Find out more about this study abroad opportunity in Ecuador. Politics of Sustainable Development in Latin America is a multi-term, four-credit course that will bring students onsite in Ecuador during the January term. Students will travel to Quito, Ecuador to begin their field study at Cornell's Global Hub partner institution, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). Following their in-country orientation, students will then relocate to the indigenous community of Sacha Waysa in the Amazon region of Ecuador to work with local partners and the Yakum Foundation on projects related to biodiversity, agroforestry, reforestation, food sovereignty, and community planning.

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) Seminar Series, Co-sponsored by: Romance Studies & Department of Performance & Media Studies

Through a long-term personal project called What Remains, Lexi Parra has been documenting the effects of violence, repression by the State, and power of community in the targeted barrios of Caracas, by following the lives of those most affected. In this presentation, Parra will share her ongoing work paired with testimonies from local collaborators to offer an analysis of the militarization of Venezuelan police forces and the false narratives of an improving country as the crisis continues. She will also offer insight into the importance of nuanced, ethical storytelling.

Lexi Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based between Caracas and New York. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. Parra has worked with The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and others. Her degree is in Photography and Human Rights, from Bard College. Parra is the founder of Project MiRA, an arts education initiative that fosters visual literacy and critical analysis with youth in the barrios of Caracas. Project MiRA has been supported by Canon USA and the Davis Peace Prize.

Talk by Amrita Kurian (Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania)

This paper uses a historical and ethnographic approach to analyze how the ideal of the “progressive farmer” percolates into the literature and processes that help establish the latest standards in Indian Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) or cigarette tobacco markets. A legacy of colonial and postcolonial agricultural improvement projects, tobacco companies use the term as an accolade, indicating their preference for collaborating with some farmers over others - usually affluent farmers with the resources necessary to invest in improving farming practices. In a cash crop economy dominated by a few large buyers, these preferences also strongly influence the direction of state regulation and infrastructure projects. The paper argues that “progressive farming” practices geared toward producing standardized commodities reinforce the rural hegemony of affluent farmers while masking the infrastructural changes that have, over the years, shifted the financial burden of producing a quality crop from producers onto farmers. On the other hand, farmers, particularly affluent farmers, negotiate evolving metrics used to evaluate farming practices to variously align with the state and corporations and further their own goals of accumulating wealth and prestige.

Amrita Kurian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC San Diego and an M.Phil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Her ethnographic research is based in the Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco sector in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, where she studies experts’ scientific and affective mediation of markets and agrarian relations of production. Her articles titled “Flowers of Deception,” “Expert Disenchantment,” and “Progressive Farmers” are at various stages of review in Cultural Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Human Values, and Geoforum. Her essay “Accusations of Corruption: A Cautionary Tale from Indian Tobacco Auctions” was published in India in Transition and Scroll.in.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Jenny Hedstrom, (Associate Professor in War Studies, Department of War Studies and Military History, Swedish Defence University), who will discuss women's labour and the Kachin conflict.

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

About the Talk

This book explores insurgency warfare from the vantage point of women’s social reproductive and productive labour. The research combines feminist political economy and war studies to explain why and how war is sustained and reproduced. Developing the concept of militarised social reproduction, I examine how women’s underpaid or undervalued household duties enable and sustain the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), a poor insurgent group fighting for political rights and a degree of autonomy in the north of Myanmar. Based on more than one hundred semi-structured interviews and participant observations collected between 2013 and 2023 in Myanmar and Thailand, I show how women’s labour (re)produced from the household provides a critical, if overlooked, piece to the puzzle that is the war in Kachinland. I argue that while dominant accounts of the Kachin conflict are preoccupied with the conduct of States or the actions of military leadership, it is more instructive to focus on the activities of the household. Focusing on women’s reproductive work helps to explain how and why the Kachin conflict has been maintained for so long, despite the superior strength and resources of the Burman military force.

About the Speaker

Jenny Hedström is an Associate Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. Jenny’s research and teaching concerns the relationship between households, gender, and warfare; gender, transitions, and peacebuilding; women’s activism and resistance; and ethics and methods when researching war, often with a focus on civil wars in Myanmar. Her research has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Peacebuilding, Critical Military Studies and International Studies Review, and other outlets. Together with Elisabeth Olivius, she is the editor of the edited collection “Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions” (NIAS Press, 2023). Jenny is the Principal Investigator for the Swedish Research Council-funded project “Women’s Labour in Civil War” and co- Principal Investigator for the project “Gender Experts in Peacebuilding”. Together with Hilary Faxon she leads the “Land, Labour, Love and Revolution” project - a collaboration with farmers, artists, students and activists to trace and understand gendered relations of land, labour and love in the Myanmar Spring Revolution.

Talk by Adeem Suhail (Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College)

This talk is based on ethnographic explorations of the broken worlds the denizens of contemporary Karachi, Pakistan, inhabit. It examines the period between two catastrophic floods in 2020 and 2022. By observing the efforts of the Wasted to piece together new realities amidst the ruins, the study seeks to understand the everyday processes and practices involved in conjuring through faith a commons as an infrastructure for troubled times. In Karachi, the ruptures caused by a convergence of crises have disrupted the city's function as a labor-driven engine of value creation. With the demise of postcolonial modernity, the city has entered a different temporality, characterized by multiple broken worlds experienced by its inhabitants. Engaging in cosmological speculation, conspiracy theories, and mythopoesis, individuals grapple with uncertainties and possibilities rooted in post-colonial and decolonial practices that produce ambivalent outcomes. Crises here manifest in jagged details that cut. Highlighting the vitality and creativity of the marginalized in contrast to the oppressive practices of the ruling classes who have dubbed these multitudes as being already-sacrificed (nazar hona) and thus Wasted (zaya hona), the talk proposes the idea of a new politics of the Sacrificed and the Wasted.

Adeem Suhail is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College. His research addresses issues in the anthropology of violence, social theory, and urban studies. His current project, Machines of Violent Desire, interrogates how non-state violence and transnational kinship networks contribute to order-making in urban South Asia, especially in the context of ecological and political fracture. He is concurrently working on another co-authored book project with David L. Nugent, titled Sacropolitics, which addresses how human communities confront emergent ecological and political crises across the globe through a politics of repair and rejuvenation. His recent publications include Urban Rearrangements: A Movement in Five Suites (IJURR, 2023) and Unarchiving Baloch History: ‘Small’ account of Baloch women that make waves in the Indian Ocean (2023).

Filmmaker Rea Tajiri (Temple University) and comparative ethnic studies scholar Vince Schleitwiler (University of Washington) consider the challenges of critical storytelling and speculative history.

The discussion examines their individual and collective work in documentary film, public art, and hybrid scholarship, including Tajiri’s latest film, Wisdom Gone Wild, which explores the creative, time-traveling reflections on her life by Tajiri’s mother, Rose—previously seen in Tajiri’s landmark work on Japanese American incarceration, History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige. Inspired by the unruly wisdom of Rose’s critical remixing of past and identity, Tajiri and Schleitwiler discuss their own work on the visual archives of intersecting histories of race, migration, confinement, and empire.

Rea Tajiri is a filmmaker and visual artist who was born in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. Her ground-breaking, award-winning film, digital video and installation work, has been supported by numerous grants, fellowships and artistic residencies, has been exhibited widely in museums, on television and in international film festivals.

Vince Schleitwiler teaches comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific (NYU Press), and critical essays in African American Review, Film Quarterly, Black Agenda Report, The Margins, and elsewhere. He has collaborated on public art and humanities projects for the Smithsonian APA Center, the Washington Trust for Historical Preservation, the Center for Art and Thought, and others. A fourth-generation Japanese American, he is a descendant of incarcerees at Salinas, Santa Anita, and Poston.

Register to attend the event.

This event is part of the Migrations Summer Institute.

As part of the Migrations Summer Institute, Crystal Baik (UC Riverside) and Ma Vang (UC Merced) will discuss their work on militarized migration through the lens of collaborative and public scholarship. The conversation will explore

the role of imagination, play, and experimentation play in one’s research, work, and teaching;how scholars of U.S. war, empire, and anti-colonial resistance "orient" themselves in relationship to the neoliberal settler university;how researchers might interrogate and shift the forms of their work, the methods of its dissemination, and its accessibility for various audiences.Crystal Mun-hye Baik is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside. Baik is the co-director of the Memory and Resistance Laboratory at UCR; a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective, and a co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies book series at University of Michigan Press.

Ma Vang is an associate professor of critical race and ethnic studies at UC Merced. She founded the program in critical race and ethnic studies as a new major at UC Merced and served as the program’s inaugural chair from 2017-2020. Vang is also a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Vang is also co-editor of the Critical Refugee Studies book series with the University of California Press.

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Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Lisandro Claudio, (Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley), who will discuss imperialism and good governance in the Philippines.

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

About the Talk

The near collapse of the Philippine National Bank (PNB) in the early 1920s is often held up as proof of how Filipino corruption derails economic development. It is an important case study in works that analyze the Philippines through the lenses of rent-seeking and crony capitalism. Unfortunately, much of this analysis has been derived from imperialist sources. More importantly, these imperialist sources were empirically incorrect. The PNB was in crisis not because of corruption, but because of a postwar global deflation—an event that has been called the most underrated economic crisis in world history. Using the PNB crisis, this lecture challenges the dominant form of political-economic analysis in the Philippines (and many other parts of Southeast Asia and the developing world), which reduces issues of economic development to questions of corruption and good governance. If scholars, credulous over imperial sources, got this event wrong, what else have they misinterpreted?

About the Speaker

Lisandro E. Claudio is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies.