The Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium presents a symposium interrogating the histories and trajectories of anti-Asian violences.

The recent surge of racially motivated attacks on Asians in the United States brought renewed attention to the issue of anti-Asian violence. It is necessary to situate this rising tide of violence in the broader histories that have produced it. By taking up “Asia” as a fraught geopolitical category that is formed through imperialist projects, this symposium attends to the underlying logics of violence that are crucial to rendering these histories legible. Building connections that are enabled by transnational, relational, and critical lenses not only will deepen insights into the discourse of anti-Asian violence, but also will allow a meaningful consideration of the implications of this moment for solidarity and movement- building. This symposium will convene a cohort of scholars, students, and activists whose work can collectively help trace the genealogies and geographies of anti-Asian violence.

The South Asia Program is coordinating efforts for current Cornell students, faculty and staff to travel to and from Syracuse for this event on Friday March 25. Please fill out this form by March 18 if you are interested in a ride (or are able to offer others a ride) to and from Syracuse for the symposium. Space is limited.

220 Eggers Hall (Strasser Legacy Room), Syracuse University

Roundtable: Queering Solidarities: Race, Caste, and Gender

Chris Eng (Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Washington in St. Louis)
Sangeeta Kamat (Professor, Comparative and International Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
William Mosley (Assistant Professor, Program for Interdisciplinary Humanities, Wake Forest University)
Esther K. (Red Canary Song Collective)
Discussant: Viranjini Munasinghe (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University)

Panel: Cripping Violence, Indigeneity and Pedagogy: Global Perspectives

Juliann Anesi (Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles)
Deepika Meena (Research Scholar, IIT Gandhinagar)
Edward Nadurata (Graduate Student, Department of Global and International Studies, UC Irvine)
Discussant: Michael Gill (Associate Professor, Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University)

Panel: Transnational Asia: Feminist & Decolonial Critiques

Juliana Hu Pegues (Associate Professor, Literatures in English, Cornell)
Danika Medak-Saltzman (Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies, Syracuse University)
Deepti Misri (Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder)
Discussant: Mona Bhan (Associate Professor, Anthropology and Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies, Syracuse University)

Closing Keynote

Iyko Day, Mount Holyoke College
“Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure”

CO-SPONSORED BY:

At Cornell University: South Asia Program, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, East Asia Program, Southeast Asia Program, and Asian American Studies Program

At Syracuse University: Graduate School, Humanities Center, Hendricks Chapel, Department of Cultural Foundations of Education, Department of English, Department of Religion, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, East Asia Program, Asian/Asian American Studies Program, Disability Studies; Disability Cultural Center, Intergroup Dialogue, and Democratizing Knowledge Collective

With funding from the Department of Education Title VI Program.

FACULTY CO-ORGANIZERS:

Susan Thomas, Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University

Antonio Tiongson, Department of English, Syracuse University

The Lingua Mater competition invites students to translate Cornell's Alma Mater into a different language and submit a video of the performed translation. The inaugural Lingua Mater student competition took place in 2018 as part of Cornell's Global Grand Challenges Symposium. The top three videos received cash prizes.

2022 competition details

Can you translate Cornell’s Alma Mater into your mother tongue (or a language you are learning/have learned at Cornell) and sing it? We invite you to translate “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” and submit a video of you (and your friends!) performing it somewhere on any of Cornell’s campuses.

Translations do not need to be exact or perfectly in meter but should capture the feel and tune of our university’s Alma Mater. As is customary, include the first verse, refrain, second verse, and refrain in your video submission (for guidance, listen to a performance and read the lyrics).

Video submissions need to be MP4 files at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), in landscape mode with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Please ensure that you have copyright permission for any images/videos you use.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Submissions will be judged equally on the translation, the musical quality, and the creativity in visual presentation.

The top three entries will win cash prizes.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 14-18, 2022) and the top three videos will be posted online that week.

Entries may be submitted by any registered Cornell student or group of students.

Submission deadline: Sunday, November 6, 2022

SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AND LYRICS HERE

Please contact Angelika Kraemer, Director of the Language Resource Center, if you have any questions.

The Lingua Mater competition is co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

The Lingua Mater competition invites alumni to translate Cornell's Alma Mater into a different language and submit a video of the performed translation. The inaugural Lingua Mater alumni competition took place in 2018 as part of Cornell's Global Grand Challenges Symposium. Winners included the Cornell Club of Thailand in 2018, Cornell Club of Gaeta, Italy in 2019, and alumni in Argentina in 2021. They received financial support for a local alumni event.

2022 competition details

Can you translate Cornell’s Alma Mater into your mother tongue (or a language you learned at Cornell) and sing it? We invite you to translate “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” and submit a video of you (and your friends!) performing it, wherever you may be!

Translations do not need to be exact or perfectly in meter but should capture the feel and tune of our university’s Alma Mater. As is customary, include the first verse, refrain, second verse, and refrain in your video submission (for guidance, listen to a performance and read the lyrics).

Video submissions need to be MP4 files at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), in landscape mode with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Please ensure that you have copyright permission for any images/videos you use.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Submissions will be judged equally on the translation, the musical quality, and the creativity in visual presentation.

The top entry will receive financial support and Cornell swag for a local alumni event.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 14-18, 2022) via Noteworthy, and the top video will be posted online that week. Be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay in the know of this competition and international alumni activities.

Entries may be submitted by any Cornell alumni groups outside of the United States and Canada.

Submission deadline: Sunday, October 30, 2022

SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AND LYRICS HERE

Please contact the International Alumni Relations team if you have any questions.

The Lingua Mater competition is co-sponsored by the Office of International Alumni Relations, the Language Resource Center, and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

Robo-Sexism: Gendering AI and Robots in Japan and the United States (and Elsewhere) HYBRID event. The in-person location is Goldwin Smith Hall GS64.

Jennifer Robertson, Professor Emerita, Anthropology and History of Art, University of Michigan

In humans, gender constitutes an array of learned behaviors that are cosmetically enabled and enhanced. Gender(ed) behaviors are both socially and historically shaped and are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. How is gender assigned in actual (as opposed to fictional) robots? Robertson will explore the sex/gender stereotypes and operational functions informing the design and embodiment of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, especially humanoids and androids.

Robots have been imagined, designed, and deployed in rhetorical and tangible forms alike to reinforce conservative models of sex/gender roles, ethnic nationalism, and "traditional" family structures. Robertson considers the ramifications of "retro-tech" and also nascent efforts to redress robo-sexism.

This is a University Lecture sponsored by the Cornell Department of History and the University Lectures Committee, co-sponsored by the East Asia Program at Cornell.

What are we learning when we play video games from Japan? Rachael Hutchinson (University of Delaware) examines the cultural content of Japanese videogames through character design, background setting and environment, aesthetic style, thematic content, and game dynamics. We will consider how mid-1990s games converged around ideas of nuclear power and bioethics, making works like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid valuable windows into social anxieties expressed in the Japanese arts.

Hosted by faculty member, Andrew Campana (Asian Studies) and the EastAsia+ collaborative. EastAsia+ is a new initiative at Cornell University that combines programming, mentorship, and digital publishing around East Asian media studies and digital humanities.

The Wa people, who live between Burma and China, undercut many stereotypes about primitive mountain-folks. They are often labelled headhunters, but Magnus Fiskesjö’s new book, Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture (Berghahn Books, 2021), confirms that taking head trophies is actually a recent borrowing from the Chinese army, where it was standard war practice, not a “primitive custom.” Also, the Wa were never isolated, but rather deeply integrated in the world economy for centuries—opium was a major export industry which helped sustain their independence until their ancient lands were annexed by Burma and China. Perhaps above all, the Wa people's fierce egalitarianism, their rejection of kings and hierarchies, as well as their deeply entrenched, armed autonomy based on their surprising wealth, pose a real challenge to the usual typologies of politics and economy.

Join Fiskesjö in a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks talk as he discusses his new book.

Sponsored by Olin Library, the talk is followed by a live Q&A.

Fiskesjö is an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University. His research engages ethnohistory, fieldwork, archival research, and social theories, and explores ethnic relations, ethno-politics, our fantasies of civilizations and barbarians as well as history and heritage issues in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America.

Dial-In Information

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5gBx1kM5ScCyaVi3P8Ctsg

Polson Institute for Global Development Seminar
A conversation with Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA

Professor Ching Kwan Lee explores the making of 'Global China' as an economic, cultural, and political phenomenon in this conversation with Jenny Goldstein (assistant professor of global development at Cornell) and Eli Friedman (associate professor and chair of international & comparative labor at Cornell)

Ching Kwan Lee is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA and author of three award-winning monographs on China: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998); Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007); and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her most recent co-edited volumes include Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019); and The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View (University of California Press, 2019).

Moderators:

Jenny Goldstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University and a core faculty member of Cornell's Southeast Asian Studies Program. She works across the areas of political ecology, critical development studies, and human geography. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics (Nebraska, 2022).Eli Friedman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative and International Labor at Cornell University. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (Cornell 2014); and The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia, forthcoming Spring 2022).

The Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Institute for Global Development supports theoretical and applied social science research. We fund projects and working groups that address issues ranging from economic inequality to discursive politics, contributing to Cornell’s leadership in global development.