Part of Cornell’s yearlong exploration of freedom of expression, this event from Global Cornell brings together the campus community to discuss how Cornell can protect academic freedom while collaborating with institutions and scholars in places with different political realities and views on free speech.

Allan Goodman, chief executive officer of the Institute of International Education, joins Vice Provost for International Affairs Wendy Wolford to discuss:

How can universities like Cornell provide a safe haven for scholars whose right to free expression is threatened?How can universities act to promote scholarship, free expression, and global collaboration?Cornell has worked with the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) for over a decade to provide yearlong fellowships for displaced academics and human rights defenders. IIE also supports the Humphrey Fellows Program in the Department of Global Development and Fulbright fellowships for undergraduate students from across the university.

Goodman and Wolford will be joined by these panelists:

Sharif Hozoori (Afghanistan) | IIE-SRF fellow in the Einaudi Center’s South Asia ProgramPeidong Sun (China) | Einaudi Center’s East Asia Program and Associate Professor of History, A&SAzat Gündoğan (Turkey) | Florida State University, former IIE-SRF fellow in the Einaudi Center’s Institute for European Studies***

If you can't attend in person, register for a Zoom link to join the livestream here.

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About Allan Goodman

IIE’s CEO Allan E. Goodman is a Council on Foreign Relations member and serves on the selection committees for the Rhodes and Schwarzman Scholars and the Yidan Prize. He also serves on the Council for Higher Education Accreditation International Quality Group advisory council and the Education Above All Foundation board of trustees. Goodman has a PhD in government from Harvard, MPA from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and BS from Northwestern University.

About the Institute of International Education

For more than 100 years, the Institute of International Education has promoted the exchange of scholars and researchers and rescued scholars, students, and artists from persecution, displacement, and crises. IIE conducts research on international academic mobility and administers the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Program.

Supporting Scholars Under Threat

Learn more about how Global Cornell supports Scholars Under Threat.

November 3-4, 2023 Statler Hotel, Cornell University Open to the Public

The symposium will explore investment and development finance which is an important area of policy discussions in Africa and other developing areas of the world, as well as those that will give a brief overview of the scale of both Chinese and Middle Eastern investment in Africa. Multifaceted and multidisciplinary analytical approaches that will consider the role of Chinese and Gulf State investments in the development of Africa, especially Africa’s efforts to create a free trade area are welcomed. Furthermore, the symposium will look at the role foreign investment can play in resource mobilization for infrastructure development as well as the links between law, trade, and regional integration.

Sponsored by the Institute for African Development and the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa

Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program

Funded by the Einaudi Center for International Studies Cross Program Initiative

LACS Film Series

‘Icaros: a vision’ is a story about fear and the release from fear – the fear of illness and of death, but also the fear of life and living. It’s about the possibility of living through one’s fear – which is what the Amazonian plant Ayahuasca is good at getting you to do. Centered on the nightly ceremonies that are the main feature of shamanic retreats, Icaros revels in darkness, replicating a shamanic journey. Set in the Peruvian Amazon among the Shipibo-Conibo community, the film is also driven by the conviction that acknowledging the power of plants is the best way to change the jeopardized future of the Amazon – itself like a dying patient.

Directors:

Matteo Norzi: Artist, designer, filmmaker and indigenous rights activist, currently serving as Executive Director at Shipibo Conibo Center in New York City. Co-founder of Cobino Productions with Leonor Caraballo and Abou Farman, which aims to promote the creativity and knowledge of the Amazonian Shipibo Conibo communities through a range of media.

Leonor Caraballo: Worked as a photographer and video artist between Buenos Aires and New York. She won a number of fellowships and grants, including the Latin American Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and an Eyebeam Art and Technology Center residency. Aspects of the film are based on co-director Leonor Caraballo’s true experiences. Although she dedicated herself to the project until the very end, sadly she died before she could see the film finished.

There is an installation of the Shipibo-Conibo artist Celia Vasquez Yui at the Johnson Museum right now, so we recommend visiting the exhibit before going to the screening.

Presented by Kanopy

There'll be free pizza!

Register

The seminar series for fall 2023 explores the future of African land, agriculture and food, digging into the contestations, conflicting and converging visions from a wide range of perspectives. How might land be used, valued and lived in, across cities, rural communities, forests, deserts and grasslands on the continent in the future? Who is proposing different visions of land futures in Africa, what are the histories, politics, socio-cultural, environmental and economic implications of these potential visions? In one of the regions with the most youthful populations, how are young people considering possible futures? What are ways that land, agriculture and food systems could be resilient, healthy, ecological, thriving and just? Can there be a decolonial agriculture and food future in Africa that celebrates Indigenous and local foodways?

Organized by the Institute for African Development and the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa

cosponsored by the East Asia program

Bina Agarwal teaches part-time as a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester, UK. She lives mainly in India where her research projects are predominantly based. She continues to be affiliated with the Institute of Economic Growth at Delhi University, where she was earlier Director and Professor of Economics. Educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Delhi, she has held distinguished teaching and research positions at many universities, including Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Minnesota (as the Winton Chair), and the New York University School of Law. She was Harvard's first Daniel Ingalls Visiting Professor and later a Research Fellow at the Ash Institute, Kennedy School of Government. She has also been a fellow of Radcliffe's Bunting Institute at Harvard.

Talk by Mabel Denzin Gergan

Covered with dense forests, seismically active, landslide-prone, and receiving the bulk of monsoonal rains, the Indian Himalayan Region has long been characterized as a “difficult landscape” with an “inhospitable terrain” in both colonial British and Indian state discourse. More recently, in reports from state and international development institutions like the IPCC, akin to charismatic, endangered megafauna, the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region occupies a central place within apocalyptic forecasts of a ruinous future wherein climatic and geological volatility are set to destabilize regional ecology and geopolitical security. In this talk, I place these discourses of vulnerability and crisis in the Himalayan region within broader, universal framings of Euro-Western epistemologies, dominant climate change frameworks, and Hindutva (Hindu nationalism). Drawing on empirical and theoretical discussions from my research on hydropower and the Lepcha Indigenous anti-dam movement in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, I show how interrogating race, caste, and environmental determinism might help us better understand the great geographic and racial unevenness of anthropogenic climate change in the Indian context. I argue that such an interrogation requires we develop fluency in regional particularities, what geographer Tariq Jazeel (2011: 88) refers to as decolonial orientation, one that is attentive to “indeterminate categories, events, and experiences” that are not “immediately comprehensible by the violent normalization of a universal claiming to speak for the particular.” In the last half of the talk, I center the experiences of the region’s Indigenous and tribal communities and ask how these groups imagine and speak of their homelands, past, and the future to come.

Mabel Denzin Gergan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. She has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research is based in the Indian Himalayan region. It examines its relationship with ‘mainland’ India, characterized on the one hand by state-led development and climate change interventions and, on the other, through the movement of racialized bodies from the borderland to India’s urban heartland. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race with special interests in political ecology, environmental humanities, and decolonial theorizing.

Empirical Study of Gender Research Network (EGEN) in collaboration with the Gender and the Security Sector Lab, and the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies presents the Global Status of Women Talk.

Speakers

Dawn Teele, Co-founder of EGEN, the Empirical Study of Gender, Johns Hopkins UniversityTiffany Barnes, Professor, University of KentuckySoledad Prillaman, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University.