Keynote address of the 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference.

With its recent hit series Cigarette Girl, Netflix is shoring up its market position in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country. Based on a novel by Ratih Kumala, Cigarette Girl weaves a tale of romantic family and business intrigue against a historical backdrop of postcolonial nationalism, political violence, and tobacco industry growth. Examining what Cigarette Girl reveals and conceals about the past, I argue that the series reproduces commodity nationalist aesthetics, fantasies, and ideologies that frame the clove cigarette (kretek) as indigenous cultural heritage. By centering the hand-rolled kretek and Javanese business rivalries, Cigarette Girl obscures how machine-rolled kretek and Chinese Indonesian families actually dominate the market. As the series grapples with other unresolved historical issues, including class and gender inequalities, the 1965/6 massacres, the military occupation of West Papua, and Indonesia’s tobacco-related disease epidemic, it also arrives at politically conservative conclusions.

Marina Welker is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She is the author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Postauthoritarian Indonesia (University of California Press, 2014) and Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024).

Ms. Betty Maina is a Kenyan politician who is currently Cabinet Secretary for Industrialization, Trade and Enterprise Development in the cabinet of Kenya. Ms. Betty Maina was the former P.S. for Environment and Cabinet Minister for Trade and Industrialization. She also was the CEO of the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) where her role/portfolio entailed working with the private sector on many environmental/energy/climate change related issues. Prior to taking up her position in the cabinet in 2020 she held roles at the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM), where her role/portfolio entailed working with the private sector on many environmental/energy/climate change related issues, and the United Nations and as the Principal Secretary of the department for Industrialization, Trade and Enterprise Development.

With reporting on the “migration crises” and the “migration surge at the border” once again taking center stage in the media, those advocating for migrant rights are frequently faced with the question of how to most effectively represent migrants and migrant issues.

In this conversation with researcher Moira O’Neil, students will have the opportunity to take a step back and critically interrogate some of the most common negative and positive migration discourses, to learn what impact they have on society's understanding of migration, and to think about effective ways of writing and speaking about migration that can drive lasting and meaningful social change.

About the Speaker

Moira O'Neil is the Senior Vice President of Research Interpretation at the FrameWorks Institute where she conducts research and advises social movement organizations on how to more effectively frame social issues to drive lasting social change. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and has worked on a variety of issues ranging from immigration, child mental health, housing, and homelessness.

Host and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Migrations initiative, part of Global Cornell.

A light lunch will be served.

Globally, 2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services, 3.5 billion lack access to safely managed sanitation services, and 1 billion people still practice open defecation. At the same time, climate change is threatening communities’ water supplies and the integrity of existing infrastructure. These realities converge to create a pressing need for new thinking about the planning, design, and financing of the next generation of water and sanitation infrastructure. This talk will examine the global challenge of providing universal access to resilient water and sanitation services with particular attention to Sub-Saharan Africa and how the global community can finance this transition.

Recent assessments of climate change impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa indicate that the continent is already experiencing impacts from rising temperatures, including water shortages, reduced food production, loss of lives and biodiversity loss. There are an increased number of extreme events, from drought, floods and tropical storms, and these events will worsen if global greenhouse gases are not significantly reduced. At the same time, Africa is one of the lowest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and many countries struggle to manage with the cost of climate change adaptation, while also paying high levels of debt. Alongside these climate challenges are ongoing extractive industries looking to Africa as a new or ongoing source of resources – including mining precious minerals to support renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. Despite this bleak picture, alternative models that are transformative and reparative are emerging as ways to imagine just climate futures in Africa. These alternatives include attention to multiple types of social inequities and building development strategies through dialogue and careful attention to power dynamics. Adaptation approaches that support decent livelihoods alongside biodiversity, ecosystems and indigenous knowledge are being tested and expanded. Recognition of power inequities at multiple scales and reparation of these inequities is part of such approaches.

Recent assessments of climate change impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa indicate that the continent is already experiencing impacts from rising temperatures, including water shortages, reduced food production, loss of lives and biodiversity loss. There are an increased number of extreme events, from drought, floods and tropical storms, and these events will worsen if global greenhouse gases are not significantly reduced. At the same time, Africa is one of the lowest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and many countries struggle to manage with the cost of climate change adaptation, while also paying high levels of debt. Alongside these climate challenges are ongoing extractive industries looking to Africa as a new or ongoing source of resources – including mining precious minerals to support renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. Despite this bleak picture, alternative models that are transformative and reparative are emerging as ways to imagine just climate futures in Africa. These alternatives include attention to multiple types of social inequities and building development strategies through dialogue and careful attention to power dynamics. Adaptation approaches that support decent livelihoods alongside biodiversity, ecosystems and indigenous knowledge are being tested and expanded. Recognition of power inequities at multiple scales and reparation of these inequities is part of such approaches.