The Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Awards fund international fieldwork to help Cornell students complete their dissertations. Through a generous gift from Amit Bhatia, this funding opportunity annually supports at least six PhD students who have passed the A exam. Recipients hold the title of Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Scholars. All disciplines and research topics are welcome. The award provides $10,000 to be used by the end of the sixth PhD year for international travel, living expenses, and research expenses.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Day 2: Pandemic Archives: Media, Geopolitics, and Temporalities of Crisis

About this workshop:

As the world enters its fourth year living with COVID-19, this workshop critically examines our conceptual tools for capturing this chronic crisis and its seismic impact on global geopolitics and humanistic inquiry. Departing from existing discussions, we focus on how the diverse media practices that flourished during the pandemic are now transforming into historical and aesthetic archives enabling re-readings of overshadowed affects, stories, and relationalities within a larger picture. With a special interest in transregional, diasporic, global, and/or other innovative frameworks of analysis, we seek to address the controversial yet indispensable role of China and Chineseness in constituting the global political ecology of this crisis period. Discussion topics include but are not limited to (post-)pandemic global politics and sociality, crisis temporalities, media forms and platforms, ordinary agency, archive, transregional world-making, soundscapes, ecocriticism, and ongoing changes in Chinese/Sinophone/Asian/Asian American studies.

We invite all interested to join us for this get-together for creative and convivial thinking.

10:00-10:10 Welcome Remarks

10:10-11:50 Panel 1: ARCHIVE

Fanyi Faye Ma (Duke University): Can Digital Wailing Crumble the Zero-COVID Great Wall?: The Political Lives of Mediated Female VoiceNick Admussen (Cornell University): The Postpandemic, the Postsocialist, and Jile Disike (Disco Elysium)Lilian Kong (University of Chicago): Calibrating the Self: Approaching East Asian Healing Vlogs as Digital Pandemic ArchiveShana Ye (University of Toronto): The Pandemic Steel(Still): Materiality, Memory and the Many Lives of Chinese Cargo Containers1:30-3:10 Panel 2: REWORLDING

Yanting-Leah Li (Cornell University): From Immunity to Superabundance: Radical Possibilities of Communitarian EcologyShiqi Lin (Cornell University) and Hans Yi Su (Pennsylvania State University): Pandemic Clubbing: Fugitive Cohabitation in a Shifting Global OrderChristopher T. Fan (University of California, Irvine): Park My Car: Ambiguity and the Auteur in the Films of Chung Mong-hongLily Wong (American University): Transpacific Alliance: Asian/American Coalitional World-Making in and beyond the Pandemic3:20-4:50 Hybrid Roundtable: RECALIBRATION

A special discussion bringing back scholars who have written about COVID-19 since 2020

Michael Berry (UCLA), Jenny Chio (University of Southern California), Belinda Kong (Bowdoin College), Carlos Rojas (Duke University), Kaiyang Xu (University of Southern California)Moderators: Nick Admussen and Shiqi Lin5:00-5:30 Concluding Discussion

Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.

Read about Day 1's book talk here.

Day 1: Book Talk – SARS Stories: Affect and Archive of the 2003 Pandemic

Speaker: Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)

In SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows how the Chinese experiences of living with SARS can reshape global feelings toward pandemic social life and foster greater fellowship in the face of pandemics.

Belinda Kong is Professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She is a scholar of global Asian literature and culture whose research focuses on global Chinese-ness.

Book discount: save 30% when you order SARS Stories from dukeupress.edu with coupon code E24BKONG.

Day 1's book talk is part of a two-day workshop. Read about Day 2 here.

Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.

Conveners:

Shiqi Lin (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Nick Admussen (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Participants:

Michael Berry (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA)

Jenny Chio (East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology, USC)

Christopher T. Fan (English, UC Irvine)

Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)

Lilian Kong (Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)

Yanting-Leah Li (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Fanyi Faye Ma (Ethnomusicology, Duke University)

Carlos Rojas (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University)

Hans Yi Su (Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)

Lily Wong (Literature, American University)

Kaiyang Xu (East Asian Languages and Cultures, USC)

Shana Ye (Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto)

Institute for European Studies Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

Until 2005, the number of democracies in the world kept increasing, but after that date, the number has declined. Even robust democracies are now showing signs of weakness and some have turned into hybrid regimes suspended between democracy and autocracy. What is killing off the world’s democracies - and what can be done about it?

In her forthcoming book Destroying Democracy by Law, Kim Lane Scheppele explores the countries in which aspirational autocrats have undermined democracies. With examples from Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and beyond, Scheppele shows how democracies no longer die with tanks in the streets. Instead, democracies die when aspirational autocrats come to power through elections and then use legal methods to undermine constraints on their power. With law as their weapon, aspirational autocrats damage the institutions that provide checks and balances, compromise the independence of the judiciary, stifle civil society, muzzle the press and use the power of the state against those who might challenge their monopoly on power. Scheppele explains how the new legal tools work, how they circulate from one budding autocracy to another and why international observers have been slow to recognize the problem. She also provides some ideas for reversing these processes through law wielded by new democratic movements.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law, and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge, and human rights.

“ The Care and Feeding of Names: The Ritual Labor of Bejuni Priestesses and Cosmological Life in Autochthonous India”

Talk abstract:

Bejuni are female ritual specialists whose rites repair and regenerate ecological, social, and cosmological relationships crucial for life in the densely jungled Niyam Donger mountains of present-day Southern Odisha state in India. Often elderly and widowed, bejuni women play key roles in a cosmologically expansive process that recycles the dead back into life. During ethnographic research, I came to understand that bejuni labor is built around the ethical and material maintenance and repair of name-lines, capacious forms of personhood that move across conventional boundaries between lives and deaths and carry with them rights in swidden gardens and in persons. Their practices enact forms of social reproduction beyond sexual conjugality, situating personhood's temporalities outside biological regimes of life. Rupina, life cycle rites for name-lines, are managed by bejuni to create stability across the vagaries of life and death, and to reproduce togetherness and solidarity between living humans, ancestral kin, and spirit beings who abide throughout the landscape. Cosmological lifeworlds centered on female bejuni priestesses face displacement due to ecological demands accompanying regional mountaintop bauxite mining and its severe impacts on water supply and flow. This talk expands directions in black and indigenous feminist theory (Tuck 2009; Lorde 1984) and feminist anthropology of religion (Apffel-Marglin 1983; Mahmood 2004; Ramberg 2013) to elaborate the implications of bejuni praxis within a cosmological framework of social reproduction. Bejuni modes of cosmo-social reproduction offer a deeper reckoning of what is lost when mountains are torn down for capitalist natural resource extraction, raising critical questions about what counts as environmental justice and who are its intended beneficiaries.

Scholar Bio:

I am a sociocultural anthropologist and ethnographic fieldworker, having recently completed my Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at Cornell University (Dec ’23). As a social scientist, I am interested in forging connections between complex global issues and locally situated experiences to render macro-level issues comprehensible in human-scale terms. My research sheds light on the shrouded social and ecological implications of the green energy economy by closely examining how communities in mountainous eastern India, affected by multinational corporate aluminum mining, endeavor to regenerate their social and ecological environments amidst climate change. I am interested in drawing upon ethnographic data and multi-species, ontological, and indigenous feminist analytic frameworks to ask: 1) what counts as environmental justice and for what types of lives and bodies; and 2) how do conventional distinctions between religion and secularism unevenly distribute the impacts of climate change, often concentrating the ecological effects of elite global consumerism within autochthonous communities at the peripheries of world economies. Based on long-term immersive ethnographic research conducted in Odia and Kui/Kubi languages and supported by Fulbright-Hays, my dissertation research explores the intricate material economies and multifaceted social and environmental displacements that Jharnia (“Dongria Kondho”) interlocutors experience to accompany regional natural resource development. Entitled “Keepers of Water: Religion, Ecology, and Ethics as Materiality along a Green Energy Frontier in Tribal Odisha, India,” my dissertation is set amidst India’s geologically ancient Eastern Ghats mountains, along the rapidly expanding aluminum-bauxite natural resource frontier. There, mountainous landscapes revered by Jharnia indigenous interlocutors as their originary ancestor, a sovereign deity, and a living landscape are also coveted by mining companies for the potential natural resource wealth hidden beneath their jungled surfaces in the form of bauxite. Bauxite ore is strip-mined, refined into alumina powder, and then smelted into lightweight, strong, and flexible aluminum metals to feed the global proliferation of aluminum-dependent electric vehicles, fuel cells, military drones, inter-stellar reusable rockets, and recyclable soda-pop cans. Amidst unprecedented ecological challenges characterized by droughts, flooding, and the persistent impacts of metallic dust and water pollution, my dissertation, supported by a grant from the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, utilizes indigenous Jharnia water management practices to demonstrate that Jharnia social life, colonial categories of knowledge about religion, and the materialities of natural resources are intricately interconnected and entangled along the bauxite frontier in indigenous India.

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) Seminar Series.

Co-sponsored: Department of History, Department of History of Art & Visual Studies

New colonial histories are being researched and written for the 1500s and 1600s to document the presence of people of the African Diaspora and explore their varied experiences in Iberia, the Peruvian highlands, and crossing the early Spanish Transpacific. Even where they were a minority of the local population or marginalized in the historical record, evidence of their actions and sometimes even their motivations can be located and analyzed.

Leo Garofalo is a History Professor at Connecticut College whose research draws attention to the central roles of Native Andeans, Afro-Peruvians, and enslaved and free Asians in shaping daily life within colonial cities. He uses the archives of the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid, Spain’s imperial bureaucracy in Seville, Rome’s Jesuit Archives, the local Church in Peru, and notaries and secular courts in Lima and Cuzco to uncover traces of the passage of the tens of thousands of West and Central Africans and hundreds of Asians forced into slavery and brought to the Andes in the 1500s and 1600s. His publications cover taverns, drinking, markets, seafaring and soldiering, the Afro-Iberian roots of Andean witchcraft, and the Atlantic, European, early trans-Pacific routes of the African and Asian Diasporas to the 16th- and 17th-century Andes. To support this research, he was recently awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Library Company of Philadelphia and a NEH Research Fellowship at the Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies of St. Louis University.

"In September 2018, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, sister of Rushan Abbas, was abducted by Chinese authorities shortly after Rushan's speech condemning the Uyghur genocide. The documentary "In Search of My Sister" chronicles Rushan's relentless pursuit of truth and justice, spanning multiple countries. The film also exposes the CCP's harrowing crimes against humanity through the personal story of Rushan and other Uyghurs in the diaspora. "In Search of My Sister" has been screened worldwide, shedding light on these atrocities."

This screening is followed by a Q&A Session with Rushan Abbas.

About the Speaker

Rushan Abbas’s activism started in the mid-1980s as a student at Xinjiang University, co-organizing pro-democracy demonstrations in Urumchi in 1985 and 1988. Since her arrival in the United States in 1989, Ms. Abbas has been an ardent campaigner for the human rights of the Uyghur people. Ms. Abbas is the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) and became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism for Uyghurs following her sister’s detainment by the Chinese government in 2018. Ms. Abbas has spearheaded numerous campaigns, including the “One Voice One Step” movement, which culminated in a simultaneous demonstration in 14 countries and 18 cities on March 15, 2018, to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps.

Ms. Abbas frequently briefs global lawmakers and officials on the Uyghur genocide and provides testimonies at legislative bodies worldwide, such as the U.S. Congress, and other parliaments. She advocates for raising awareness and engaging in discussions on policy options to address the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party and halt the ongoing Uyghur genocide. She also serves as the Chairperson for the Advisory Board of the Axel Springer Freedom Foundation and as a board member of the Task Force on Human Trafficking within the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum.

In 2019, Ms. Abbas received the Freedom Fighter Award, and her work was recognized at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2020. Under her leadership, CFU published the 'Genocide in East Turkistan' report in July 2020, leading to the organization receiving the World Democracy Courage Tribute in 2021 and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2022.

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Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-Host
Cornell Cinema