The Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Awards fund international fieldwork to help Cornell students complete their dissertations. Through a generous gift from Amit Bhatia, this funding opportunity annually supports at least six PhD students who have passed the A exam. Recipients hold the title of Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Scholars. All disciplines and research topics are welcome. The award provides $10,000 to be used by the end of the sixth PhD year for international travel, living expenses, and research expenses.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Day 2: Pandemic Archives: Media, Geopolitics, and Temporalities of Crisis

About this workshop:

As the world enters its fourth year living with COVID-19, this workshop critically examines our conceptual tools for capturing this chronic crisis and its seismic impact on global geopolitics and humanistic inquiry. Departing from existing discussions, we focus on how the diverse media practices that flourished during the pandemic are now transforming into historical and aesthetic archives enabling re-readings of overshadowed affects, stories, and relationalities within a larger picture. With a special interest in transregional, diasporic, global, and/or other innovative frameworks of analysis, we seek to address the controversial yet indispensable role of China and Chineseness in constituting the global political ecology of this crisis period. Discussion topics include but are not limited to (post-)pandemic global politics and sociality, crisis temporalities, media forms and platforms, ordinary agency, archive, transregional world-making, soundscapes, ecocriticism, and ongoing changes in Chinese/Sinophone/Asian/Asian American studies.

We invite all interested to join us for this get-together for creative and convivial thinking.

10:00-10:10 Welcome Remarks

10:10-11:50 Panel 1: ARCHIVE

Fanyi Faye Ma (Duke University): Can Digital Wailing Crumble the Zero-COVID Great Wall?: The Political Lives of Mediated Female VoiceNick Admussen (Cornell University): The Postpandemic, the Postsocialist, and Jile Disike (Disco Elysium)Lilian Kong (University of Chicago): Calibrating the Self: Approaching East Asian Healing Vlogs as Digital Pandemic ArchiveShana Ye (University of Toronto): The Pandemic Steel(Still): Materiality, Memory and the Many Lives of Chinese Cargo Containers1:30-3:10 Panel 2: REWORLDING

Yanting-Leah Li (Cornell University): From Immunity to Superabundance: Radical Possibilities of Communitarian EcologyShiqi Lin (Cornell University) and Hans Yi Su (Pennsylvania State University): Pandemic Clubbing: Fugitive Cohabitation in a Shifting Global OrderChristopher T. Fan (University of California, Irvine): Park My Car: Ambiguity and the Auteur in the Films of Chung Mong-hongLily Wong (American University): Transpacific Alliance: Asian/American Coalitional World-Making in and beyond the Pandemic3:20-4:50 Hybrid Roundtable: RECALIBRATION

A special discussion bringing back scholars who have written about COVID-19 since 2020

Michael Berry (UCLA), Jenny Chio (University of Southern California), Belinda Kong (Bowdoin College), Carlos Rojas (Duke University), Kaiyang Xu (University of Southern California)Moderators: Nick Admussen and Shiqi Lin5:00-5:30 Concluding Discussion

Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.

Read about Day 1's book talk here.

Day 1: Book Talk – SARS Stories: Affect and Archive of the 2003 Pandemic

Speaker: Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)

In SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows how the Chinese experiences of living with SARS can reshape global feelings toward pandemic social life and foster greater fellowship in the face of pandemics.

Belinda Kong is Professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She is a scholar of global Asian literature and culture whose research focuses on global Chinese-ness.

Book discount: save 30% when you order SARS Stories from dukeupress.edu with coupon code E24BKONG.

Day 1's book talk is part of a two-day workshop. Read about Day 2 here.

Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.

Conveners:

Shiqi Lin (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Nick Admussen (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Participants:

Michael Berry (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA)

Jenny Chio (East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology, USC)

Christopher T. Fan (English, UC Irvine)

Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)

Lilian Kong (Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)

Yanting-Leah Li (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Fanyi Faye Ma (Ethnomusicology, Duke University)

Carlos Rojas (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University)

Hans Yi Su (Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)

Lily Wong (Literature, American University)

Kaiyang Xu (East Asian Languages and Cultures, USC)

Shana Ye (Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto)

"In September 2018, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, sister of Rushan Abbas, was abducted by Chinese authorities shortly after Rushan's speech condemning the Uyghur genocide. The documentary "In Search of My Sister" chronicles Rushan's relentless pursuit of truth and justice, spanning multiple countries. The film also exposes the CCP's harrowing crimes against humanity through the personal story of Rushan and other Uyghurs in the diaspora. "In Search of My Sister" has been screened worldwide, shedding light on these atrocities."

This screening is followed by a Q&A Session with Rushan Abbas.

About the Speaker

Rushan Abbas’s activism started in the mid-1980s as a student at Xinjiang University, co-organizing pro-democracy demonstrations in Urumchi in 1985 and 1988. Since her arrival in the United States in 1989, Ms. Abbas has been an ardent campaigner for the human rights of the Uyghur people. Ms. Abbas is the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) and became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism for Uyghurs following her sister’s detainment by the Chinese government in 2018. Ms. Abbas has spearheaded numerous campaigns, including the “One Voice One Step” movement, which culminated in a simultaneous demonstration in 14 countries and 18 cities on March 15, 2018, to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps.

Ms. Abbas frequently briefs global lawmakers and officials on the Uyghur genocide and provides testimonies at legislative bodies worldwide, such as the U.S. Congress, and other parliaments. She advocates for raising awareness and engaging in discussions on policy options to address the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party and halt the ongoing Uyghur genocide. She also serves as the Chairperson for the Advisory Board of the Axel Springer Freedom Foundation and as a board member of the Task Force on Human Trafficking within the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum.

In 2019, Ms. Abbas received the Freedom Fighter Award, and her work was recognized at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2020. Under her leadership, CFU published the 'Genocide in East Turkistan' report in July 2020, leading to the organization receiving the World Democracy Courage Tribute in 2021 and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2022.

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Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-Host
Cornell Cinema

The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) gives students multiple ways to engage with Southeast Asia. Affiliate with our program to be informed of all SEAP events and activities. Undergraduates who minor in Southeast Asian Studies are advised by SEAP Program Faculty advisors who collaborate with them to construct a course of study based upon their area of interest. SEAP also runs the CU in Cambodia program for students interested in international travel.

Can’t attend? Contact seap@cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

This conference brings together scholars undertaking new research on questions of democratic resistance and sources of resilience in response to global evidence of democratic backsliding.

We will work together to analyze domestic and international factors, including institutions, civil society, political parties, voters, media, and foreign policy. In an era marked by threats to democracy from within nominally democratic institutions, by elected officials, and with varying degrees of support from the voting public, we seek to understand the interactive nature of democratic threats and resistance strategies.

As democracy can be conceived of as a continued contestation over rights, responsibilities, and rules, we aim to use this critical historical moment of contestation to expand our comparative conceptions of democratic practice, strategies of endurance and deepening or weakening of democratic regimes, and the social, economic, technological, and institutional factors that contribute to varied outcomes worldwide.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the conference is part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience.

Register to attend the conference

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March 22 Panels

Panel 1: Concepts and Measurement: Democracy 2.0
This panel will push beyond the measurement debates to address conceptual and ontological questions about how to measure democracy, and definitional questions at the heart of democracy’s weaknesses and promise in contemporary practice. Does the practice of a minimal definition of democracy contribute to public disenchantment, and is such practice durable?

Panel 2: Resilience Factors, Resistance Strategies, and Opposition Tactics
This panel will examine the social and economic bases of democratic resiliency, as well as various strategies, actors, and institutions that can fortify and even enhance democratic practice.

Panel 3: Stabilizing Forces? Historical Patterns and Contemporary Challenges
This panel will dissect the factors that have historically stabilized advanced industrial democracies—including party systems, modes of political representation, and patterns of capitalist development-- and their potential applicability to contemporary patterns of democratic backsliding and resistance.

March 23 Panel

Panel 4: International Actors and Regional Organizations
This panel will explore the ways in which authoritarian or democratic leaders and regimes exert influence on the regime types of other countries and the influence of regional organizations on participating countries’ regime trajectories.

Learn about Cornell's new Global Grand Challenge: The Future and how you can propose a research or curricular project.

Global Cornell is opening what will be The Future’s only call for proposals. Interdisciplinary teams of faculty and researchers from all Cornell colleges, schools, and departments are encouraged to identify a research issue of global importance and plan a path to a successful alternative future.

Teams may apply for research project support up to $150,000 per year for two years. Stand-alone curricular projects are eligible for up to $20,000 per year for two years.

Deadline for letters of intent to apply (1 page): February 26, 2024Deadline for full proposals (5–7 pages): May 6, 2024Register here to join the virtual info session. The session will include an opportunity to ask questions and network with others interested in finding collaborators.

The information session slides and Q&A will be posted online after the event.