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This webinar features a discussion of author Saket Soni’s The Great Escape, which tells the astonishing true story of a group of immigrants trapped in the largest human trafficking scheme in modern American history. Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of modern-day forced labor, The Great Escape — named a 2023 best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, and Amazon — takes us into the hidden lives of the foreign workers that America relies on to rebuild after climate disasters.

Join us for a dialogue with Saket Soni, a labor organizer and human rights strategist working at the intersection of racial justice, migrant rights, and climate change, and New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman. Cornell Law School professor Stephen Yale-Loehr moderates the discussion, in which our panel will put this tale of human slavery into the larger context of our broken immigration system.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

A gripping tale of forced labor and liberation that NPR called “a true story that reads like a novel”What it takes for immigrant workers to make the promise of democracy realThe origin of the immigrant workforce rebuilding after climate disastersHow this story fits into larger immigration controversiesSPEAKERS

Saket Soni
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, Resilience Force

Sarah Stillman
STAFF WRITER, The New Yorker

Stephen W. Yale-Loehr
PROFESSOR, Cornell Law School

This webinar is cosponsored by the Migrations Initiative and Cornell Law School.

Speaker: Edith Aldridge, Linguistics, Academia Sinica

Taiwan is the homeland of the Austronesian language family, speakers of Proto-Austronesian having migrated there from southeastern China roughly 6,000 years ago before proceeding to populate the Philippines, Indonesia/Malaysia, Madagascar, and the Pacific islands. As many as twenty distinct languages were spoken in Taiwan at the beginning of foreign contact in the 17th century. Now a third of these are extinct, and the rest are endangered. The first of these to decline were languages spoken in lowland areas in contact first with the small Dutch presence in southern Taiwan in the mid-17th century and subsequently with waves of Chinese migration in the 18th and 19th centuries. Intensive contact with highland Austronesians began with Japanese colonization during the first half the 20th century and continued under the Nationalist government from 1945 until the lifting of martial law in 1987. In 2001, the government inaugurated a revitalization program with the hope of invigorating the by then already endangered Austronesian languages, for example by introducing ethnic language education into local school curriculums. This presentation sketches the history of foreign contact, government language policies (particularly in the 20th century), revitalization efforts, and some outcomes of these policies and programs.

Introduced by John Whitman, Linguistics, Cornell University.

Co-sponsored by the Linguistics Department.

Su-yeon Seo, (Cornell grad student, Asian Studies) will lead final Classical Chinese text-reading for this semester titled Naming and Knowledge in the East Asian Sea.

The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, Waseda University.

As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, video game director Hideo Kojima is synonymous with the “stealth game” genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between video games and other forms of media. In this talk, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim draws from his recently published book to explain the core tenets of Kojima’s game design. Despite working for a commercial game studio for most of his career, Kojima designed and directed games that were both industrially disruptive and socially relevant. Focusing on developer disclosures from Japanese game periodicals, Hartzheim argues that Kojima advocates for a “progressive game design” that expands the boundaries of both game industry conventions and sociocultural discourses in Japan.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim is Associate Professor of New Media at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He teaches and researches on game studies, media industries, and Japanese popular culture in the School of International Liberal Studies and Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. He is the author of Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding (2023) and co-editor of The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy (2019).

Introduced by Andrea Mariucci, graduate student, Asian Studies. This event is created by the EAP Graduate Student Steering Committee.

Watch an interview with Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Andrea Mariucci here! (2 min.)

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@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.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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

***

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.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research in any field or teaching in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only.

The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months. Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

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

***

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.

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

Co-sponsored by Einaudi's Democratic Threats and Resilience Initiative

In this talk, Gabriel Vommaro will present his new Elements, "Conservatives Against the Tide. The Rise of the Argentine PRO in Comparative Perspective" (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The volume addresses the success of conservative parties in non-authoritarian contexts in contemporary Latin America. It places the core case of Argentina's Republican Proposal (PRO) party in comparative perspective with Argentina's Recrear and with Colombia's Democratic Center party and the Bolivia's Social Democratic Movement in an effort to understand their differing degrees of success in adverse circumstances. Based on long-term research using a variety of methods, this Element shows that success has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and elite fear of the 'Venezuela model.'

After the talk, Professors at ILR Santiago Anria and Candelaria Garay will briefly reflect on Vommaro’s book in light of the rise of an even more radical right-wing alternative in Argentina.

Gabriel Vommaro is Professor of Political Sociology at the EIDAES, Universidad de San Martín and Researcher at the Argentinian National Research Council, CONICET. He received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has published on political activism and political parties, political clientelism and the state, and political communication. His books include Conservatives against the Tide (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Diminished Parties. Democratic Representation in Contemporary Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2021; with JP Luna, R. Piñeiro & F. Rosenblatt); La larga marcha de Cambiemos (Siglo XXI, 2017) and Sociologie du clientélisme (La découverte, 2015; with H. Combes). His research has been published by Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, Party Politics, LAPS and JLAS.

Talk by Mahruba Mowtushi (English and Humanities, BRAC University, Bangladesh)

'Wireless Broadcasting in Eastern Bengal: Sound, Nation, Modernity 1939-1979’ tells the story of forty years of expanding wireless soundscape in the eastern regions of Bengal. The wireless has been instrumental in Bengal in exploring modernist ideas about nation and identity. The wireless’ remarkable reach across the airspace of Bengal was responsible for creating an ‘imagined community’ among Bengalis, especially during and after the partitions of 1947 and 1971. This project, the first of its kind in examining radio culture in eastern Bengal, brings together original archival research on wireless to bear on the expanding scholarly interest in the history of broadcasting, its connection to nationalist imaginaries, and the semiotics of sound. The project is being reworked into a book that is divided into six chapters that are somewhat chronologically arranged: each chapter surveys a particular facet of radio culture in East Bengal involving a myriad moving and moveable elements — of people, equipment, ideas, practices, and sound — that created a new kind of awareness to mediated sound and the art of listening among Bengalis.

Mahruba Mowtushi completed her BA (2007-10) and MA (2010-11) in English literature from Queen Mary, University of London, and PhD in comparative literature from King’s College, University of London (2017). She writes for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL), Research in African Literature (RAL), and South Asian Review (SAR). In recent years, Mowthushi has published articles and book chapters on Bengali cinema, street art in Dhaka, South Asian Muslim food culture, and ‘transnational’ African writers of Bengali descent. She works in English and Bengali, and her research and writing interests cut across South Asian and African literature and cultural history. Her first monograph, Africa in the Bengali Literary Imagination: From Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-1973, is coming out in 2024 from Routledge. Dr. Mowtushi is currently working on two book-length projects on wireless broadcasting in Bengal and the rise of modern nation-states in South Asia.