The Supreme Court of India has been called “the most powerful court in the world” for its wide jurisdiction, its expansive understanding of its own powers, and the billion plus people under its authority. It has also attracted its share of controversy. Critics have disputed its claim to being a “people’s court” serving the interests of the common person. Scholars and even judges have leveled claims of corruption and overreaching against the Court. And observers lament the backlog of cases and the disproportionate influence of the most elite (and expensive) members of the Supreme Court bar. In this talk, William Hubbard shows how an empirical approach to studying the Court offers new insights into the controversies, generating lessons for reformers in India and even the US.

Join Media Studies and the Southeast Asia Program for a talk by Elmo Gonzaga, Associate Professor in the Division of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

About the Talk

This talk discusses how the book Monsoon Marketplace applies an archipelagic method to trace the changing vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass consumption, and media spectatorship in two Southeast Asian cities Manila and Singapore by looking at print, film, and audiovisual representations of commercial and leisure spaces including night markets, amusement parks, department stores, movie theaters, and shopping malls that captivated their populations at three important historical moments of colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. Juxtaposing seemingly unrelated urban environments that have become unrecognizably and irretrievably transformed such as Calle Escolta and Raffles Place, the talk will examine lost spaces like Crystal Arcade and Change Alley, which had offered contrasting experiences of consumerism and sociality in times of upheaval.

About the Speaker

Elmo Gonzaga is Associate Professor in the Division of Cultural Studies and Director of the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He obtained his PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. A native of Manila, he is a former Permanent Resident of Singapore. His work on Southeast Asian film and urban cultures has appeared in Cinema Journal, Cultural Studies, South East Asia Research, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and the Journal of Asian Studies. He is the project leader of the Doing Theory in Southeast Asia online database, which was funded by a highly competitive Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund grant.

A simulcast film screeing and discussion, hosted by the GETESA consortium.

In conjunction with the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, GETSEA and the Bophana Center present four short films by Indigenous Cambodian filmmakers on the themes of “Healing, Memory & Care.”

Dull Trail (2020) – Directed by KHON Raksa, PEOU Mono & CHOEY Rickydavid, Bunong Language

My Wish (2021) – Directed by KASOL Sinoun, Jarai Language

Trung (2022) – Directed by Khamnhei HEA, Karvet Language

Alive Skin (2022) – Directed by Veasna OEM & Vantha RAT, Khmer Language

In-person screenings of GETSEA’s Simulcast Film Screening with the Bophana Center will be held at the universities across North America. Each university will connect via Zoom with the film makers located at the Bophana Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for introductions and a post-screening discussion of the films. Meanwhile, a virtual screening will be available for viewers across the globe at KhmerTV.com. Virtual-only viewers will also be able to join the in-person screening locations for the post-screening discussion with the film makers via Zoom.

Did the Communists win or the Nationalists lose the Chinese civil war? This talk will reexamine this classic question with new evidence from diaries and memoirs of the period that examine how economic crisis and political disillusionment in the existing regime interacted with a new type of revolutionary identity. It will discuss the immensely complex and ambiguous political atmosphere in the period leading up to 1949 and suggest that while the forces behind revolution were powerful, they contained the seeds of their own contradictions too.

Register Now, to Join Remotely: https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/overview/K041024/

Speaker Bio: Professor Rana Mitter

Rana Mitter is ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the author of several books, including Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II (2013) which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His writing on contemporary China has appeared recently in Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Business Review, The Spectator, The Critic, and The Guardian. He has commented regularly on China in media and forums around the world, including at the World Economic Forum at Davos. His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics "Meanwhile in Beijing" is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the UK Historical Association. He previously taught at Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

This lecture series is kindly sponsored by the Einaudi Center, East Asia Program, Department of History, Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Society for Humanities, Cornell External Education, eCornell, Cornell IT, Department of Government, and Department of Asian Studies.

Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real.

Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, Anita meets climate skeptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe we live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to persuade us that we’re all in this together.

This documentary, ten years in the making, weaves together the most urgent themes of our times: climate change, gender and racial inequality, the gaps between the rich and the poor, and the ideas that groups around the world have generated in order to save the planet.

Free admission. Sponsored by the Institute for African Development at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Film website: https://www.antsandgrasshopper.org/

"I am blown away. You have found a hero of such grace and intelligence and power, and you had the good sense to get out of the way, center the narrative on her. The film is obviously not about agriculture in the way I expected to be-- it’s much bigger than that. We get to observe history. That’s what ten years on a movie gets you. I feel invested in the project... so wonderful to see it completed. I will be happy to spread the word." - Michael Pollan, Author & Director Of The Knight Program In Science And Environmental Journalism

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.