Talk by Farzana Afridi (Economics, Indian Statistical Institute)

In contrast to the Western experience, while the gender gap in educational attainment and fertility rates has declined in India, we don’t observe women participating concomitantly in the labor market. Can technological changes in the market and home production propel women’s labor market engagement, or does technological change have gendered impacts due to the gendered division of labor, prevailing social norms, and low market value for women’s time? This talk will unpack how adopting new technologies within the home and in agricultural production affects women’s time use and labor supply in urban and rural India.

Farzana Afridi is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute (Delhi), a Visiting Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and a Research Fellow at the IZA (Bonn). Her research lies at the intersection of development and labor economics, covering three broad themes: gender and social identity, human capital, and governance. She has collaborated with government agencies, non-profits, and businesses to conduct field-based projects using administrative data and randomized experiments. Currently, she heads the Digital Platforms and WEE program, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to analyze and suggest measures that empower women on digital labor platforms.

Talk by Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art & Architecture, University of California-Santa Barbara )

The diffusion of printed books in India in the late eighteenth century, beyond the confines of royal courts, European factories, and missions, changed the spaces of reading, publishing, and literary exchange and archiving. For a while, as in the Western world, books, loose folios, and manuscript scrolls jostled for space in trunks and wall niches before the rectangular freestanding bookshelf became standard. As a modern introduction, however, the bookshelf exceeded its role as a container of books. It anchored political debates, created new modes of social intercourse, and changed the practice of reading in private and public spaces. This talk takes the bookshelf as a figure of space to explore the socio-political import of this historical transformation. We start with the East India Company’s looting of Tipu Sultan’s library following the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and conclude with the proliferation of neighborhood libraries in Calcutta in the early twentieth century.

Swati Chattopadhyay is a Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, California, Santa Barbara, with an affiliated appointment in Comparative Literature. An architect and architectural historian, she is the author of Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023); Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012); Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005); and the co-editor with Jeremy White Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2019); and City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge, 2014). Her current work includes Nature’s Infrastructure: The British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880, supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, and two digital humanities projects, Mapping the Ephemeral and Bookscapes. She is a founding editor of PLATFORM.

Upstate New York has welcomed a significant number of Afghan families in recent years. This virtual workshop provides approaches and tools for elementary school educators to introduce Afghanistan into their curriculum and provide a nuanced view of the people and culture.

Participating educators will receive:

an overview of Afghanistan's history and current political situationactivity ideas and materials exploring cultural themes like holidays, letters and numbers, language, food, clothing, etc.age-appropriate songs and stories addressing more complex issues like education, gender, politics, and religion

The workshop is facilitated by Akbar Quraishi and Amy Friers, alumni of Syracuse University's Public Administration and International Affairs program, who both have extensive experience in Afghanistan. Together, they founded an international relations-focused university in Kabul, in addition to working with the previous Afghan government and NGOs in Afghanistan. This workshop is supported by the federally funded Cornell-Syracuse South Asia National Resource Center Consortium.

"Afghanistan in the Classroom" is specifically designed for elementary grades, though educators of all ages and subject areas are welcome to attend. There is no registration fee for this event.

Photo credit: Sohaib Ghyasi