participants to a program that involved 1,200 students a year. She has taught community-engaged classes at the elementary, high school, undergraduate, and graduate level, and she loves supporting instructors as they explore community-based pedagogies.

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.

About the speaker
Dr. Aurora Santiago Ortiz is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Chicane/Latine Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on antiracist feminisms, decolonial perspectives, and participatory action research. Her work has been published in the Michigan Journal for Community Service Learning, the Italian Journal of Urban Studies, Curriculum Inquiry, Chicana/Latina Studies Journal, and the International Journal of Qualitative Research. She has also contributed to Society and Space, NACLA, The Abusable Past blog of the Radical History Review, Electric Marronage, Open Democracy, Caliban’s Readings, and Zora magazine.