Cornell’s Migrations initiative and the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) invite you to join a discussion on global migrations, featuring postdoctoral fellows and early career scholars from both universities. This virtual symposium will include presentations and faculty-led discussion.

Cornell Speakers

Eleanor Paynter is currently an ACLS fellow and Migrations fellow at Cornell. Her work is in the area of critical refugee studies, incorporating approaches from narrative, media, and cultural studies to consider experiences and representations of precarious and undocumented migration, asylum, and human rights. Focused on the Black Mediterranean, her research and public writing respond to anti-immigrant racism and postcolonial border dynamics. Ángel A. Escamilla García is a Migrations postdoctoral fellow at Cornell. His research focuses on how migrant youth negotiate high-risk environments. His current project uses ethnographic methods and interviews to explore the different strategies that Central American youth use to migrate through Mexico on their way to the United States.Discussants

Eric Tagliacozzo, co-chair of the Migrations initiative and the John Stambaugh Professor of History. He is also the director of Cornell's Comparative Muslim Societies Program, the director of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and the contributing editor of the journal Indonesia. Kavita Datta, Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the Study of Migration, Queen Mary University of London, and Professor of Development Geography. Kavita is also Deputy Vice-Principal (Research Impact) of the Queen Mary Centre for the Study of Migration.QMUL Speakers

Yasmin Fedda is a fellow of the Institute for Humanities and Social science (IHSS) at QMUL. Yasmin works as a filmmaker, researcher, and film programmer who has focused on themes that broadly fit under film, anthropology, and political sciences, with a focus on documentary, interactive storytelling, forced migration, representation, film & ethics, language, disability, activism and human rights. Keren Weitzberg is a tech and migration researcher with 15 years of experience in East Africa conducting fieldwork in cross-cultural, multilingual settings. In September 2022, she joined the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London as a senior lecturer and a fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. Keren works at the intersection of science and technology studies, migration studies, and critical race studies, examining problematics related to mobility, digital identity, biometrics, and fintech.Ria Kapoor is a lecturer in history and IHSS Fellow at QMUL. She is a historian of refugees, immigration, and rights, with a focus on the Afro-Asian world and its impact on the international and global orders. Ria joined QMUL in 2022, following a year as a Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester.Register for the symposium.

Xinyu Guan (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, Cornell University) leads this workshop.

Eighty percent of Singapore’s population lives in apartment blocks constructed by the Housing Development Board (HDB). Guan's talk examines how state-constructed housing estates in Singapore function as a site for the production of Asianness.

First, Guan examines how HDB neighborhoods are cast as quintessentially Asian, as opposed to Western, spaces, amidst the turn to neoliberalism and the debates over culture in 1990s Singapore arguing that the casting of HDB neighborhoods as Asian spaces recruit HDB inhabitants as everyday enforcers of the moralized boundaries between citizens and non-citizens, and between good and bad Asians.

Second, Guan explores ethnographically how HDB neighborhoods function as a site for the production of a Sinocentric form of Asianness. He considers how migrant and nonmigrant bodies are racialized and interpellated in these spaces, in accordance with their embodied linguistic performance of Chinese languages. Further, Guan discusses how Singaporean HDB inhabitants construct new meanings of Asianness vis-à-vis these migrants, whose labor keeps the HDB neighborhood running.

Finally, Guan's talk illustrates how his ethnographic and historical perspectives enrich theorizations of Asian urban modernities and neoliberal authoritarianism in the wider region.

Introduction by Chencong Zhu (Co-chair of EAP-GSSC and Ph.D. student, Anthropology, Cornell University)

Biography: Xinyu Guan is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His research examines state-constructed housing and the everyday micropolitics of migration and sexuality in Singapore. A Fall 2020 EAP Hu Shih Fellow, Xinyu works at the intersections of Southeast Asian, Indian Ocean and East Asian worlds, and engages questions of postcoloniality, urbanity and citizenship from critical trans-Asian perspectives.

This workshop is organized by East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (EAP-GSSC). The GSSC workshop is open to the public but RSVPs are encouraged. Please contact eap-gssc@cornell.edu for RSVPs and questions.

The South Asian Imaginary: Exploring the region through image-making practices

A lecture by Rahaab Allana, curator and publisher at Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi, to introduce the foundation's latest reader, Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia, co-published with HarperCollins India, 2023. An indispensable new volume for students and enthusiasts of contemporary photography and lens-based media from South Asia, this edition provides recent interviews and essays that reflect the depth and complexity of lens-based practice in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal. Allana will also introduce the Alkazi Foundation's recent work in exhibition-making and publishing, working collaboratively in India and abroad over the last two decades, establishing the Foundation as committed archivists and researchers of image-making practice across the region.

Rahaab Allana is Curator/Publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi. A Charles Wallace grant awardee and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (UK), he received his MA in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and was Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Visual Anthropology at University College, London. He was Founding Editor of PIX, a themed digital publication that focuses on South Asian lens-based practices and production, and Founder of ASAP|Art (Alternative South Asia Photography/Art), the region’s first app for presentation and discussion of contemporary creative work. Allana works nationally and internationally with museums, archives, cultural initiatives and institutions, universities and festivals. He recently served as Guest Editor for a Delhi-themed issue of Aperture (Summer 2021). He is on the editorial board of Trans-Asia Photography, the advisory committees of the India-Europe Foundation for New Dialogues (Rome), and the Arts and Culture committee, Asia Society (India Chapter). His forthcoming edited volume with Tulika books (Delhi) and West Heavens (Shanghai) is based on photography in India since the 90s.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art & Visual Studies and South Asia Program.

"Real-World Tasks in the Classroom: Myth or Reality? Exploring Task-Based Language Teaching"
Koen Van Gorp
Assistant Professor and Less Commonly Taught Languages Coordinator, Michigan State University

Tasks are everywhere. They are the things we do in daily life. Long (2016) argues that task-based language teaching (TBLT) is the strongest empirically supported teaching approach around. However, for many instructors of commonly and less commonly languages, TBLT is still an innovative approach that deviates from more familiar structure-based or form-focused teaching methods. They find it difficult to incorporate real-world tasks in their classrooms. Are real-world tasks the only option or can instructors integrate more pedagogical tasks? What do they look like and how do they incorporate (or not) grammar and vocabulary?

This talk will focus on what makes a task different from a traditional language classroom activity or exercise, and how real-world and pedagogical tasks can drive classroom (and beyond) learning. This talk aims to provide you with the foundational principles of TBLT so you can make tasks work for students and classrooms.

Bio: Dr. Koen Van Gorp is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Linguistics program and Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Coordinator in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University. He is also Co-Principal Investigator and Head of Research for the National LCTL Resource Center (NLRC) and serves as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Education (KU Leuven, Belgium). His main research interests are task-based language teaching and assessment, and multilingualism in education. He is founding Co-Editor (together with Kris Van den Branden) of TASK. Journal on task-based language teaching and learning and Treasurer of the International Association for Task-Based Language Teaching (IATBLT).

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.