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.

Please join us for the 2023 Alice Cook-Lois Gray Distinguished Lecture. Our honored speaker is Amrita Basu, Amherst College's Domenic J. Paino 1955 Professor of Political Science, and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies. This year's lecture will be held in 423 King-Shaw Hall, ILR Conference Center, and live on Zoom.

Amrita Basu

We hear many stories about Muslim women’s subservience as a result of victimization by Muslim men. Less common are stories of Muslim women’s resistance, as a result of exclusionary state policies. This talk, on Muslim women in Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, in 2019, tells a story about how marginalization can inspire demands for inclusive, secular, democratic citizenship rights.

This lecture is co-sponsored by: Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Center for the Study of Inequality, Cornell Center for the Social Sciences, Cornell Population Center, Brooks School of Public Policy and the South Asia Program.

This October 28th, Asha Cornell is hosting the world’s first and premier South Asian a cappella group, Penn Masala, for a benefit concert, nearly 10 years after their first Cornell performance (also hosted by Asha!)

Hailing from the University of Pennsylvania, and known for its viral fusions of Western music and classic Bollywood hits, the group has gained nearly 125,000 Instagram followers, 146,000 Facebook followers, and 30 million YouTube views since its founding in 1996. In 2009, Penn Masala performed for President Barack Obama as part of the White House Diwali Celebration. In 2015, Masala performed as the only collegiate a cappella group in the award-winning movie—and soundtrack—Pitch Perfect Two. After returning from their India-wide tour earlier this year, they also performed for President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In addition to our main group, we will also feature guest performances from Cornell student organizations! Join us for an evening of music, dance, and fun!

Asha Cornell will donate all proceeds from the concert to our partner schools in India, to fund the education of children from impoverished and underprivileged communities. If you are able, we are grateful for additional donations to our cause. Your contributions will go directly to fund teachers' salaries, textbooks, specialized equipment for children with disabilities, schoolhouse rebuilding following natural disasters, and more. You can choose to donate along with your ticket purchase, or on Asha Cornell's website at https://cornell.ashanet.org/