The Office of Global Learning invites graduating international students to this year's graduation reception to celebrate the international Class of 2023! We're so proud of all you've achieved.

Join us for refreshments and celebratory remarks from Cornell's leadership and winners of our Global Citizen Awards.

RSVP by Sunday, April 16!

The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. This talk, based on a newly published book Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, rethinks commonsense notions that equate corruption with bribery. It illuminates instead how corruption is fundamental to a global storytelling practice about how states and elites abuse entrusted power both inside and outside the law. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories of corruption from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan and coauthors David L. Pike and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender location of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how, in this moment of late capitalism and rightwing populism, corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of the unequal stakes of rapid urban change; it is equally used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the “corruption plot” in all its contradictions.

About the speaker:

Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. An urban geographer and political ecologist by training, her research in India and the U.S. studies land, labor, and environmental injustices animating urban social movements, as well as global histories of anticaste, abolitionist, and anticolonial thought. Her coauthored book, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, will be out with Cornell University Press in April 2023. She is co-editor of Rethinking Difference in India through Racialization and has authored several journal articles, including in the journals Antipode, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Dr. Ranganathan is a 2017-2019 recipient of an Andrew Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and a 2021 faculty awardee for outstanding contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at American University.

Critical Development Studies Seminar Series:

The series is organized by faculty and Ph.D. students in the Department of Global Development and the Graduate Field of Development Studies. You are encouraged to take part in these invigorating discussions in-person in Warren Hall B73 or via Zoom.

This seminar is co-sponsored by Cornell Global Development, the Polson Institute for Global Development, the Department of City and Regional Planning, and the Graduate Field of Development Studies.

Lund Critical Debate

Democracies worldwide—even many wealthy democracies long considered safely consolidated—are at risk today. Governments, policymakers, and voters face new conflicts over democratic institutions, checks and balances, which citizens can compete for office or deserve representation, and what rules of accountability apply.

This year's Lund debate from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies examines the threats democracies around the world are confronting, both from external forces and from within—and what governments and citizens can do to fight back.

Join Thomas Garrett of the Community of Democracies and Damon Wilson of the National Endowment for Democracy for a conversation on democratic backsliding, strategies for resilience, and the conditions and practices that undermine democracy: democracy ... and its opposites.

A reception with refreshments will follow the conversation.

Lund Debate: 5:00–6:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance. Reserve your ticket today! Join the lecture virtually by registering at Cornell.

Reception to follow.

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Panelists

Thomas E. Garrett is secretary general of the Community of Democracies, a global intergovernmental coalition comprised of the Governing Council member states that support adherence to the Warsaw Declaration's common democratic values and standards. Garrett previously worked for the International Republican Institute for 12 years overseas in Ukraine, Mongolia, and Indonesia, returning to Washington, DC, in 2005 as director of Middle East programs and then as vice president for global programs.

Damon Wilson is president and CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a nonprofit grant-making foundation supporting freedom around the world. Prior to joining NED, he helped transform the Atlantic Council into a leading global think tank as its executive vice president. He previously served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council. Wilson also served at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as the executive secretary and chief of staff, where he helped manage one of the largest U.S. embassies during a time of conflict.

Moderator

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 the Debate

The Lund Critical Debate is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. This year's dialogue is part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience. Established in 2008, Einaudi's Lund Critical Debate series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs '57.

Featuring performance and video artist Soni Kum and her collaborators Hiroki Yamamoto and Kazuya Takagawa, this symposium will address themes of borders, visibility, and invisibility in relation to the Johnson Museum’s current exhibition Morning Dew: The Stigma of Being “Brainwashed,” Kum’s inaugural installation in the United States.

The artists’ video works, based on interviews with Zainichi Koreans who were repatriated to North Korea but later defected, bring visibility to the entangled borders they have crossed and recrossed, and their hidden lives in Japan today.  Having returned to Japan, they are now compelled to hide the fact that they left, or fled from, North Korea, threatened with discrimination and other troubling consequences. Facing these fears of her interviewees, Kum’s installation weaves together archival images, text, and silences to artistically evoke their hidden stories. In their video work, Yamamoto and Takagawa delve into the dream of one “ex-returnee.” The first part of the symposium will feature the artists discussing their own work in conversation with symposium moderator Brett de Bary.

In the second part, panelists Iftikhar Dadi (Cornell), Rebecca Jennison (Seika University, Kyoto), Soyi Kim (LB Korean Studies Research Scholar, Cornell) and discussant Naoki Sakai (Cornell) will consider the way modern borders, underlain by layered histories of violence, forcefully produce both the visibility, but also the invisibility, of social groups. How have contemporary artists engaged this dialectic of visibility and invisibility in their own work? Drawing on a broad and varied range of materials, how do such “material” media evoke silence and invisibility?

Seating at this symposium is free but limited. Please use this link to register for the symposium.

Cosponsored by the Johnson Museum of Art; the POLA Art Foundation, Japan; the East Asia Program and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies; Cornell Migrations Initiative; and the Cornell Council for the Arts.

Institute for African Development Weekly Seminar Series

In this seminar, we will explore promising avenues to improve the science-policy interface in Africa. The seminar will cover multiple themes under this broad umbrella, including (a) reviews of productive modes of interfacing science and policy, (b) detailed explorations of the policy-making process in the region, including current obstacles to building strong S/P interfaces, (c) efforts to train the region’s scientists in policy communication, (d) the role of mass media, new media, and civil society in the process, (e) the role of national and regional think-tanks, (f) advocacy efforts directed at policy-makers to promote an evidence-based culture.