Planning for study abroad? No matter how you identify or where you're studying, early planning is the key to a successful study abroad experience.

Join us for a facilitated discussion with fellow students about navigating your intersectional identities while studying abroad. A panel of returned study abroad students will share their experiences, knowledge, and advice for expressing your whole self in a different culture. This is a great opportunity to ask questions and think about your identity in a new context—outside the norms of Cornell, your hometown, or your home country.

This global freedom of expression event is an opportunity to explore critical issues related to free expression of your identity and how you encounter the world. As a student abroad, you have a deeply personal chance to experience cultural exchange, collaborate productively in a global context, and have challenging conversations while staying true to yourself—all vital skills for successful participation in democracy.

The Office of Global Learning is here to help as you think about your identity in a global context, learn about new norms and ways of life, and find the support you need.

In-Person Event

Attend the panel in Statler Hall 165

The Geopolitics of Empire and Espionage

Alfred "Al" William McCoy, the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, will focus on the interplay between geopolitics and individual historical actors, explaining how geopolitical ruptures in hegemonic control during the Cold War created a momentary void in the world order that allowed a latter-day “man on the spot” the autonomy to put his fingerprints on the crime scenes of this global conflict.

Instead of the gentlemen adventurers like James Brooke and T.E. Lawrence of the British imperial age for whom the term was coined, our Cold War analogues are usually covert operatives. Like Africa, Southeast Asia during postwar decolonization abounds in these characters, so my talk will present the general thesis and some case studies from Southeast Asia—the region where the most famous, and notorious, of these figures first appeared.”

This seminar is part of the Gatty Lecture Series.

About the speaker
Alfred "Al" William McCoy is an American historian and educator. He is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He specializes in the history of the Philippines, foreign policy of the United States, European colonization of Southeast Asia, illegal drug trade, and Central Intelligence Agency covert operations. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. His newest book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Dispatch Books).

Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-Host
Southeast Asia Program

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.