What do you do when the site where you planned to do your research has a major disruption making your research infeasible? What do you do when a loved one gets sick and you need to find more time for caregiving in the last semester of your program? What do you do when you get a job—a year earlier than you anticipated—and you need to finish quickly? Have a Plan B! Come hear from current and former PhD students who have had to make changes in plans, how they negotiated the process with their committee, and where they are today.

Moderator

Mildred Warner (City and Regional Planning, AAP)Panelists

Gloria Blaise (Natural Resources and the Environment, CALS)Michael Cary (Global Development, CALS)George Homsy (Binghamton University)Adam (Chuling) Huang (International and Comparative Labor, ILR)***

Grad Chats: Conversations on International Research and Practice is a series hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies to support graduate students with interdisciplinary training and planning around conducting international research.

Spring 2023 Schedule

From Plan A to Plan B: Designing Research for a Changing World (Thursday, February 16, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G02)Best Practices and Challenges in International Field Research (Tuesday, March 14, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Beyond the IRB: Ethics and International Research (Wednesday, March 29, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Finding a Research Focus through Creative Writing (Tuesday, April 18, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Travel Health and Safety Awareness for Conducting Research Abroad (Tuesday, May 9, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)

Black History Month is a time to assess, ask questions, and come together. Join us for this town hall and community event hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies to kick off Black History Month on campus and discuss the encounter between African Americans and Black people outside the United States.

To be Black is to be part of a community that has multiple identities and nationalities. Our encounters and experiences show historical, political, and cultural solidarities but, at the same time, capture tensions among ways of being Black.

At this event, faculty, staff, and students will gather to ask the questions: What does Blackness here at Cornell mean? Who defines it? What do Black people owe each other? What of each other’s histories do we know and should know? And what should be done?

Stay after the town hall to enjoy time with friends, refreshments, and music from DJs Ishion Hutchinson and Esther Kondo Heller.

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Free Ticket Required

Limited seating: Reserve your free ticket today!

Please note that this is an in-person community event. The discussion will not be recorded or livestreamed.

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Schedule

Town Hall: 6:00–7:30 p.m.Food and Music: 7:30–9:00 p.m.Faculty Speakers

Mukoma Wa Ngugi (Literatures in English, Africana Studies and Research Center, A&S)Carole Boyce Davies (Africana Studies and Research Center, Literatures in English, A&S)Russell Rickford (History, A&S)Ishion Hutchinson (Literatures in English, A&S)Michell Chresfield (Africana Studies and Research Center, A&S)Grant Farred (Africana Studies and Research Center, A&S)Derrick Spires (Literatures in English, A&S)Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (Literatures in English, A&S)Misha Inniss-Thompson (Psychology, A&S)Student Speakers

Harmela Anteneh '23 | Alana Berry '24 | Obioha Chijioke '24 | Esther Kondo Heller, MFA candidate | Setor Kudiabor '25 | Maia Lee ' 24 | Rumbidzai Mangwende '23 | Amira Olingou '25 | Imani Rezaka '24 | Brice Roundtree '24 | Ami Tamakloe, PhD student | Amandla Thomas-Johnson, PhD student | Selam Woldai '23 | Members of Black Students United and the Caribbean Students' Association

Host and Sponsors

Hosted by the Einaudi Center as part of its inequalities, identities, and justice global research priority, this event is cosponsored by the Africana Studies and Research Center in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Borderlands, migrations, and movement are prevalent themes in post-secondary education. They connect students to seemingly disparate experiences in an increasingly inter-connected world. How do we engage with these topics to teach effectively about diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice? In this workshop, we combine the expertise of faculty across disciplines and area studies to share ideas and resources with one another.

This online workshop is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, with funding support from the U.S. Department of Education Title VI NRC Program.

Speakers:

Nicole Childrose (History, Columbia-Green Community College)

Debra Castillo (Latina/o Studies, Cornell)

Tristan Ivory (sub-Saharan Africa/Sociology, Cornell)

Natasha Raheja (South Asia/Anthropology, Cornell)

Talk by Sonia Ahmad (City and Regional Planning, Cornell University)

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with NGOs, utilities, and the urban-poor residents in informal settlements, this talk contributes to the study of water governance and informality. Hosted by the Einaudi Center's South Asia Program, the talk explores how utilities are experimenting with different strategies to extend water systems to informal settlements in Khulna, Bangladesh.

Using a Gramscian framework of Integral State, it will first describe how utilities and NGOs are implementing innovative community-based approaches and water pricing strategies to enroll the poor into the formal water supply program. The talk will then analyze how Khulna's utility is using these strategies to simultaneously expand the water markets but to also divide the urban poor so they cannot coalesce or contest their water access.

It concludes by arguing that divisive strategies generally fail to extend formal water supply in informal settlements, and in the context of climate change, utilities will benefit if more inclusive planning strategies are used to enhance the voices of the urban poor, which would allow them to negotiate better terms of engagement.

Speaker

Sonia Ahmad recently finished her Ph.D. from the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Her research spans the areas of international development, water, urbanization, and climate justice. She is motivated to understand how diverse change agents from the state and society can be mobilized to shift current ecologically harmful development pathways to one oriented toward climate justice. Her research also draws on her training as an economist and ten years of professional practice at the World Bank, where she worked across local, national, and third-sector organizations on complex urban problems across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South Asia regions.

Talk by Anushay Malik (History, Simon Fraser University)

Before 1947, the working classes in the province of Punjab imagined themselves as part of a world much bigger than the one they would find themselves in after Punjab was partitioned to carve out the new states of India and Pakistan. This time (in the 1940s) of anticolonial movements and rising labor struggles affected the historical imagination of the working classes, leading them to believe that a revolution was possible. Focusing on Pakistan and using autobiographies, intelligence reporting, and newspapers, this discussion will show how the “imagined communities” that workers in Pakistan were part of shifted during South Asia’s Partitions, referring to both 1947 and Bangladesh’s liberation war in 1971. As the belief that the working classes would seize the day burnt down to its embers, former worker groups moved into religious and regional movements, a testament to the rise of a new form of belonging in Pakistan.

Dr. Anushay Malik is a social historian who has worked on leftist and labor movements in South Asia, South Asian diasporas, and, most recently, histories of citizenship in the region. She formerly taught in the history department at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and is currently a lecturer at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada.

LACS Weekly Seminar

Readings from: Azares del cuerpo (2017) and Solo un poco aquí (2023) And a conversation with author María Ospina. Colombian writer and critic María Ospina will share excerpts from her two works of fiction, Azares del cuerpo (2017) and Solo un poco aquí (2023), followed by a Q & A.

About the Author

María Ospina is an Associate Professor of Latin American culture at the Department of Romance Languages and the Latin American Studies Program at Wesleyan University.

Publications

She is the author of the book El rompecabezas de la memoria: Literatura, cine y testimonio de fin de siglo en Colombia and has written numerous articles on nature, violence, and culture in contemporary Colombia. Her first book of fiction, the short story collection Azares del cuerpo (2017), has been published in Colombia, Chile, Spain, and Italy and was recently translated into English (Variations on the Body, Coffee House Press, 2021). Her novel Solo un poco aquí will be published by Random House Mondadori in April 2023.

LACS Weekly Seminar

This talk explores the practical negotiations, discursive contests, and social aspirations surrounding print over a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. Centering on the diverse communities that worked behind the scenes at urban presses, the talk considers how printer interactions with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship, identifying printing shops as unexplored spaces of democratic practice where the boundaries between manual and intellectual labor blurred.

About the Speaker

Corinna Zeltsman is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (the University of California Press, 2021), which received the Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association. Trained as a letterpress printer, she is a senior fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School.

LACS Weekly Seminar

The environmental crisis accentuates inequality. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most vulnerable populations often reside in informal, precarious, or popular settlements, which are more exposed to climate events and generally have less access to infrastructure and ecosystem services. In recent years, designers and urbanists have offered important insights into rethinking informal settlements and developing strategies to improve their inhabitants' quality of life, safety, and opportunities. Today, it is essential to incorporate climate criteria into urban interventions effectively. The presentation will focus on the potential of landscape design and public space as media to restore and improve, adapt and connect, and mitigate and anticipate the transformation of the most vulnerable settlements in the Americas.

About the Speaker

Jeannette Sordi is an architect and urban planner based in New York City. She currently teaches at the New York Institute of Technology and collaborates with the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean. Until 2018 she was an Associate Professor of Landscape and Urbanism at Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago de Chile. She holds a Ph.D. in urban planning and design from the University of Genoa (2014) and was a Ph.D. Visiting Student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2011- 2012). Her Ph.D. focused on the genealogy of landscape urbanism and was published as Beyond Urbanism (List, 2014; Sacabana, 2017, Spanish edition). She co-founded Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas in 2015 and was one of the curators of the Chilean XX Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in Valparaiso in 2017.

Publications

Her main publications include the books Andrea Branzi. From Radical Design to Post-Environmentalism (ARQ, 2015), The Camp and the City. Territories of Extraction (List, 2017), Part-time Cities (ARQ, 2019), Ness.doc.2 Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas (Lots, 2020, co-edited with F. Rodriguez and P. Peralta) and Ecological Design. Strategies for the Vulnerable City (IaDB, 2021, 2022, with F. Vera).

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Presented by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program and cosponsored by the Department of Landscape Architecture.

Risking their lives along a network of dangerous Colombian highways to confronting the wounds of leaving home through poetry, Nos Vemos Pronto documents first-hand the treacherous and diverse experiences of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. Filmed in various regions throughout Colombia, from the Venezuelan border to the capital city of Bogotá, Nos Vemos Pronto chronicles the stages of current Venezuelan migration through direct accounts from refugees. Narrated by the poetry of Johanna, a Venezuelan immigrant who left seeking better opportunities, we get a glimpse into the tribulations one faces leaving their home country as an immigrant and/or refugee.

Nos Vemos Pronto is impossible to watch without grappling with our own humanity and realizing the dire conditions of the present Venezuelan diaspora. Nonetheless, Nos Vemos Pronto also provides a message of hope, offers untold perspectives, and reveals nuanced and universal dimensions of immigration.

About the Director

Andrew Kirschenbaum is a director, writer, and passionate traveler who follows his curiosity to various corners of the world, exploring meaningful connections with people and places. In the process, he aims to uncover stories and moving visuals that reveal more about our human experience and offer a voice to the voiceless. Kirschenbaum grew up outside of New Haven, Connecticut, and has worked, volunteered, traveled, and studied across the globe in Morocco, Colombia, Mexico, Niger, Ethiopia, Serbia, Ukraine, Brazil, and more. Kirschenbaum has a degree in International Relations from Roger Williams University and recently relocated to New York City to dive deeper into documentary and narrative film after spending roughly a year and a half in Latin America. Kirschenbaum takes great pride in language learning in his free time and currently speaks Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Arabic at varying levels.

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Cosponsored by the Department of Roman Studies

The Institute for Comparative Modernities' second Global South Translation Symposium, featuring presentations by the 2022-2023 cohort of translators (see below). Moderated by ICM member Natalie Melas, with remarks by Jan Steyn (Translation Studies, University of Iowa) and others.

With presentations from the following ICM Global South Translation Awards recipients:

Abrona Lee Pandi Aden on Solon Karthak’s 2013 travelogue Visva Euta Pallo Gao (The World is the Next Village ) from the Nepali

Conor Bracken on Jean D’Amerique’s 2020 poetry collection Atelier du Silence from the French

Whitney DeVos on Martín Tonalmeyotl’s 2016 bilingual poetry collection, Tlalkatsajtsilistle/ Ritual de los olvidados translated from the Atzacoaloya Náhuatl/Spanish

Katherine Hennessey on The Collected Plays of Wajdi Al-Ahdal from the Arabic

Sumathy Sivamohan on a collection of Sri Lankan poems, dating from the 1930s to the present, from the Tamil

Jeremy Tiang on Hai Fan’s 2017 short story collection 可口的饥饿(Delicious Hunger), from the Mandarin Chinese