Julie Ficarra

About

Julie Ficarra is an associate professor of the practice in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. She specializes in critical approaches to partnership development centered on mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity-building, particularly in university/community relationships that support engaged learning. Her research focuses on the impact of students on the communities that host them during study, intern, research, and service abroad programs. She is particularly interested in issues of race, gender, class, nationality and language in the development and implementation of North/South partnerships, and challenging unequal relations of power through discourse and program design. 

Her teaching focuses on fostering critical consciousness as students prepare for, undertake, and then return from, engaged learning experiences, both domestically and internationally. She is a practitioner of critical and anti-racist pedagogy and is interested in pedagogical and curricular partnerships that allow for relationship building across difference – such as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). Dr. Ficarra provides mentorship and advisement to students in identifying and curating a set of engaged learning opportunities that help them realize their academic, professional, and personal goals in the Global Development program. She leads the department’s efforts to expand and formalize engaged learning partnerships with public, community, and private partners – domestically and internationally.

Dr. Ficarra comes to Cornell with extensive professional experience in the field of international education and partnership development, having supported internationalization efforts at Harvard, SUNY, and the University of South Florida. Additionally, she has studied in Tanzania, England (Hertford College, Oxford), and the Czech Republic (Univerzita Karlova) and has conducted qualitative field research in San Jose, Costa Rica and Florence, Italy. She served as an Una Chapman Cox Fellow at the U.S Embassy in eSwatini, where she supported the Education USA Advising Center, PEPFAR Orphans and Vulnerable Children Programs, and spearheaded a bi-lateral HIV/AIDS youth advocacy group.