• Connect more effectively with students, faculty, and colleagues.
• Prepare yourself to engage in diversity & inclusion processes in your future career as a scholar/professional.
• Explore your own social identities and learn how they relate to larger structures.
• Feel confident addressing power dynamics in your field.
• Learn how to respond to uncomfortable comments and situations.
• Engage in meaningful conversations about and across differences.
• Communicate productively through conflict.
• Collaboratively think about ways you can enact positive social change.
• Get to know a diverse group of scholars who are interested in similar topics!

Through an interactive process known as intergroup dialogue, this program provides participants with opportunities to explore how their social identities shape their professional choices and teaching/learning styles, how to build capacity to have meaningful dialogue and effective collaborations across social, cultural and power differences, and how to explore the power of alliances when seeking to create an inclusive environment.

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are required to communicate and work across cultural, social, and power differences on a daily basis. They interact with mentors, colleagues, undergraduate students, and professors in a variety of academic settings, and need to navigate different spaces, ways of thought, and academic practice. Throughout their long and complex training, many of them are also occupied with questions and thoughts about the scholars and professionals they want to become, and how different aspects of their identity might influence their “professional persona.” This program provides a space for a group to come together to connect in a deep and personal way across differences through activities designed to stimulate critical reflection of social identities and power dynamics in society. Through this process, our participants gain the skills and confidence to engage in difficult conversations in an empathetic way that allows for authentic dialogue.

The Intergroup Dialogue Project, the Graduate School, and the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning, have been working together to create a meaningful process for graduate students and post-doctoral scholars to explore their social identities, to practice communication across difference, and to think together about authentic diversity in academia. This peer-led offering enables participants to reflect on their personal experiences related to such issues, but to also explore ways through which they can promote equity and inclusion in their academic spaces and circles. 

Click here to read about our Summer 2016 pilot program for graduate students and post-doctoral scholars.

This program offering for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars has been made possible through funding support from the Graduate School Office of Inclusion & Student Engagement, CIRTL at Cornell, the Graduate School’s ETS/CGS Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education, and the National Science Foundation-funded Cornell CIRTL AGEP Program under Grant No. 1647094.

” IDP transformed the way I think about my role as a graduate student at Cornell… I’m [now] certain that I am not alone in my desire to enact change. Although the challenges facing our campus and nation do not seem any less daunting, the possibility of success seems much greater with the knowledge that others, from a variety of departments and positions at Cornell, are working towards a shared vision of a better, more equitable future.”

-Graduate Student