World in Focus: Einaudi Center Democracy Roundtable

Nancy Okail of the Washington-based Center for International Policy joins Einaudi Center director Rachel Beatty Riedl for this important conversation on democracy, security, and human rights in the North Africa region. Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the event is part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience.

Register in advance to reserve a seat!

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Speakers

Nancy Okail is president and CEO of the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. She is a leading scholar, policy analyst, and advocate with more than 20 years of experience working on issues of human rights, democracy, and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. Okail holds a PhD from the University of Sussex. Her policy analysis and political commentary appear in top media outlets including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Foreign Affairs.

Rachel Beatty Riedl has served as the Einaudi Center's director since 2019. She is the Einaudi Center's John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and professor in the Department of Government and Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. Her research interests include institutional development in new democracies, local governance and decentralization, and authoritarian regime legacies in Africa.

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About Democratic Threats and Resilience

Democratic threats and resilience is one of the Einaudi Center's global research priorities. Researchers across the Einaudi Center are monitoring evolving democratic norms and threats to democracy in the United States and around the world. This work is vital today, as our ability to address a range of global challenges—from pandemics and climate change to human rights—often hinges on the strength of representative institutions that provide voice and access to diverse societal interests and actors.

FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture & Urbanism
The FRINGE is an ambiguous and ubiquitous patchwork of zones forming a wide range of territorial landscapes that can be characterized as neither distinctly urban nor distinctly rural. Imbued with narratives driven by unrelenting and perpetual urbanization, the FRINGE serves as a global engine for urban growth, a site for extractive industries, a territory for agricultural and technological productions, and a continuous land supply for architectural production and the expansion of urbanites. Formerly understood as peripheral, these rural-urban zones constitute new conceptual centers for architecture and urbanism, from generating innovative and adaptive material usage to redefining spatial adjacency between agricultural and urban landscapes. Emerging as the predominant context for current and future urban development, the FRINGE embodies contradicting adjacencies that are situated between the local-specific and the urban-generic and outside the preconceived binaries of urban versus rural, natural versus manmade, or remote versus connected.

Containing some of the world's most intensely altered rural-urban contexts, East and Southeast Asia have provided a fertile seedbed for research on global FRINGE architecture and urbanism. Bringing together innovative design and research through the lens of the built environment, this symposium questions: How do the material and technological changes brought about by urbanization collide with the spatial, cultural, and social practices of the rural? How do such meetings create or alter the special conditions of agency and interconnection, from the digital to the traditional, from the informal to the infrastructural, within the rural-urban?

Kicking off with a keynote lecture and the first panel in Beijing on March 2 (co-hosted with the Cornell China Center), the symposium will continue with a second panel at the Milstein Hall on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, on March 3. An accompanying exhibition will be on view in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery from February 28 to March 23. The symposium and the accompanying exhibition aim to unpack the FRINGE's spatial, ecological, and technological capacities to reveal innovative design strategies that strive to be more environmentally conscious, socially equitable, and architecturally adaptive.

The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium events are free and open to the public.

The Beijing panel of the symposium is co-hosted and co-sponsored by the generous support of the Cornell China Center.

Organized by Architecture Assistant Professor Leslie Lok; coordinated by Design Teaching Fellow Hanxi Wang. Exhibition assistant Jialiang (Hunter) Huang; Augmented Reality interface support by Yichen Jia.

The 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium Exhibition highlights the work of leading creative experts around the world that explores and integrates regional cultural, material, technological, and spatial practices in the rural-urban territories of East and Southeast Asia. Through a collection of visual materials and augmented reality (AR) experiences, the exhibition provides an immersive and interactive experience of works that challenge preconceived notions of the rural-urban binary and propose exciting potentials for rethinking construction technologies, sustainability, and citizen agency in the built environment.

The exhibition features the work of:

1+1>2 Architects, Amateur Architecture Studio, ArchiUnion, Bangkok Project Studio, DnA Design and Architecture, Drawing Architecture Studio, Future Cities Laboratory, Rural-Urban Building Innovation Laboratory, Rural Urban Framework, Studio Anna Heringer, SUP Atelier

Learn more about the 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium "FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism."

Bartels World Affairs Lecture In this year's Bartels lecture from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, former president of Costa Rica Carlos Alvarado Quesada shares how conservation and sustainability are crucial for preserving democracy around the world. Costa Rica is one of the most biodiverse spots on the planet, with more than one-quarter of the nation's land protected in parks and preserves. As Costa Rica's leader from 2018 to 2022, Alvarado proposed a challenge for his country and the world: to make Costa Rica a decarbonized nation by 2050. During his visit to Cornell, Alvarado explores some of the questions that guided his administration: What roles do democracy and governance play in shaping environmental policies at the local, national, and global levels? And how can we meet the basic needs of the world’s ever-growing human population—equitably and democratically—without sacrificing the health of the planet and its other inhabitants? A reception with refreshments will follow the lecture. Lecture: 6:00–7:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumReception: 7:30–8:30 p.m. | Park AtriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance. Reserve your ticket for the lecture and/or reception today! Join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell. *** How did President Alvarado's policies protect Costa Rica's environment? Read a Bartels explainer by the Lab of O's Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez. *** About Carlos Alvarado Quesada Carlos Alvarado Quesada was Costa Rica's 48th president, serving from 2018 until 2022. He was Costa Rica's youngest president in a century, taking office at age 38. Representing the Citizens' Action Party (PAC), Alvarado previously served as minister of labor and social security. Alvarado received the 2022 Planetary Leadership Award from the National Geographic Society for his commitment and action to protect the ocean. He accepted on behalf of his country the 2019 Champion of the Earth Award, the United Nations' highest environmental honor. A writer and political scientist, Alvarado is currently Professor of Practice of Diplomacy at Tufts University's Fletcher School in Massachusetts. *** About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience, this year's lecture is cosponsored by Einaudi's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. The Einaudi Center’s flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

Meet the director of Cornell’s study abroad program in Paris and hear from returned students from Cornell's program in Paris, EDUCO. Learn about what EDUCO offers French majors, minors, and students of all disciplines. EDUCO helps you immerse yourself in France through university study in French alongside local students and with engaging classes, activities, and support offered through the EDUCO Center.

FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism - 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium

Beijing Panel — Thursday, March 2 (Ithaca) | Friday, March 3 (Beijing)

In-Person & Livestream Webinar

Cornell China Center | 1208 Beijing IFC Tower B

8 p.m. (Ithaca) | 9 a.m. (Beijing)
Welcome and Introduction

8:15 p.m. (Ithaca) | 9:15 a.m. (Beijing)
Keynote Address: Lu Wenyu & Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio

9:15 p.m. (Ithaca) | 10:15 a.m. (Beijing) | Panel

Speakers:
Xu Tiantian, DnA Design and Architecture
Song Yehao, SUP Atelier
Song Gang, Atelier cnS

Moderator:
Ying Hua, Director of Cornell China Center

RURAL ITERATIONS

Where the Oxford English Dictionary defines “reiteration” as an act of repetition, in architecture, to iterate and reiterate is to work in a cyclical methodology, prototyping, testing, and analyzing, to refine a product or process.

This panel looks in detail at recent works that “iterate” upon China’s rural territories. In these projects, the rural is reclaimed as a repository of architectural materials and methods, which had been gradually lost during urbanization, and re-iterated to produce new architecture that is nonetheless highly contextualized and connected to local cultural and material practices. Sometimes this reclamation is literal – repurposing material and site; and sometimes methodological; and sometimes programmatic.

Through the work of the speakers, we gain an understanding of the speed, scale, and context of China’s rural transformation, as well as how practitioners can work with local communities and craftsmen, manufacturers, government agencies, and outside experts on technology to reiterate materials and cultures practices for new architectural methods.

The symposium also has additional events in Ithaca. View the 2-day symposium overview, schedule, exhibition, and organizers.

The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium events are free and open to the public. The Beijing panel of the symposium is co-hosted and co-sponsored by the Cornell China Center. Organized by Architecture Assistant Professor Leslie Lok; coordinated by Design Teaching Fellow Hanxi Wang. Exhibition assistant Jialiang (Hunter) Huang; Augmented Reality interface support by Yichen Jia.

Saturday, February 18th, 2023 -- 9:00am-4:30pm (breakfast available at 8:30am) FULL SCHEDULE HERE

Physical Sciences Building (PSB) 401

A territory, understood as a site to be defended, is anchored by parameters of exclusivity and control. Territory is often associated with physical land mass, attributing sovereignty to nations. It can describe sites of knowledge. We can also speak of disciplinary and discursive territories governed by methodologies and subjects of study. Yet, even as colonial powers attempted to delineate Latin America and the Caribbean territories, these sites continue to resist. The Andes and the Amazon, for example, defy human efforts to draw straight lines through natural environments. Indigenous communities that do not recognize colonial separation of their ancestral lands, migrate transnationally, challenging national imaginaries. In celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) program, we invite the Cornell community to rethink the disciplinary, environmental, political, and discursive boundaries of Latin America and the Caribbean in our 2023 Research Symposium “Un-Charting Territories”.

To underscore the success of 60 years of programming and the expansion of the program to include the Caribbean, we strongly encourage proposals that explore the Caribbean, the hispanophone islands and the coastal regions of South and Central America. Additionally, we are including a special panel that highlights undergraduate students interested in developing research proposals focused on this year’s theme of “Un-Charting Territories” through interdisciplinary work.

Friday, February 17th -- 4:30pm-7:30pm & Saturday, February 18th, 2023 -- 9:00am-4:30pm (breakfast available at 8:30am)

Physical Sciences Building (PSB) 401 FULL SCHEDULE HERE

A territory, understood as a site to be defended, is anchored by parameters of exclusivity and control. Territory is often associated with physical land mass, attributing sovereignty to nations. It can describe sites of knowledge. We can also speak of disciplinary and discursive territories governed by methodologies and subjects of study. Yet, even as colonial powers attempted to delineate Latin America and the Caribbean territories, these sites continue to resist. The Andes and the Amazon, for example, defy human efforts to draw straight lines through natural environments. Indigenous communities that do not recognize colonial separation of their ancestral lands, migrate transnationally, challenging national imaginaries. In celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) program, we invite the Cornell community to rethink the disciplinary, environmental, political, and discursive boundaries of Latin America and the Caribbean in our 2023 Research Symposium “Un-Charting Territories”.

To underscore the success of 60 years of programming and the expansion of the program to include the Caribbean, we strongly encourage proposals that explore the Caribbean, the hispanophone islands and the coastal regions of South and Central America. Additionally, we are including a special panel that highlights undergraduate students interested in developing research proposals focused on this year’s theme of “Un-Charting Territories” through interdisciplinary work.

Please join Cornell faculty for a gathering to share personal experiences and feelings about the two devastating Earthquakes that hit Southern Turkey and Northern Syria last week.

We believe it is important to get together in difficult times like this and support each other. We will have Turkish snacks and tea to make the event cozy.

We look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday evening in person at Mann Library or on Zoom.