Are you curious about how mental health, culture, and global health connect to real-world policy challenges? Do you want to learn through hands-on field research and community engagement in one of the most beautiful and biodiverse regions of South India? The Cornell-Keystone NFLP Summer Program in India offers an interdisciplinary experience in global health and policy, where students explore how culture, environment, and community shape wellbeing in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve.

Are you curious about how mental health, culture, and global health connect to real-world policy challenges? Do you want to learn through hands-on field research and community engagement in one of the most beautiful and biodiverse regions of South India? The Cornell-Keystone NFLP Summer Program in India offers an interdisciplinary experience in global health and policy, where students explore how culture, environment, and community shape wellbeing in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve.

Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

The United States helped create the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of independent countries. Now the Trump administration is setting the tone for superpowers with imperial ambitions by waging economic war against democratic allies, violating long-standing treaties, and holding out the possibility of using military force.

What do these unprecedented actions mean for the rest of the world? How are states and peoples in different regions responding? And what may happen if tensions continue to escalate?

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Featured Faculty

Agnieszka Nimark (PACS) | Affiliated ScholarMagnus Fiskesjö (EAP, PACS, SEAP) | AnthropologyAlexandra Blackman (SWANA) | GovernmentSeema Golestaneh (SWANA) | Near Eastern StudiesIrina Troconis (LACS) | Romance StudiesKenneth Roberts (LACS) | GovernmentPeter Katzenstein (IES, PACS) | Government

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Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "Convict Politics: Innocent Convicts and Unlawful Commoners in Early Chinese Empires (221 BCE-23 CE)"

Speaker: Liang Cai, Ruth and Paul Idzik Associate Professor in Digital Scholarship of History, University of Notre Dame

Description:

This talk, based on newly mined data from newly unearthed manuscripts and traditional sources, explores convict politics in the early Chinese empires. Whereas a substantial number of bureaucratic personnel were convict laborers, assisting local officials, the central court reemployed numerous previously convicted individuals as high officials. The book argues that convict politics emerged because the mutual responsibility system and high-performance-oriented law extensively criminalized people, including the innocent. Paradoxically, the Western Han dynasty’s stringent criminalization of individuals was juxtaposed with redemption policies and frequent amnesties that excessively exonerated offenders, even the most heinous. The intellectual roots underpinning the harsh laws and the universal amnesties fundamentally embraced the same utopian ideal of a crime-free society. Although this dual practice of extensive criminalization and widespread pardoning fostered the population’s tolerance towards the political system, these practices were fraught with injustice and led to form Confucian deep-seated skepticism towards the law in Chinese tradition.

Speaker's Bio:

Dr. Liang Cai received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and currently serves as an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in Chinese political and intellectual history, with a focus on the Qin-Han dynasties (221 BCE - 23 CE). Dr. Cai's publications cover topics such as Confucianism, bureaucracy, law, social networks, and archaeologically excavated manuscripts. She has also collaborated with computer scientists on a digital humanities project aimed at creating structured biographical data and conducting social network analysis of early Chinese empires, particularly those in the Qin-Han period, which is considered the fountainhead of Chinese civilization.
Dr. Cai’s first book Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence with the promotion of Emperor Wu in the Han dynasty. She argues that it was a witchcraft scandal in 91–87 BCE that created a political vacuum and permitted Confucians to rise to power, ultimately transforming China into a Confucian regime. Her book won the 2014 Academic Award for Excellence presented by Chinese Historians in the United States and was a finalist for the 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions presented by the American Academy of Religion.
Her other selected publications appear in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Journal of Asian studies and Law and History Review.
Dr. Cai’s second book, Convict Politics: From Utopia to Serfdom in Early China (221 BCE–23 CE) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), is scheduled for release in December 2025. This book seeks to stimulate deeper reflection on utopian thought and its perilous application in political practice.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Gatty Lecture Series

Anti-authoritarian Counter-Cartographies of Solidarity with Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in the Philippines

Join us for a talk by Arnisson Ortega, Associate Professor from the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at Rockefeller 374, Asian Studies Lounge. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in the Philippines have long endured systemic violence, making the country one of the most dangerous places for HRDs. In solidarity with HRDs in Negros Island—a key hotspot targeted by the state —me and my colleagues in the Philippines initiated a participatory mapping project grounded in HRD geonarratives: spatially anchored accounts of resistance, trauma, and survival. Working with activists, artists, and grassroots organizations, we launched a series of storytelling and sketchmapping activities, and co-created artmaps to visualize sites of struggle, care, and state repression. These maps served as tools for social media advocacy, political mobilization, and cultivating care practices. What have emerged from these initiatives are counter-cartographies of resistance and solidarity that expose the spatial logics of authoritarian violence. Through geonarrative storytelling and sketchmapping, we expose the spatial configurations of authoritarian violence that HRDs face. We traced the necropolitical spaces where HRDs confront psychological and physical violence—from surveillance and red-tagging to arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings—within everyday spaces such as homes, workplaces, hospitals, commercial centers, and rural farmlands. These geonarratives reveal how state and non-state actors systematically constrict safe spaces for HRDs, embedding violence into the micro-geographies of everyday life. Despite these conditions, HRDs and their communities have cultivated practices of care, resilience, and collective survival to sustain their advocacy work. The maps we generated amplified the plight of HRDs, supported public-facing campaigns, and fostered broader awareness of HRD vulnerability and resistance. By centering their geonarratives, we advance a justice-oriented geographic praxis that foregrounds solidarity and creative collaboration.

About the Speaker
Arnisson Ortega is a human geographer committed to community-engaged work that advances social justice. Arnisson’s research spans the spatial politics of urbanization, transnational migration, and uneven geographies of accumulation and dispossession. Much of Arnisson’s work focuses on the Philippines, Arnisson’s homeland, where Arnisson uses decolonial, community-engaged, and mixed-method approaches—particularly mapping and storytelling—as tools for resistance and world-making. Arnisson’s current projects examine decolonial cartographies, migrant-driven urban change in post-industrial cities, and the spatial politics of urban development in former U.S. military estates in the Philippines.