It is not possible to fully understand current global environmental politics and responses to environmental challenges without understanding the role of data platforms, devices, standards, and institutions, according to Jenny Goldstein, assistant professor in Global Development.

In an in-person Chats in the Stacks book talk, Goldstein discusses her new book, The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), coedited with Eric Nost, assistant professor at the University of Guelph, which brings together scholars from geography, anthropology, science and technology studies, and ecology to explore these connections, and reveal how environmental politics are waged in the digital realm.

Goldstein's work is driven by interests in environmental conservation and development in the tropics; intersections of data infrastructure and land governance; human health impacts of ecological change; global food and agriculture systems; the financialization of land; and the role of scientific knowledge in climate change politics.

This talk is hosted by Mann Library. Light refreshments will be served.

The University of Nebraska Press is offering a 40% discount on The Nature of Data if you order from their website using promo code 6AS22.

Talk by Bruno Shirley (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

In the twelfth century, the Buddhist monarchs of Poḷonnaruva began to claim to be cakravartins: literally "wheel turners," but usually translated as “universal kings.” Scholars have reasonably assumed that a direct line can be drawn backward from these cakravartin claims, and those ubiquitously made in later Buddhist polities across Southern Asia, to a supposed origin in Pali Canonical texts. I argue, however, that Poḷonnaruva’s s cakravartin claims represented a radical disjuncture in Pali Buddhist models of kingship. These claims were not modeled on canonical cakravartins, nor on historical monarchs like Aśoka; instead, they represented participation in what I call a transregional and trans-religious community of shared practice. It was only after and in response to these practices, I show, that scholars like Guruḷugōmin and Siddhattha Thero developed a theoretical framework for Buddhist cakravartinship, with implications for later developments in Southeast Asia.

Bruno M. Shirley is a Ph.D. candidate in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture, Cornell University. His work focuses on Buddhist ideas about gender, politics, and devotion in the early second-millennium Indian Ocean, particularly in Sri Lanka.