Engaged Faculty Fellowship Program
Jamila Michener
A 2016-17 Engaged Faculty Fellow, Jamila Michener is an assistant professor in the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her community-engaged course is Prisons, Politics and Policy. Learn more about Michener at jamilamichener.net, follow her on Twitter @povertyscholar or read her Cornell faculty profile.
About the Project
As a faculty fellow, Michener will design a community-engagement component for her spring 2017 undergraduate lecture course on Prisons, Politics and Policy. The course will examine the policies that are implicated in the imprisonment of large numbers of people in the United States and the politics at the root of those policies. A key focus of the course will be on the lived experiences of those who are most directly impacted by the carceral state. To that end, she will cultivate collaboration between Cornell students taking the class and local organizations that offer support services to formerly incarcerated persons. The goal of this partnership will be two-fold: 1) to provide students with a learning-rich opportunity for civic engagement and 2) to strengthen and amplify the efforts of the Ithaca community to address the challenges produced by mass incarceration. The support of the Office of Engagement Initiatives will be crucial to coordinating this endeavor.
Why She Does It
In her research and teaching, Michener always seeks to connect the insights of academic scholarship to the practice of informed and engaged citizenship. This is part of that larger commitment.
OEI Grants
Engaged Opportunity Grant: Anti-Poverty Assessment
Engaged Curriculum Grant: Crime, Prison, Education and Justice Minor
Engaged Faculty Fellowship Program
A yearlong cohort program in which faculty dive deep into the theory and practice of community-engaged learning; meet monthly to discuss readings, share projects and workshop challenges; and help transform what it means to teach at Cornell