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

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

After being governed by left-wing populism for most of the 21st century, Ecuador elected right-wing Guillermo Lasso as its new president in 2021. This presentation explains the juncture that brought Lasso to power, thanks to the formation of an anti-populist coalition that agglomerated various heterogeneous sectors. It also analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of this anti-populist coalition, both in the electoral contest and in the exercise of power.

Paolo Moncagatta is Associate Professor of Political Science at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, in Quito, Ecuador, where he also serves as Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities. He obtained his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. He also collaborates as a Research Fellow at the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM) of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research focuses on Latin American politics, citizen attitudes toward democracy, democratization, ideology (and ideological polarization), and electoral behavior.

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

For generations, the Afro-Caribbean islanders from the Archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia had regularly migrated to and from Central America and other islands in the Caribbean Sea. By the middle of the twentieth century, waves of migrants from mostly new locales in mainland Colombia and even as far as the Middle East transformed the tiny Colombian-administered islands' economy, society, and culture. Drawn to newfound opportunities due to the opening of the free port and promotion of tourism in San Andrés, these international and national migrants served as unintentional yet willing partners to state efforts to integrate the islands administratively, economically, and socially within Colombia. Drawing on ethnographic studies from the period, Colombian newspaper articles, and oral histories available in the collections at the Banco de la República Casa Cultura in San Andres Island, I trace how the rise of new aviation technologies and the creation of the free port facilitated an uneven integration of the island into the Colombian nation. While the free port strengthened administrative ties and contact between mainland Colombians and islanders, it failed to integrate the majority of native islanders who retained an oppositional stance against Colombian authorities and national projects. Unlike other studies on this topic, this paper gives equal attention to the experiences of migrants and native islanders.

Dr. Sharika Crawford is the inaugural Speedwell Professor of International Studies and Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Her primary research focuses on modern Latin America, specifically, Colombia and the interstitial places in the circum-Caribbean. In 2021, the Association of Caribbean Historians commended her first monograph The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making, published by the University of North Carolina Press, an Honorable Mention from its Elsa Goveia Prize in the Caribbean History. Additionally, she has published articles and essays in the Global South, Historia Crítica, International Journal of Maritime History, Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, and the New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids. Some of her current projects include a co-edited volume titled Understanding and Teaching Modern Latin American History, which is under contract with the Harvey Goldberg Series at the University of Wisconsin Press, and a second monograph-in-progress examining the social, political, and environmental histories of twentieth-century the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia.

Michelle Cho, University of Toronto.

Retro trends in popular media are a common feature of contemporary cultures across the globe. Nowhere is the nostalgia for 20th century vibes more prominent than South Korea. This talk will discuss “new retro”(aka “newtro/뉴트로)” aesthetics in South Korea, focusing on the television drama Reply 1988 and the recent revival of City Pop on digital platforms like YouTube and Spotify. My presentation probes newtro’s multiple genealogies, to situate nostalgia-tinged portrayals of late ‘80s and ‘90s youth culture as Korean media’s self-reflexive portrayal of the impact of commercial popular media on the social transformations of the post-authoritarian period. Connecting newtro to the transmedia domains of City Pop and related genres of music and media production driven by digital distribution and platform engagement, I’ll argue that the aesthetics and sensoria of new retro illuminate the social impacts and ideological effects of contemporary parasocial engagement, to suggest that the trendiness of retro aesthetics today serves as a visible trace of global media entanglements of human and algorithmic agency.

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her published work explores contemporary South Korean genre cinemas, Korean television, K-Pop's politicization on digital platforms, and histories of race and racialization in K-Pop and its fandoms. She is co-editor of two forthcoming volumes: Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea with Jesook Song (University of Michigan, April 2024, Perspectives on Contemporary Korea series) and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke UP, August 2024) and author of the forthcoming monograph Genre Worlds: Global Forms and Millennial South Korean Cinema (Duke UP, 2025). Her public-facing writing appears in such venues as The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she's a frequent commentator on Asian media in outlets ranging from NPR to the CBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post. She once hosted a public conversation between hallyu stars and BFFs Lee Jung Jae and Jung Woo Sung at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Introduced by Andrea Bachner, Comparative Literature, Cornell University. This event is part of the East Asia+ Initiative.

The lecture is followed by a reception.

Shibley Telhami (University of Maryland) and Marc Lynch (George Washington University) will give a joint talk titled "Academic Freedom and Middle East Scholars after October 7" as part of Cornell University's Freedom of Expression theme this year. Description: American college campuses have been at the center of charged political disputes in the weeks since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and the subsequent attacks by Israel on Gaza. These heated debates have focused on the pressures on university presidents to take a stand, the behavior of student groups, allegations of antisemitism, and the censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. But less attention has been paid to one group directly affected by the controversies: the scholars who work on and teach about the Middle East, who often concentrate professionally on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Presenting findings from opinion polling among scholars before and after the war started, carried out by the Middle East Scholars Barometer, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami will discuss the results and the ramifications. This event is sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies with generous support from the College of Arts & Sciences, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Comparative Muslim Societies Program, Critical Ottoman & Post Ottoman Studies, Religious Studies Program, Jewish Studies Program. Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, Department of Government and Society for the Humanities.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Thongchai Winichakul, (Emeritus Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison), who will discuss Thai intellectual history.

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 Talk

What is the global context of doing Thai intellectual history today? First, it is always a cross-cultural encounter, always involving comparison, interpretation and translation across literal and cultural languages. Second, despite being non-colonized, Siam’s transformation to modernity went through the encounters of different intellectual worlds of unequal powers. Thirdly, it unavoidably involves the encounters between different academies whose particular environments (politics, economy, scholarly culture, etc.) often lead to different questions, points of view, even methodology. Finally, a scholar in this field approaches the subject with different positioning, from one of the “Other” to one of the “Self” as a home scholar, and anything in between, hence the different politics of knowledge.

About the Speaker

Thongchai Winichakul, Emeritus Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Apart from eight books in Thai, his wrote two prize-winning books, Siam Mapped (1994, Harry Benda Prize, AAS, 1995) and Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok (2020, EUROSEAS 2022 award and George Kahin Prize, AAS, 2023). He received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), and was awarded the Fukuoka Grand Prize (2023). He was President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2013/14. His research interests are in the intellectual foundations of modern Siam under colonial conditions.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Joshua Mitchell, (PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University), who will discuss addiction and rehabilitation in Myanmar.

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 Talk

Burma is home to the world's longest running armed conflict. It is also the world's second largest producer of heroin and Asia's largest producer of methamphetamines. Studies of the drug-war relationship in Burma are top-down. They concern the way elite agreements, such as ceasefires between belligerents, shape patterns of drug production, peace, and conflict. In contrast, I consider these patterns from the ground up. Drawing on interviews with ex-soldiers recovering from addiction in drug rehabilitation centers in northeastern Burma, as well as public portrayals of addiction and war in Burma, I examine the role that drug addiction and rehabilitation play in the maintenance of militaries. I argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between rehabilitation and conscription. As a population that is commonly represented in Burma as the epitome of wasted male labor addicts are made into a labor pool that both militaries and churches can rehabilitate, deploy, or abandon. The social value of the addict is structured but the shifting contingencies of war and the shifting demands for military manpower. Centering the life stories of soldier-addicts shows the ways these men create and contest practices and imaginations of war, as well as their role in it. Yet the stories also reveal the way they often become ensnared in circuits of rehabilitation and conscription. These are produced by a diffuse array of religious and military institutions that hold conflicting ideologies, identities, and intentions, yet create a shared military order: the military-religious complex.

About the Speaker

Joshua Mitchell is a PhD candidate at Cornell University in socio-cultural anthropology. His dissertation research examines the intersections of Christianity, addiction, and war in Myanmar.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Cindy Lin, (Assistant Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University), who will discuss environmental governance in Indonesia.

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 Talk

Government data on Indonesia’s environment is in question. When ministerial officials contest deforestation and fire estimates that differ from their numbers, activists and scientists regard these actions as a suppression of science and, for some, even anti-science. In response, ministerial officials reason that such estimates, often provided by foreign scientists, are unverified by field surveys.

The talk considers a lesser-known story at the interface of this contradiction, that of topographical field surveys and their significance for the formation of professional work and scientific expertise. While field surveys are claimed to allow for the faithful validation of remote sensing data, what is missed is how they refashion scientists as technologists with alternative ways of accessing and knowing otherwise contingent resource frontiers.

In Indonesia, reduced research budgets, rapid environmental change, and the advent of machine learning in the last decade have greatly transformed the role of field surveys in the mapping sciences, forcing scientists to either question or hold more tightly to prior regimes of verification.

To explore these shifting constructions of the field, I bring together critical data studies scholarship with conceptual work on expertise in anthropology and history of science to examine the shifting material and social basis of environmental governance in Indonesia today.

About the Speaker

Cindy Lin is an ethnographer and information science assistant professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. Her first single-authored book project explores statecraft and computing practices in the environmental and mapping sciences in Indonesia and the professional identities and government institutions that emerged from these efforts.