Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

In the United States and around the world, strict immigration enforcement and violence are being wielded as political tools. Recent U.S. actions include surveillance of communities, indiscriminate detainment, and violence against protestors. Despite being framed as necessary for the safety of citizens, these tactics are rooted in histories of slavery, the prison industrial complex, and xenophobia.

Does this type of enforcement infringe on rights? How can we understand current events through the lens of global and historical contexts? Do present-day immigration policies make communities safer?

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Featured Faculty

Shannon Gleeson (Migrations) | Industrial and Labor RelationsTristan Ivory (EAP, IAD) | International and Comparative LaborJaclyn Kelley-Widmer | LawNatasha Raheja (SAP) | Anthropology

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Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents Translucent Atmospherics: Media as Utility in China

Speaker: Angela Xiao Wu, Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Abstract
Utilities provide essential services like water, electricity, railroads, which societies strive to make affordable and widely accessible. As legacy media lose advertising revenue and “news deserts” proliferate, proposals to treat journalism as a public utility have reemerged. While liberal capitalist societies approach this idea through fragmented evidence and speculative hypotheticals, China has long treated news as a state-supplied, nonproprietary good, akin to earthquake alerts. Since 1978, the state’s stubborn commitment to this utility model has interacted with China's social, economic, and technological transformations, producing surprising configurations of public finance, intellectual property, distribution politics, journalistic forms, and popular culture.
In this talk, I introduce my book-length research tracing the evolution of China’s administration of the socialist press into its regulation of private digital platforms. Reframing media history as utility history, I disaggregate the Chinese state into its lesser-studied roles—as lawmaker, owner, investor, licensor, thinly stretched administrator, and purported guarantor of collective welfare—beyond propaganda and censorship. This perspective sheds new light on post-reform Chinese governance and offers the utility system as a broader framework for thinking about our digital present: What happens to public culture when it is governed through unified computing regimes?

Bio
Angela Xiao Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research sits at the intersection of media and communication studies and science and technology studies (STS), with broader interests in the politics and infrastructures of knowledge production. Her work spans critical data studies, platform studies, the political economy of media, political cultures, and post/socialism studies. Her book project has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, among others.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Speaker: Jina Kim, Associate Professor of Korean Literature & Culture, University of Oregon

Description: This presentation examines how a 1950s South Korean radio docudrama contributed to post-war reconstruction of national identity, shaped cultural narratives, and participated in collective healing. In South Korea, radio programs played a key role in addressing the emotional and social wounds caused by loss, displacement, and family separation in the postwar period. The docudrama media format came to capture this shared historical experience as well as everyday concerns of love, work, marriage, etc. One of the most popular radio programs during this time was Insaeng yŏngmach’a (The stagecoach of life), which was broadcasted from 1954 – 1958 on Seoul’s HLKA Station. This program was created based on listeners’ letters that were sent to the station with which professional writers then reconstructed the story into a radio drama while simultaneously providing advice to the letter writer for the dilemma that they were facing. In this presentation, I will explore how The Stagecoach of Life aestheticized real-life stories into dramatic form for the radio thereby serving as a model for the golden age of radio melodramas and docudramas in the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. By centering women’s letters and the responses crafted by elite women writers, this project traces how intimate, everyday dilemmas became mediated narratives of gendered experience. These exchanges provide insight into how modern womanhood was imagined, disciplined, and occasionally re imagined during South Korea’s post war transition. The docudrama format exposes the push and pull between evolving notions of female agency and the persistent cultural scripts of filial duty and moral propriety.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

The United States helped create the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of independent countries. Now the Trump administration is setting the tone for superpowers with imperial ambitions by waging economic war against democratic allies, violating long-standing treaties, and holding out the possibility of using military force.

What do these unprecedented actions mean for the rest of the world? How are states and peoples in different regions responding? And what may happen if tensions continue to escalate?

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Featured Faculty

Agnieszka Nimark (PACS) | Affiliated ScholarMagnus Fiskesjö (EAP, PACS, SEAP) | AnthropologyAlexandra Blackman (SWANA) | GovernmentSeema Golestaneh (SWANA) | Near Eastern StudiesIrina Troconis (LACS) | Romance StudiesKenneth Roberts (LACS) | GovernmentPeter Katzenstein (IES, PACS) | Government

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Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.