Speaker: Ying Qian, Associate Professor of Chinese Cinema and Media, Columbia University

Title: Forthcoming

Abstract: Forthcoming

Most people dream of a better future. Pedro, an aspiring social worker, is no different. But as a blind, undocumented immigrant, Pedro faces political restrictions to obtain his college degree, secure a job in his field, and support his family. As he finally graduates, uncertainty looms over Pedro. What starts as a journey to provide mental health care for his community ultimately transforms into Pedro’s path towards his own healing.

Directed by queer, undocumented filmmaker, writer, and community organizer Set Hernandez, Unseen is a visually innovative, audio-centric documentary that reimagines the accessibility of cinema, while exploring the intersections of immigration, disability, and mental health. The film is also groundbreaking as one of the first media projects ever to be led by an intersectional team of queer, undocumented immigrant and disabled/blind artists

Filmmaker Set Hernandez will join for a post-screening conversation with Ezra Brown, Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Immigration Law & Advocacy Clinic, and Krsna Avila, Legal Director of the Clinic's Path2Papers Project.

Free admission! Sponsored by Cornell Law School Immigration Law & Advocacy Clinic, Migration and Human Rights Program, the Migrations Program in the Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell Law School Berger International Speaker Series, National Lawyers Guild (NLG), and Public Interest Law Union (PILU), and Cornell Latin American Law Student Association (LALSA).

Part of our "Campus Collaborations" and "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy: GOOD DOCS

Cornell World Languages Day is a free annual event highlighting the importance of language learning, cultural awareness, and global literacy. WLD invites middle and high school students from the greater community to campus, showcasing the opportunities for language learning and international studies at Cornell.

This in-person event is open to middle and high school aged students. You do not need to be affiliated with Cornell to participate.

REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED! Visit https://lrc.cornell.edu/wld to register.

World Languages Day is an interdepartmental event, organized by the LRC and Upward Bound and sponsored by many on- and off-campus units. Generous support is provided by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, the College of Arts & Sciences, and the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement.

Talk by Michelle Weitzel (International Relations and Political Science, Graduate Institute of Geneva)

Since the early aughts, policy makers, states, and military strategists have shown renewed interest in better understanding the psychophysiological underpinnings of human behavior and decision-making. Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, as well as on emergent industry trends in marketing, publicity, and design, this interest in “beyond-rational” thinking is focused on precognitive, embodied feeling as much as it is on the conscious mind. Insights from behavioral sciences have led to an outpouring of new micro-techniques of governance, sometimes termed “nudge policies,” which purport to guide citizens toward beneficial choices. However, these studies and their resultant policies rarely grapple with the theoretical presuppositions coming from the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies, which has long insisted that the senses are culturally organized and politically consequential. Nor do they critically interrogate the ethical and political implications of policies that target the subconscious, particularly when these move beyond narrow policy initiatives and are applied more broadly in conflict settings. In this talk, I tune in to the sensory register of the auditory, asking what role sound plays in micro-techniques of politics and how this mode of perception has become entangled with everyday governance and statecraft. With a nod to Foucault, I advance the notion of a “Panaudicon” in which sound derives power from the fact that its political effects are ignored in all but the most obvious cases. In identifying and tracing the contours and operations of the Panaudicon, I track sound’s political effects via empirical settings that vary in degree and technique of repressive control. The research draws on fieldwork and case studies from Israel and Palestine, Algeria and France, and Morocco.

Michelle Weitzel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. Prior to joining the Institute, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Basel where she collaborated on a Swiss National Science Foundation project related to design thinking and governance. She received her PhD from The New School, where she trained in comparative politics and international relations, and specialized in the political systems of Southwest Asia and North Africa. Weitzel’s research centers on affect, emotion, and the body in politics, critical security, and everyday governance. Her current book project, entitled "Sound Politics: Navigating Affective Governance” (under contract with Oxford University Press) draws on case studies in Palestine, Israel, Algeria, France, and Morocco.

John Dinges was one of hundreds of young idealists who gathered in Chile to experience the revolution that began with the election of President Salvador Allende. Allende, though an avowed Marxist, promised real democracy and real social change. Many who came were political exiles from South American countries that had already become military dictatorships. It was a political journey full of hope; it ended in a military coup, encouraged by the United States, in which thousands were rounded up and executed. Two Norteamericanos—Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi—came to support Allende and ended up being secretly executed in the first days after the coup. Their murders inspired the Hollywood movie Missing. John Dinges’s book, Chile in Their Hearts, unravels the mystery of how and who they were killed, and takes you with him on his investigation. (Spoiler: the movie got much of it wrong.) His surprising findings shed light not only on an iconic period in Latin America but provide signposts for the current slide toward authoritarianism in the United States.

John Dinges is the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism Emeritus. He was a freelance journalist in Chile during the Allende government and for five years during the Pinochet dictatorship, writing for Time, The Washington Post and other media. His latest book, Chile in Their Hearts (University of California Press 2025, completes a trilogy on Chile during its most turbulent years, which includes Assassination on Embassy Row (on the terrorist killing in Washington DC of exile leader Orlando Letelier) and The Condor Years. He is also the author of Our Man in Panama, on the rise and fall of Gen. Manuel Noriega. He has founded or co-founded three news organizations in Chile: APSI: Actualidad Internacional (1976); CIPER (2008); and Archivos Chile (2011). He worked on the foreign desk of the Washington Post and later served as foreign editor and managing editor for NPR News.

Since January 2026, Venezuela has become the model of the new “successful” imperialist intervention. Indeed, the Chavista authoritarian government has been reenforced by the support of the US intervention while transforming itself to accommodate this new situation. In this context, social mobilization has been visible in different forms: human rights, workers' unions, and divers leftwing organizations currently going through important transformations to build new forms of solidarity from below. The Venezuelan case allows us to put into perspective social sciences literature on authoritarian governance and democratic resilience, by taking a “mezzo” perspective on the relationship between policy and politics. This approach can help us to answer a new question: how to integrate the imperialistic/ neo-colonial concept tool to the study of policy and social movements' interactions and mutual transformations?

Yoletty Bracho has a PhD in Political Sociology from the Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France). She’s now an Impact + Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Montréal (Canada). She specializes on participatory public policy and leftwing activism in Venezuela. She is currently working on her manuscript Faire la Révolution dans l’État : participation et consolidation autoritaire au Venezuela, at the Éditions Terres de feu (Paris).