April 23, 2026 401 Warren Hall Register Artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed by some as having great promise, while others view the arrival of this novel technology with skepticism or concern. AI is certainly having a significant impact in many arenas of life. What are the specific implications of AI for people living in the Global South? This conference will examine the specific social, political, environmental and economic impacts of AI in and for the Global South, taking a holistic, perspective that considers the historical, socio-cultural, environmental and political-economic context in which AI is embedded in and entangles with across the Global South. Keynote speakers from a range of disciplines will focus on specific themes.

Conference Schedule

8:00am - 8:30am Breakfast

8:30am Welcome Rachel Bezner Kerr Professor, Global Development Section Director, Institute for African Development, Global Cornell

8:45am - 9:00am Opening Remarks: Wendy Wolford Vice Provost for International Affairs, Office of the Provost Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor, Global Development Section

9:00am - 10:00am Keynote Address: AI and Development Impacts Arthur Mutambara Director and Professor, Institute for the Future of Knowledge (IFK) University of Johannesburg (UJ) Q & A

10:00am - 10:15am Networking and Coffee Break

10:15am - 11:15pm Session I: Culture and Representation Rethinking AI Equity: Collaborative Perspectives from Ghana and the U.S

Hua Wang PhD, Associate Teaching Professor, Duffield College of Engineering, Cornell

Nancy Henaku PhD, Lecturer, Department of English, University of Ghana

Kwaku Owusu Afriyie Osei-Tutu PhD, Senior Lecturer, Dept of English, University of Ghana

11:15am-12:15pm Session II: Political Economy and Governance of AI in the Global South Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhungaha Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Youssif Hassan Assistant Professor, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and School of Information University of Michigan

12:15pm - 1:30pm Lunch and Poster Viewing 1:30pm-2:45pm Session III: Safety and Ethics with AI

Aditya Vashistha Assistant Professor, Cornell Ann. S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science Cornell Ethics of AI in, for, and by the Global South

Trystan Sterling Goetze, Director, Sue G. and Harry E. Bovay Program in the History and Ethics of Professional Engineering, Cornell Duffield Engineering

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence against women in Sudan as a threat to the Women Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda

Lucie George PhD, University of Witwatersrand (Wits) Johannesburg

2:45pm - 3:00pm Tea break and Networking

3:00pm - 3:45pm Session IV: Creativity, Visual Arts, Healthcare and AI

The Problem in Pandamatenga’: Precarity, Power and AI as Actors in Southern African Border Communities

Rebecca Upton Professor of Global Public and Environmental Health; Director, Global Public and Environmental Health Program, Colgate University

Kelly Van Busum Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Butler University

Artists, Creativity, and the Challenges of AI

Pedro Molina Political Cartoonist

3:45pm - 4:00pm Closing Discussion

cosponsors: STS, Cornell Global AI Initiative, Global Development.

More Auspicious Shores chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and promoting a pan-Africanist agenda while simultaneously fulfilling their 'civilizing' and 'Christianizing' duties. Through a close examination of the Afro-Barbadians, Caree A. Banton provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa. Banton reveals how, as former British subjects, Afro-Barbadians navigated an inherent tension between ideas of pan-Africanism and colonial superiority. Upon their arrival in Liberia, an English imperial identity distinguished the Barbadians from African Americans and secured them privileges in the Republic's hierarchy above the other group. By fracturing assumptions of a homogeneous black identity, Banton ultimately demonstrates how Afro-Barbadian settlement in Liberia influenced ideas of blackness in the Atlantic World.

Caree Banton is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora History and the Director of the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. Banton earned a BPA in Public Administration and BA in History from Grambling State University in 2005. She received a MA in Development Studies from the University of Ghana in July 2012 and completed her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in June 2013. Her research focuses on movements towards freedom, particularly around abolition, emancipation, and colonization.
Much of her work also explores ideas of citizenship, nationhood, and race in the 19th century. Her research has been supported by a number of fellowships, including the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center, and the Nancy Weiss Malkiel Fellowship.

High rates of micronutrient deficiency persist in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and disproportionately impact populations with limited access to nutrient-rich foods. In response, national agricultural research programs and international organizations are prioritizing biofortification as a strategy to improve the nutritional value of staple crops. This presentation will examine efforts to scale these crops throughout the region and summarize specific research and applied interventions that address the broader food system, exploring the intersections of policy, processing, market access, the food environment, and human behavior.

Dr. Victor Taleon is a Research Fellow at IFPRI, specializing in the nexus of crop biofortification and food processing. With a Ph.D. in Food Science and Technology from Texas A&M University, he investigates the stability and bioavailability of micronutrients in staple crops like maize, beans, and rice. His research focuses on the post-harvest value chain to identify strategies that preserve the nutritional benefits of biofortified foods from farm to plate. Dr. Taleon collaborates with partners across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America to scale these solutions and combat hidden hunger.

In this talk, I analyze the relationship between criminal governance and citizen claim-making for public goods. Millions of people across Latin America live in urban peripheries marked by uneven state presence but where criminal organizations are often present and govern everyday life. What impact does this overlapping reality have on the strategies citizens use to make claims on the state for public goods? A comparative analysis across three peripheral Mexico City neighborhoods shows that claim-making strategies vary in both level – individual or collective – and mode – brokered or direct. I argue that criminal governance influences claim-making through two channels: social capital and political brokerage. I use this argument to structure a comparative analysis of claim-making for a basic but fundamental public good: water. The study contributes to broader debates on distributive politics, citizenship, and democracy.

Eduardo Moncada is the Claire Tow Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College of Columbia University, and he is also the Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. His research examines the origins, dynamics and consequences of crime and violence in Latin America, with a focus on how criminal governance shapes political life. He is the author of Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America (Stanford University Press) and Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America (Cambridge University Press). He is also co-editor of Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics (Cambridge University Press). In his current research, Moncada is examining how variation in the ways that criminal organizations govern territories shapes how citizens make claims on the state for public goods and services. Moncada’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

Faced with a past that seems to repeat itself ad infinitum, through the dynamics of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism, we ask ourselves about the past, present, and future of Latin America and Caribbean. The slogan “Otro futuro es posible” –another future is possible– has been appropriated in a wide array of spaces, movements, and temporalities to trigger the imagination of many, from political movements to environmental causes. This symposium is an invitation to explore this expression not as an enthusiastic affirmation but rather a question awaiting an answer: is another future possible in Latin America and the Caribbean? Thinking about and with categories such as encounters, crossings, (dis)continuities, fractures and unions in space and time, and the search for autonomy, we ask: how can we think about the future of the region?

With this in mind, we invite the Cornell community to participate in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program’s annual research symposium entitled “Futures in (Re)Construction”, to take place on February 20th and 21st, 2026. VENUE In the midst of the current political sphere that especially affects Latin American and Caribbean communities and has sought to silence not only their traditions, heritage, and languages but also the academic study of the land and the impacts of climate change in various communities, we especially welcome abstracts for projects related to categories, concepts, and keywords that, in the current political climate, have been erased and discarded, such as gender, race, climate and environmental justice, and cuir/queer.

Faced with a past that seems to repeat itself ad infinitum, through the dynamics of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism, we ask ourselves about the past, present, and future of Latin America and Caribbean. The slogan “Otro futuro es posible” –another future is possible– has been appropriated in a wide array of spaces, movements, and temporalities to trigger the imagination of many, from political movements to environmental causes. This symposium is an invitation to explore this expression not as an enthusiastic affirmation but rather a question awaiting an answer: is another future possible in Latin America and the Caribbean? Thinking about and with categories such as encounters, crossings, (dis)continuities, fractures and unions in space and time, and the search for autonomy, we ask: how can we think about the future of the region?

With this in mind, we invite the Cornell community to participate in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program’s annual research symposium entitled “Futures in (Re)Construction”, to take place on February 20th and 21st, 2026. VENUE In the midst of the current political sphere that especially affects Latin American and Caribbean communities and has sought to silence not only their traditions, heritage, and languages but also the academic study of the land and the impacts of climate change in various communities, we especially welcome abstracts for projects related to categories, concepts, and keywords that, in the current political climate, have been erased and discarded, such as gender, race, climate and environmental justice, and cuir/queer.

“We’re not going to be afraid of Immigration.” Juana spoke those words to her undocumented niece Sonia while they agonized over Sonia’s upcoming court hearing. Sonia had missed a previous hearing and might have a deportation order awaiting her. It was February 2025. But Juana advised against fear. She told her niece, We’ll go to court together.

This paper reaches for a theory of the state in order to think through the dilemmas faced by Central American immigrants in the rural and small-town Hudson Valley. To start, I focus on people who are at high risk of deportation and decide to go to court anyway. As Juana says, they are deciding not to be afraid. Why refuse to fear?

To search for an answer, I turn to 2021, when New York State created the Excluded Worker Fund, a COVID unemployment benefit designed specifically for undocumented New Yorkers. The shift from 2021 to 2025 – from state benevolence to mass deportation – can seem like a dramatic transformation in regimes. Immigrants, however, may be detecting an underlying continuity. In both periods, state intervention is managing the rural labor market by rewarding workers who have strong links to their employers. First trust and then loyalty (rather than enterprise) emerge as key dispositions. Through their refusal to fear, immigrants may demonstrate loyalty in the midst of danger. This paper turns an ethnographic eye to the practices and attitudes that rural New Yorkers develop in the current moment. By charting five tumultuous years in a single valley, we aim to understand what, during a time of change, ends up remaining the same.

Gregory Duff Morton is an economic anthropologist and social worker. He wants to know how people send value across borders in the Americas. He has engaged with welfare programs in Latin America, with Brazilian migrants who move back to the countryside, with Dominican seniors undergoing surgery in New York City, and, most recently, with Central Americans and the activists they meet in upstate New York. Morton has a special interest in the MST, Brazil’s landless movement, which brings small farmers together to occupy plantations. By thinking internationally about human services, he hopes, we can equip ourselves to confront the inequalities so characteristic of public life in the Americas.

Cancelled due to an emergency!

Although the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II following the invocation of the Enemy Aliens Act has been well documented, the parallel experiences of Latin Americans of Japanese descent remain far less examined. Like their U.S.-based counterparts, these communities were removed from their homes, stripped of property, and interned in U.S.-run camps. In Venezuela, rather than being interned abroad, Caracas’ Japanese community was confined to a camp in Ocumare del Tuy—a story almost entirely erased from both Venezuelan historical memory. This history raises urgent questions about whose experiences are recorded, whose are forgotten, and which forms of memory gain recognition. In this talk, Elizabeth Barrios explores these questions through Nikkei (2011), the largely overlooked documentary by filmmaker Kaori Flores Yonekura, which traces her own family’s experiences and illuminates a hidden chapter of Venezuelan and hemispheric history. The film not only preserves personal and collective memory but also challenges us to rethink the boundaries of national and transnational histories, exposing the racial and political logics that made such internments possible. These questions are particularly urgent today, as the Enemy Aliens Act has been invoked once more (this time specifically targeting Venezuelans), revealing how the mechanisms of exclusion and surveillance from the past continue to resonate in the present.

Elizabeth Barrios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Albion College. This year she is a fellow at the Society for the Humanities. Her research explores ecology, energy humanities, and Latin American and Latina/o literature and media, with an emphasis on Venezuela and its diaspora. She is the author of Failures of the Imagination: Reckoning with Oil in Venezuelan Cultural Production (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026), which examines how Venezuelan literature and media have confronted the social and ecological toll of oil, often in ways overlooked or deliberately obscured by critics and institutions

Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP26/class/LATA/4000

Marshall Islanders explain that US nuclear blasting is woven into their polity “kone jubar”—like an ironwood tree roots in the soil; like a child belongs to the lands of their mother’s lineage. This talk is about bodies (biological, territorial, political) and persons (natural and legal), and about radionuclides that expose, permeate, entangle, and transform them.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 of its most powerful nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, which it governed as part of a United Nations “strategic trusteeship.” During decolonization negotiations, the residues of US nuclear colonialism shaped the birth of the Marshallese state. In international law, “residual sovereignty” describes sovereign rights that will only vest fully following the removal of an encumbrance. In the late 1970s, US Defense Department planned to retain extensive military rights in the Marshall Islands that would limit Marshallese state sovereignty indefinitely.

Marshallese sovereignty also became residual in a second, material sense, for it was shaped by the enduring damage and residues of US blasting. As a condition of the formation of a Marshallese state “in free association” with the United States, US negotiators required Islanders not only to cede military and security rights, but also to settle all legal claims relating to the nuclear legacy.

This talk will explore the significance of this history for broader post-World War II entanglements between the racialized international legal politics of decolonization, on the one hand, and the material and epistemic politics of technology and technogenic pollution, on the other.

About the Speaker

Mary X. Mitchell is a lawyer and historian of science and technology. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania (University of Chicago Press), uses legal wrangling over US nuclear blasting and contamination in the Marshall Islands to explore the shifting shape of sovereignty following World War II. Mitchell is an assistant professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark.

Host

The talk is hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies.