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Global Cornell

Cornell University

Teaching

By funding faculty curricular projects, leading summer trainings, and creating accessible resources, we are training a new generation of scholars and practitioners. 

In the Classroom

Curriculum development grants from Migrations helped Cornell faculty create collaborative, interactive, and reflective courses about racism, dispossession, and migration. 

Refugee Pathways: From Conflict to Resettlement

Led by Julie Ficarra, lecturer in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Refugee Pathways connects students and community partners through an examination of critical migration issues. Ficarra developed the course with help from Migrations and secured further funding from Global Cornell to develop it into an annual spring exchange between Cornell and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

 

Underground Railroad Seminar

St. James A.M.E. Zion Church in Ithaca, NY

Gerard Aching, professor emeritus of Africana and romance studies, takes students in this course on a tour of local Underground Railroad sites and links local histories to national and international debates in the mid-19th century and now. 

Caribbean Studies at Cornell

Map of the Caribbean

Scholars across campus created courses on migration to and from the Caribbean in this this curricular project, led by Ernesto Bassi, associate professor history, and Judith Byfield, Stephen ’59 and Madeline ’60 Anbinder Professor of history.

Summer Pathways

Summer Pathways provided fully funded, hands-on research training to undergraduates and recent graduates from underrepresented backgrounds. Participants worked with mentors to explore their interest in pursuing migration studies in graduate school through interdisciplinary workshops on research methods, research presentations, social networking, and preparation for graduate school applications.

Students sit around a long rectangular table, facing a presentation on graduate school.
A group of students sit together at the front of a boat on Cayuga Lake, smiling for a photo.

Resources for Educators

Summer Institutes

Over three summers, the initiative's summer institute, co-sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, immersed early-career scholars in the study of racism, dispossession, and migration in a collaborative space. Each year, the institute addressed a new topic under the leadership of a faculty researcher.

Past institutes include: 

  • Cartographies of Racial Justice Beyond Borders (2021) led by Tao Leigh Goffe and Shannon Gleeson (School of Industrial and Labor Relations)
  • The Ongoing Afterlife of Dispossession in Africa and the Americas (2022) led by Judith Byfield (History, College of Arts and Sciences)
  • History and Memory: Migration, Militarism, and U.S. Empire (2023) led by Christine Bacareza Balance (Performing and Media Arts and Asian American Studies, A&S) and Derek Chang (History and Asian American Studies, A&S)

The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis

Map of Indigenous land.

Participants from the 2021 summer institute—a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists—tackled how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled in this essay and speculative cartography experiment.

Published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, the project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures with visual and audio components presenting a planetary vision of the year 2350 as an underwater future in ruins.