Long before COVID, communities near and far have faced daunting economic, political, and cultural challenges, while precarious individuals struggle with crises of social and familial care. StudioLab’s Critical Design Teams work with community partners making media and crafting stories to help them engage with different stakeholders.

 

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, activists, and community stakeholders working on live, on-going projects. Learning practices of transmedia knowledge, design thinking, and strategic storytelling, student teams collaborate with partners through the Cornell’s Law School and Small Farms Program. This semester we worked with:

• Black Farmer Fund: To reconceive wealth beyond financial and intellectual capital to include social capital and ancestral wisdom, can black farmers build wider community?

• Survived and Punished: Survivors of violence are especially vulnerable to being punished with “a living death sentence”: can sensitive, holistic storytelling help commute their sentences?

• Al-Marsad Golan: The UN has issued a resolution on occupied Golan land rights: can we help a small human rights organization launch an international campaign to publicize the community’s plight and protect its people?

• Health Access Connect: A small successful non-profit, HAC has for years used “boda-boda” or motorcycle taxis to help Ugandans access low-cost healthcare: how to share their experience as the staff helps scale up their work across Africa.

Consulting on partners’ ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO’s Design Thinking  and Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as tactical media and organizational developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

Part of a multi-year Civic Storytelling project to translate StudioLab into practices, policies, and infrastructures of different disciplines and institutions, the class and workshops are funded by the Society for the Humanities’ Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative, Engaged Cornell, and a Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, with support from the Department of English and the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.

Design thinking, transmedia knowledge, and artist activism overlap and all focus on engaging multiple stakeholders. Our partners’ interests include issues of local and international land rights, rights of the incarcerated and dispossessed, economic development for minorities in New York State, and social justice.

This course serves Cornell’s long-standing mission of public engagement, as embodied in Cornell Cooperative Extension, Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, Engaged Cornell, and the Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative.

Civic Storytelling

Civic Storytelling is a multi-year initiative supporting professional development of teachers, Black and Latinx farm laborers, creation of online resources, and innovative curricula that help students address issues such as health and well-being through video, info comics, and other transmedia genres. In collaboration with local schools and community organizations, this Fall 2020 course used design thinking to translate media and performance research into practices of project-based learning.

Community Engagement

ENGL 3741 serves Cornell’s long-standing mission of community engagement, as embodied in the Department of English, the Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative, Engaged Cornell, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and the Bronfrenbrenner Center for Translational Research.  You can find out more about the course and the Civic Storytelling project through the Engaged Showcase and this Cornell Chronicle story.

Kaplan Fellowship

In June 2020, the Cornell Public Service Center awarded the Civic Storytelling Project one of two Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowships. Many thanks to the educators and students who made this project possible, as well as to the PSC and the Kaplan Family. Thanks also to the Office of Engagement Initiatives for an Engaged Opportunity Grant and long-term advice and guidance.

English 3741 Spring 2021

Professor: Jon McKenzie