Cornell University

Graduate Student, Education

Other Affiliations: Cornell University, City and Regional Planning
Cornell University, Natural Resources

Graduate Research Assistant

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

About

I am a PhD candidate at Cornell University studying adult and extension education. Specifically, I am interested in non-formal education and understanding how and when it occurs. There is a great deal of education beyond classrooms and schools, and recognizing and making sense of these other educational settings is important, especially when one thinks about the role of education in relationship to both citizenship and democracy.

My research program is centered on the cultivation and development of respectful, productive, and effective relationships between scientific and academic experts and lay citizens. My work focuses on both the promise and challenge of intentional efforts to redefine and reshape the expert-citizen relationship in ways that simultaneously honor and strengthen scientific and academic expertise and knowledge, as well as citizens’ knowledge, capacities, voice, power, and agency.

I study two related lines of inquiry: a historical line that focuses on civic engagement in the 1930s and 1940s in the land-grant system’s agricultural extension work as it related to community life and democratic practices and a line that utilizes narrative inquiry to illuminate, analyze, and interpret the contemporary civic engagement experiences of academic professionals and citizens as co-creators of knowledge to name, frame, and address complex public problems. I have further interests in the history of higher education, democratic theory, governance, community-based research, learning theories, and the use of narrative inquiry as a research methodology. 

In addition to studying civic engagement, I have also been directly engaged in this work, particularly during my time at the University of Dayton's Fitz Center for Leadership in Community and at St. Bonaventure University's Franciscan Mountain Retreat. Through those experiences, I realized how complex social issues are and the need to cultivate and sustain work that seeks to positively impact communities. It is my professional goal to interweave my scholarship with my passions.

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