Faced with a past that seems to repeat itself ad infinitum, through the dynamics of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism, we ask ourselves about the past, present, and future of Latin America and Caribbean. The slogan “Otro futuro es posible” –another future is possible– has been appropriated in a wide array of spaces, movements, and temporalities to trigger the imagination of many, from political movements to environmental causes. This symposium is an invitation to explore this expression not as an enthusiastic affirmation but rather a question awaiting an answer: is another future possible in Latin America and the Caribbean? Thinking about and with categories such as encounters, crossings, (dis)continuities, fractures and unions in space and time, and the search for autonomy, we ask: how can we think about the future of the region?

With this in mind, we invite the Cornell community to participate in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program’s annual research symposium entitled “Futures in (Re)Construction”, to take place on February 20th and 21st, 2026. VENUE In the midst of the current political sphere that especially affects Latin American and Caribbean communities and has sought to silence not only their traditions, heritage, and languages but also the academic study of the land and the impacts of climate change in various communities, we especially welcome abstracts for projects related to categories, concepts, and keywords that, in the current political climate, have been erased and discarded, such as gender, race, climate and environmental justice, and cuir/queer.

Faced with a past that seems to repeat itself ad infinitum, through the dynamics of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism, we ask ourselves about the past, present, and future of Latin America and Caribbean. The slogan “Otro futuro es posible” –another future is possible– has been appropriated in a wide array of spaces, movements, and temporalities to trigger the imagination of many, from political movements to environmental causes. This symposium is an invitation to explore this expression not as an enthusiastic affirmation but rather a question awaiting an answer: is another future possible in Latin America and the Caribbean? Thinking about and with categories such as encounters, crossings, (dis)continuities, fractures and unions in space and time, and the search for autonomy, we ask: how can we think about the future of the region?

With this in mind, we invite the Cornell community to participate in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program’s annual research symposium entitled “Futures in (Re)Construction”, to take place on February 20th and 21st, 2026. VENUE In the midst of the current political sphere that especially affects Latin American and Caribbean communities and has sought to silence not only their traditions, heritage, and languages but also the academic study of the land and the impacts of climate change in various communities, we especially welcome abstracts for projects related to categories, concepts, and keywords that, in the current political climate, have been erased and discarded, such as gender, race, climate and environmental justice, and cuir/queer.

“We’re not going to be afraid of Immigration.” Juana spoke those words to her undocumented niece Sonia while they agonized over Sonia’s upcoming court hearing. Sonia had missed a previous hearing and might have a deportation order awaiting her. It was February 2025. But Juana advised against fear. She told her niece, We’ll go to court together.

This paper reaches for a theory of the state in order to think through the dilemmas faced by Central American immigrants in the rural and small-town Hudson Valley. To start, I focus on people who are at high risk of deportation and decide to go to court anyway. As Juana says, they are deciding not to be afraid. Why refuse to fear?

To search for an answer, I turn to 2021, when New York State created the Excluded Worker Fund, a COVID unemployment benefit designed specifically for undocumented New Yorkers. The shift from 2021 to 2025 – from state benevolence to mass deportation – can seem like a dramatic transformation in regimes. Immigrants, however, may be detecting an underlying continuity. In both periods, state intervention is managing the rural labor market by rewarding workers who have strong links to their employers. First trust and then loyalty (rather than enterprise) emerge as key dispositions. Through their refusal to fear, immigrants may demonstrate loyalty in the midst of danger. This paper turns an ethnographic eye to the practices and attitudes that rural New Yorkers develop in the current moment. By charting five tumultuous years in a single valley, we aim to understand what, during a time of change, ends up remaining the same.

Gregory Duff Morton is an economic anthropologist and social worker. He wants to know how people send value across borders in the Americas. He has engaged with welfare programs in Latin America, with Brazilian migrants who move back to the countryside, with Dominican seniors undergoing surgery in New York City, and, most recently, with Central Americans and the activists they meet in upstate New York. Morton has a special interest in the MST, Brazil’s landless movement, which brings small farmers together to occupy plantations. By thinking internationally about human services, he hopes, we can equip ourselves to confront the inequalities so characteristic of public life in the Americas.

Cancelled due to an emergency!

Although the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II following the invocation of the Enemy Aliens Act has been well documented, the parallel experiences of Latin Americans of Japanese descent remain far less examined. Like their U.S.-based counterparts, these communities were removed from their homes, stripped of property, and interned in U.S.-run camps. In Venezuela, rather than being interned abroad, Caracas’ Japanese community was confined to a camp in Ocumare del Tuy—a story almost entirely erased from both Venezuelan historical memory. This history raises urgent questions about whose experiences are recorded, whose are forgotten, and which forms of memory gain recognition. In this talk, Elizabeth Barrios explores these questions through Nikkei (2011), the largely overlooked documentary by filmmaker Kaori Flores Yonekura, which traces her own family’s experiences and illuminates a hidden chapter of Venezuelan and hemispheric history. The film not only preserves personal and collective memory but also challenges us to rethink the boundaries of national and transnational histories, exposing the racial and political logics that made such internments possible. These questions are particularly urgent today, as the Enemy Aliens Act has been invoked once more (this time specifically targeting Venezuelans), revealing how the mechanisms of exclusion and surveillance from the past continue to resonate in the present.

Elizabeth Barrios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Albion College. This year she is a fellow at the Society for the Humanities. Her research explores ecology, energy humanities, and Latin American and Latina/o literature and media, with an emphasis on Venezuela and its diaspora. She is the author of Failures of the Imagination: Reckoning with Oil in Venezuelan Cultural Production (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026), which examines how Venezuelan literature and media have confronted the social and ecological toll of oil, often in ways overlooked or deliberately obscured by critics and institutions

Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP26/class/LATA/4000

Marshall Islanders explain that US nuclear blasting is woven into their polity “kone jubar”—like an ironwood tree roots in the soil; like a child belongs to the lands of their mother’s lineage. This talk is about bodies (biological, territorial, political) and persons (natural and legal), and about radionuclides that expose, permeate, entangle, and transform them.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 of its most powerful nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, which it governed as part of a United Nations “strategic trusteeship.” During decolonization negotiations, the residues of US nuclear colonialism shaped the birth of the Marshallese state. In international law, “residual sovereignty” describes sovereign rights that will only vest fully following the removal of an encumbrance. In the late 1970s, US Defense Department planned to retain extensive military rights in the Marshall Islands that would limit Marshallese state sovereignty indefinitely.

Marshallese sovereignty also became residual in a second, material sense, for it was shaped by the enduring damage and residues of US blasting. As a condition of the formation of a Marshallese state “in free association” with the United States, US negotiators required Islanders not only to cede military and security rights, but also to settle all legal claims relating to the nuclear legacy.

This talk will explore the significance of this history for broader post-World War II entanglements between the racialized international legal politics of decolonization, on the one hand, and the material and epistemic politics of technology and technogenic pollution, on the other.

About the Speaker

Mary X. Mitchell is a lawyer and historian of science and technology. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania (University of Chicago Press), uses legal wrangling over US nuclear blasting and contamination in the Marshall Islands to explore the shifting shape of sovereignty following World War II. Mitchell is an assistant professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark.

Host

The talk is hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

This conference explores the interrelationships among political literary, and religious culture in early second-millennium South India and Sri Lanka. Scholars of premodern South Asia and Indian Ocean political culture now recognize that transregional processes fundamentally shaped political environments in this region. The substantial migration of scholars, military operators, ritual specialists, and pilgrim-patrons led to substantial transfers of knowledge. During this period, textual forms, material culture, languages, and technical sciences were on the move. Speakers will highlight the potential of working across languages and between key political-cultural centers to identify core characteristics of premodern political culture in peninsular India and Sri Lanka from approximately 900-1500. The culture of politics in this region underwent substantial changes during this period, bookended by the Indian Ocean imperial vision of the Cōḷas to the advent of the Portuguese Indian Ocean colonial empire.

Conference participants include:

Manasicha Akepiyapornchai, Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Daud Ali, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Stephen Berkwitz, Religious Studies, Missouri State University

Anne Blackburn, Asian Studies, Cornell University

Whitney Cox, South Asian Languages & Civilizations, University of Chicago

Elaine Fisher, Religious Studies, Stanford University

Alistair Gornall, History & Religion, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Larry McCrea, Asian Studies, Cornell University

Bruno Shirley, Buddhist Studies, Heidelberg University

Hakem Al-Rustom, Assistant Professor at University of Michigan, will give this year's Armenian Genocide Commemoration Lecture, "What Remains: Afterlives of Genocide and the Persistence of the Unfinished."

This lecture begins from a simple but unsettling premise: genocide does not end. It exceeds the event that names it, extending into the present through forms of erasure, displacement, and the normalization of loss. Rather than treating genocide as a closed historical episode, this talk develops afterlives as both object and method—a way of reading the present as structured by violences that remain ongoing, though not always visible.

Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, the lecture traces how these afterlives take shape through processes of denativization: the systematic rendering of populations as foreign to the lands they inhabit. Through legal, spatial, and affective transformations, denativization sustains the conditions of disappearance while making them appear natural.

Yet something persists. Not as recovery or return, but as a fragile presence—in refusals, in stories, in the partial transmission of memory. Here, refusal emerges not as declaration, but as practice: a refusal to disappear, to be fully absorbed into the terms that negate one’s existence. To think in terms of afterlives, then, is to confront the unfinishedness of genocide—not as past, but as a condition of the present.

Speaker Bio:

Hakem Amer Al-Rustom is the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History, Assistant Professor of History, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. A historical anthropologist, his work explores the afterlives of violence, with a particular focus on Armenians in Turkey and the post-Ottoman Middle East. His book, Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (2026), brings together ethnography and history to examine how genocide persists through erasure, displacement, and the reshaping of belonging. He is coeditor of Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (2010).