Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Diana Kim, (Assistant Professor, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service), who will discuss Japanese colonial legacies in Southeast Asia.

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

For over a century, Southeast Asia was ruled by multiple European powers. Then, between 1940 and 1945 during World War Two, there was a temporary changing of the colonial guard as the Japanese empire occupied the region. The ideological bases and discourses for arrogating political authority changed, with a self-avowed Asian empire professing to liberate fellow Asians from the old yoke of Western imperialism and build a so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was also a time of heightened emotions, both great material losses and gains, as well as extraordinary physical, sexual, and symbolic violence. And in retrospect, it is an era that people remember in different ways, from a time of war, material deprivation and acute hardship, and the indignities of a “double occupation,” to a turning point towards independence and the birth of new nations.

This talk explores the significance of the Japanese occupation (1940-1945) for understanding the legacies of European colonial institutions across Southeast Asia today. It examines how agents of wartime empires stationed across Southeast Asia implemented varieties of formal arrangements for governing territories under Japanese military control that variably destroyed, kept, or altered extant institutions, while sometimes introducing new ones altogether. The Japanese occupation as such, I argue, generated different pathways for transmitting pre-war European colonial institutions into independent Southeast Asia. By exploring these varieties of wartime institution-building processes, this talk grapples more generally with what constitutes a meaningful rupture to historical continuity when studying the long-term effects of colonial institutions upon contemporary outcomes.

About the Speaker

Diana S. Kim is Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. She is the award-winning author of Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press 2020), and is currently writing a new book on global untouchability. Her scholarship is animated by concerns with how modern states develop capacity to define people at the edges of respectable society, constructing what it means to be illicit, marginal, and deviant, and crosses disciplinary boundaries between political science and history, with area focus on Southeast and East Asia.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Aichiro Suryo Prabowo, (Postdoctoral Associate, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University), who will discuss climate policy 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

Governments in developing countries often consider alleviating poverty and addressing climate change mutually exclusive agenda. The tension is likely salient in Indonesia, which has seen a momentum of economic development since the 2000s but is also home to the largest tropical forests in the world. This study empirically investigates whether such a dilemma exists by combining quantitative with textual analysis of the Indonesian central government’s budget documents over the last two decades. First, I will examine yearly allocations for environmental programs within the national budget. My analysis seeks to find intertemporal spending patterns and identify whether expenditures addressing environmental issues are adjusted across different presidencies. Second, I will focus on the narrative portions of the budget documents. By employing computational text analysis, this iteration aims to evaluate the extent to which national programs are oriented toward climate solutions, and how they stack up against competing economic agenda. Early evidence shows that the central government has allocated more funds to environmental programs at present than in the past, but it is unclear whether more funding is associated with quality spending.

About the Speaker

Aichiro Suryo Prabowo (Chiro) is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program (SEAP). His research integrates sustainability and resilience issues into public finance and budgeting. Beyond academia, Chiro has consulted internationally for the World Bank and previously served as an associate director at Indonesia’s Presidential Office (UKP4). He received his PhD from the University of Maryland, after completing a master's degree at the University of Chicago, both in policy studies.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nora Taylor, (Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), who will discuss contemporary Vietnamese artistic responses to monuments.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center at 12:20pm, not in Goldwin Smith later in the evening as was previously advertised. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

What do monuments to war heroes and victims of colonialism and American imperialism say to the current generation of Vietnamese, in a country where 80% of the population was born after the end of the war? As demands for dismantling monuments that glorified racism and imperialism arose around the globe in the last decade, how can we consider - or as Mechtild Widrich’s recent book Monumental Cares evokes - care for and about commemorative statues in contemporary Vietnam? Are they still relevant in Vietnam’s rapid changing society or are they merely vestiges of the past? This talk will look at several projects by contemporary Vietnamese artists that engage with the paradoxical nature of monuments and the changing perceptions of historical memory in the aftermath of war and colonialism.

About the Speaker

Nora Annesley Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii 2004 and Singapore 2009) and the co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP 2012) as well as numerous essays on Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian and Vietnamese Art. In 2013, she was the recipient of a John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She is currently co-editing with Pamela Corey, Contemporary Art from Vietnam: A Critical Reader forthcoming from the Nguyen Art Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Hew Wai Weng, (Research fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, National University of Malaysia), who will discuss Decolonial Idioms and Right-wing Propaganda in Malaysia.

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

It is often assumed that decolonial discourses will empower emancipatory and anti-racist movements. Yet, in reality, many right-wing activists appropriate decolonial idioms to promote their ultra-nationalist, majoritarian and nativist agenda. In Malaysia, several right-wing groups and individuals routinely use the “decolonial” rhetoric to criticize various ethnic, religious, gender and sexual minorities and to silence their efforts to demand equal rights. In other words, their call to go against ‘colonizers’ is to justify their intolerant stands by simply labelling any perceived threats to ‘heterosexual Malay Muslim identity’ as “foreign intervention”, “Western imperialism”, or “Chinese colonialism”. In this talk, he will first discuss two concurrent trends in Malaysia – the rise of right-wing majoritarianism and the popularity of decolonial discourses. He will then explore how “decolonial” rhetoric feeds into right-wing propaganda, as manifested in political campaigns, social activism, academic writings, and pop culture. Lastly, he goes beyond the Malaysian case study to examine similar trends of right-wing appropriation of “decolonial” discourses in the region (such as in Indonesia) and beyond. This talk aims to draw attention to the possible danger and limitations of decolonial scholarship without totally dismissing its emancipatory potential.

About the Speaker

Hew Wai Weng is a research fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (IKMAS, UKM). He writes about Chinese Muslim identities, Hui migrations, political Islam, urban middle-class Muslim aspirations and their social media practices in Malaysia and Indonesia. He is the author of ‘Chinese Ways of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity and Religiosity in Indonesia’ (NIAS Press, 2018). As a visiting fellow at SEAP during 2023-2024, under the Fulbright Malaysia Scholar Program, he researches political Islam and Malay Muslim majoritarianism in contemporary Malaysia by looking at various key actors and their narratives - ranging from politicians, activists, and preachers to influencers.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Sirithorn Siriwan, (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University), who will discuss Feminized Divinity and Animist Sovereignty in Northern Thai Ricelihood.

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

The prevalent scholarly interpretation of Thai religiosity as a congenial form of religious syncretism permits animism to exist alongside Theravada Buddhism and Hindu-Brahmanism. In fact, animism or sasana phi is often considered a mere set of beliefs, not a religion. This study reconceptualizes the ontology of northern Thai rice beings, human and non-human, or what I call ricelihood. I probe the rice narratives produced by the Thai Sangha that erase animist sovereignty and subdue agrarian deities. Drawing from stories of rice farmers and rice tales in archival documents, converting the non-demarcated rice deity into a feminized body suggests two forms of religious and gender subjugation. The first is the transformation of khwan khao (the rice spirit) into a feminized deity secondary to the Buddha. This genderization and religious constitution devise new, yet deviated conceptions of khwan khao, and strip away its personhood and governing power in the rice realm. The second is the subdual of the pre-existing phi under the male-dominant Sangha and its laity, not only making phi less potent, but also constituting these entities as other-than-Buddhist remnants. This talk includes the investigation of rice narratives from oral traditions and local rituals that are less popular and often neglected, but at the same time, less censored and pasteurized by centralized narratives. Through phi performances, women in rice communities subtly subvert religious subdual through rice rituals and divination rites in which animist entities manifest in corporeal and immaterial forms. In these ritualistic spaces, phi, rice deity, and Theravada Buddhism negotiate and reclaim their governing sovereignty.

About the Speaker

Sirithorn (Ing) Siriwan is a Ph.D. candidate in Asian Studies at Cornell University. Previously, she was a member of Crescent Moon Theater and a lecturer at Chiang Mai University. Sirithorn is currently completing her dissertation research on the livingness, residuality, and seedness of ritual, performance, and culture in northern Thai ricelihood through ethnographic studies and creative research approaches. Recently, she has co-authored a book chapter, “Thai Theatre and the Interplay of Perfection and Imperfection” (2022).

This book talk draws from creative and constructive tensions between violent efforts to define and disambiguate sex/gender transgression, on the one hand, and trans people’s incessant everyday negotiations with these efforts, on the other. As much as trans people are shaped by the cisheteronormative powers of the state, the family and religion, they also act on these powers to transform them. The book argues that everyday troubles with sex/gender transgression in personal, social and institutional life shape trans lives and deaths, as well as state power, family and kinship, regimes of sexuality and gender, urban geography, and feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Turkey. In order to understand this entangled world of the trans everyday, the book offers a novel concept, violent intimacies, and shows how transness in Turkey theoretically makes us rethink the notions of violence and intimacy and the relationship between them. Violent Intimacies exposes the connective tissue of a cisheteronormative social order which is intertwined with neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical order, and authoritarian management of social difference.

About the Speaker- Aslı Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Before joining Rutgers, she held postdoctoral and teaching positions at Brown, Harvard, and Brandeis Universities. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul (Iktidarin Mahremiyeti: Istanbul’da Hayat Kadinlari, Seks Isciligi ve Siddet), was published in Turkish. Her new book, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World is recently published by Duke University Press in February 2024. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnography of sex/gender non-conforming lives and deaths; medico-legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; as well as transnational feminist and LGBTQ movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey.

This event is hosted by Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies and co-sponsored by Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Talk by Aarti Sethi (Anthropology, University of California Berkeley)

Since 1997, over 250,000 farmers have taken their own lives in central India, an agrarian region where farmers have grown cotton for centuries. Today, farmers are mono-cropping genetically modified hybrid cotton seeds, which have trebled the input costs of cotton cultivation. Pushed into downward debt spirals to moneylenders and banks and unable to recoup costs, over a quarter million farmers have taken their own lives. This talk examines a paradoxical set of conversations around suicide deaths in the village. Whereas media, scholarly, and civil society discourses narrate the deaths of farmers as a debt-induced tragedy, amongst themselves, farmers describe suicide as an individual failing, usually on account of alcohol addiction and domestic strife. In this talk, I describe a structure of feeling I term ‘empathy without sympathy’ in which people may place themselves in the position of those who have died but have no sympathy for them. This disavowal arises from the individuation of risk as a structural precondition of farming. Since everyone is trapped in transgenic cotton cultivation, the inclination to isolate death in individual failure, rather than structural compulsion, is an attempt by the living to recover space for sovereign action, as they, too, must farm within this mode of debt-driven cultivation. Empathy without sympathy has rendered the speech of men ‘socially empty’. Even when someone says that they will commit suicide, no one believes them. I argue that toxicity is productive. By consuming pesticides, the body performs the communicative function to supplement for the failure of masculine speech.

Aarti Sethi is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political economy, and the study of South Asia. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines cash-crop agricultural economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society. She is particularly concerned with understanding the specificity of neoliberal agrarian change as a process in which peasant producers worldwide have become the subaltern franchisees of international bio-capital. Her second project, Republic of Readers, explores the relationship between reading literacy and libraries as sites of postcolonial democracy and citizenship. Alongside her research in agrarian anthropology, she is interested in the social life of technology, the politics of knowledge and literacy, the anthropology of religion, the history of anthropological thought, multi-species ethnography, and bringing archives and ethnography together. She has published in urban ethnography, cinematic, media, and visual cultures. Sethi holds degrees in political science and cinema and cultural studies from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. Before joining UC Berkeley, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Brown and Harvard University. Sethi’s work has appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, The Journal of Peasant Studies, American Ethnologist, and Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, among other venues.

From local to global perspectives

This lecture aims to illustrate different modalities of teaching, curriculum, educational partnerships and pedagogies within the fields of comparative, intercultural and peace education, which comprise the collection of interdisciplinary perspectives on educating for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina recently published in a co-edited book volume Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Theory and Practice in Formal Education (Kasumagic-Kafedzic, L. & Clarke- Habibi, S., Editors, Springer, 2023). The book explores a range of theories, contexts, pedagogies and practices within formal education settings and draws attention to the multiple roles that educators and education institutions play in fostering socially transformative learning.

The lecture will invite for a critical exploration of peace pedagogies within the post-war educational politics and divided societies, institutional and curricular constraints, and the lived experiences and identities of teachers and students in socially and historically situated communities. Insights and recommendations on how peace pedagogies can be systematically integrated at all levels of the education system taking into account the structural uniqueness of the contexts will be explored. The lecture reflections will invite for connections to the global challenges faced by educational institutions of today in the context of raging conflicts, deep social fragmentations, political divisions, marginalization of humanities, technocratic approaches to learning and teaching, and the rise of ethnonationalist politics where the “third mission” of education institutions to remain dedicated to peace, humanity and solidarity still poses a big challenge.

Register in advance for this meeting

About the Speakers

Professor Larisa Kasumagić- Kafedžić was a 2003-04 Cornell University Hubert Humphrey Fellow Alumni and a 2022-23 Cornell University Fulbright Visiting Scholar Alumni. For the past 25 years, Larisa has been actively involved in peaceful actions, community youth development programs, the philosophy of nonviolence, teacher development, and intercultural pedagogy in language education. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo. Her research interests are intercultural education, peace pedagogy, language education, teacher training, reflective pedagogies, and action research in teacher development. She is also the founder and a president of the Peace Education Hub. Her latest co-edited book volume Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Theory and Practice in Formal Education (Springer, 2023) focuses on the importance of institutionalizing peace pedagogy in formal education and teacher training in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Dr. Sara Clarke-Habibi has worked in the field of peacebuilding through education for over 20 years as a practitioner, researcher, curriculum developer, and trainer. She currently works in the Division for Peace at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in Geneva. Her research and teaching explore peacebuilding in relation to collective memory, trauma and healing; educational policy, curricula and textbooks; teacher education, identity and agency; formal and nonformal educational practices; and the role of youth as critical peace actors. She has published scientific articles and professional manuals on topics of intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding; peace psychology and trauma-sensitivity; dealing with the past and intergroup reconciliation. Her co-edited volume on Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Theory and Practice in Formal Education was published by Springer in 2023.Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-host
Institute for European Studies

Are you interested in the intersection of mental health and culture, global health, and community engagement? Do you want to gain field research skills and learn about indigenous communities in South India’s beautiful and fragile Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve? If so, the Cornell-Keystone Nilgiris Field Learning Program might be for you!

"iSpraak: A Platform for Second Language Pronunciation Instruction, Assessment, and Research"
Dan Nickolai
Associate Professor of French and Director of the Language Resource Center, Saint Louis University

This presentation will showcase the latest feature developments to the iSpraak platform. This free online tool incorporates multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech technologies to both model and assess pronunciation in 36 different languages. Now generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, iSpraak has significantly expanded on its previous feature set and has adopted new tools for learners, teachers, and researchers.

Bio: Dr. Dan Nickolai is an Associate Professor of French and the Director of the Language Resource Center at Saint Louis University. He has a professional and educational background in the fields of Computer Science, French, and Second Language Acquisition. His current work focuses on developing web-based applications that support language learning, assessment, and research. In addition to his roles at Saint Louis University, Dr. Nickolai serves as the President of the International Association for Language Learning Technology.

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.