Evaluating Public Perceptions

This discussion, based on the book The Legitimacy of Drone Warfare: Evaluating Public Perceptions (Routledge 2024), will examine public perceptions of the legitimacy of drones, and how this affects countries’ policies on and the global governance of drone warfare. Scholars recognize that legitimacy is central to countries’ use of drones, and political officials often characterize strikes as legitimate to sustain their use abroad.

In this discussion, Dr. Paul Lushenko introduces his recent book, which introduces and tests an original middle-range theory that allows scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners to understand how evolving patterns of drone warfare globally shape the public’s perceptions of legitimate strikes. Rather than relate drone warfare to a platform or counterterrorism strikes only, as experts often do, Dr. Lushenko argues that drone warfare is best understood as a function of the unique ways that countries use and constrain strikes. By updating theories of drone warfare, Dr. Lushenko provides a generalizable way to understand public perceptions of legitimacy in cross-national contexts, especially among democratic political regimes that are prefigured on political officials’ accountability for the use of force abroad.

About the Speaker

Paul Lushenko is an Assistant Professor and Director of Special Operations at the U.S. Army War College.

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

"Language Policy, (Anti-)Racism, and Change"
Jeff Bale
Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, University of Toronto

This session begins with findings from a policy genealogy (Gale, 2001) of the Heritage Languages Program (HLP) in Ontario and the racialized conflicts over it between 1977–1987. Heritage-language education policies emerged across Canada in the 1970s, just after federal policies for official bilingualism (1969) and multiculturalism (1971) were established. As Haque (2012) argues, official bilingualism was only possible by excluding demands of Indigenous and other racialized communities for their own linguistic and cultural rights. The HLP challenged the logic of official bilingualism, and thus became the site of extended, racialized conflicts over fundamental questions of (1) whose language and culture can be included at school, (2) to what ends, and (3) who gets to decide? The session draws on notions of thick solidarity (Liu & Shange, 2018) to interpret the temporary alliances (Garland, 2014) formed among Black, Indigenous, South & East Asian, Italian, Portuguese, and Francophone communities in Toronto and their activism around the HLP.

The session then extends the lessons from this study to ask larger questions about the field of language policy. If racialized hierarchies of languages — and of the people who speak them — are often so stable over time, then under what conditions is it possible to work across difference and dismantle racial and linguistic stratification? Responses to this question, whether in language-policy scholarship or language-policy activism, require clear theoretical stances on (1) the relationship between language policy, (anti-)racism, migration and (settler-)colonialism (e.g., Bale, 2015; Flores & Chaparro, 2018), (2) the relationship between language-policy pasts and futures (e.g., Haque, 2012, 2019; Macías, 2014), and (3) what counts as change in language policy (Wiley, 1999, 2006).

Bio: Jeff Bale is Associate Professor of Language and Literacies Education at the University of Toronto, and serves as Vice President, University & External Affairs of the University of Toronto Faculty Association. His research applies political-economic, anti-racist, and critical perspectives to educational language policy and teacher education. From 2021-2022 he held a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the Universität Bremen in Germany. He is PI of the project Language, Race, and Regulating Difference: The Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, 1977-1987, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is lead author of Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education (Multilingual Matters, 2023) and co-editor with Sarah Knopp of Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (Haymarket, 2012).

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

"Copyright Basics: Understanding Copyright in the Context of Language Teaching"
Julie Evershed
Language Resource Center Director, University of Michigan

The purpose of this session is to give you tools and strategies to become comfortable making basic decisions regarding materials usage and copyright considerations in the pursuit of language teaching and learning. There are many of the more traditional ways that copyright impacts our work: Public Performance Rights, conversion of "obsolete" materials, and duplication of language learning media. However, with the evolution of technology and the advent of the user as creator, we are facing many new situations where the law has not caught up with reality. The paradigm shift in publishing and distribution contributes to the confusing nature of this topic, leaving us with serious questions on how to deal with the online textbook, licensing, streaming media, and distance (as well as hybrid) education. In this session, the concepts presented will include: intent, protected rights, fair use, face-to-face teaching, "guidelines," right of first sale, the Berne Convention, and will touch on issues around generative AI.

Bio: Julie Evershed began her career at the Language Resource Center (LRC) at the University of Michigan in 1998 as the Information Specialist, taking the lead managing collections, student staff, and main-center operations. After many years’ experience, she was well prepared to step into the position of Director in 2010. Her first responsibility was leading the move from the Modern Languages Building where the LRC had been housed since 1971, to the facility in the newly built North Quad Academic and Residential Building. Julie came to the LRC with a strong administrative background, including experience in customer service, supervision, systems implementation, and integration of technology. She has a Masters in Information and Library Science from the University of Michigan School of Information, and a Bachelors of Art in French Language and Literature from the UM Department of Romance Languages. Julie has a love for languages and cultures, fostered by her experiences studying and living abroad. She participated in the Michigan study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence, obtaining a Certificat d'études politiques: Les Relations Internationales from the Université Aix-Marseille. She also spent 15 months in Istanbul Turkey, studying at Bogaziçi University and teaching English.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Boreth Ly (Art History, Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz), who will discuss the politics and optics of how the sultans of Java ‘accidentally’ became colonial brides.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Goldwin Smith Hall, G22. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Black and white photographs from the Dutch colonial eras captured the Sultans of Java and the Dutch governor residents standing side by side comparable to a bride and groom in a wedding photograph. This talk looks both closely and broadly at these “Happy Marriage” photographs of the Sultans of Java and the Dutch Resident Governors and considers the cultural and political legibility of these photographs within historical and postcolonial contexts. About the Speaker

Born in the cosmopolitan village of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Boreth Ly is an associate professor of Southeast Asian art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She coedited with Nora A. Taylor, Modern and Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia (2012). In addition, she has written numerous articles and essays on the arts and films of Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Academically trained as an art historian, Ly employs multidisciplinary methods and theories in her writings and analysis, depending on the subject matter. Last, Ly’s research focuses on the intersection between memory and historical trauma. She authored, Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022).

Gatty Lecture Series Join us for a talk by Daniel Whitehouse, (ERSC postdoctoral fellow based at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS), who will discuss network politics at an elite Thai school. This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu. About the TalkScholars posit that Thai politics is dominated by opaque and unaccountable networks that work to frustrate democracy and maintain control of a ‘parallel’ or ‘deep state’. The late King Bhumibol, suggests McCargo, sat atop an enigmatic and powerful ‘network monarchy’ that retained loyal proxies through strategic placement. Some of these elite networks have a strong dynastic component; Nishizaki shows relations of kin and marriage are important structuring features. In this seminar, I introduce ‘network institutions’ as a critical site of study to understand how these important relations of power are forged and maintained in contemporary Thailand. I show that many of these cliques centre around a handful of understudied ‘network institutions’—elite secondary schools and military academies that prepare young men for power via induction into a close-knit fraternal community.
I take as a case study Suan Kularb Wittayalai, Thailand’s oldest state-administered secondary school and alma mater to seven prime ministers. Drawing on extensive archival analysis, life histories, and twelve months fieldwork at Suan Kularb, I explore the processes by which the school maintains elite syndicates that operate across the military, bureaucracy, and commerce. Specifically, I propose that Suan Kulap’s network politics are not merely an expression of traditional patronage models. Rather, such relations are consciously facilitated by the school through the elaboration of an idiosyncratic and unusually ritualized institutional culture, much of which utilizes colonial pedagogic practices introduced by a succession of former British headmasters. Such technologies—which include novel mechanisms of surveillance, invented tradition, and disciplinary practices— integrate with local epistemic practices to generate life-long sentiments of obligation and collective exceptionalism. This, in turn, underpins the political culture and distribution of power in contemporary Thailand. About the SpeakerDaniel Whitehouse is a ERSC postdoctoral fellow based at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS. His research is concerned with the cultural legacy of colonialism in Thailand, the anthropology of elites, and institutional ethnography. His is currently writing Learning to Govern, an historical ethnography of Suan Kulap Wittiyalai, the so-called ‘Eton of Thailand’. Before studying his PhD at Durham University, Daniel worked as a broadcast journalist at Voice TV, a Thai language news channel based in Bangkok.