Gatty Lecture Series

Developing an Innovative Mobile Phone Tool for Monitoring Marine Biodiversity and Human Nutrition in Timor-Leste

Join us for a talk by Lydia O'Meara, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Across the Indo-Pacific Coral Triangle, one of the world’s most biodiverse yet threatened regions, climate change and human pressures are reshaping both marine ecosystems and the coastal communities that rely on them for livelihoods and nutrition. Yet, integrated and timely data on ocean and human health remain scarce, especially in remote, low-resource settings. This lecture presents the early stages of a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability study developing a low-cost mobile phone–based tool to track aquatic food consumption as an integrated monitoring indicator of marine biodiversity and food security at high frequency amidst a changing climate in Timor-Leste.
Using Interactive Voice Response technology on basic mobile phones, the project will pilot high-frequency participant-recorded dietary monitoring with women in small-scale fishing households, a nutritionally vulnerable and sentinel population for tracking community food security. By recording the diversity of aquatic foods eaten throughout the year, the study will explore how seasonal and environmental fluctuations shape access to nutrient-rich aquatic foods, whilst also providing insights into changes in marine biodiversity. This lecture will focus on the co-design, feasibility, and refinement of innovative integrated mobile phone monitoring tools suited to contexts where conventional surveys are constrained by severe weather, low literacy, and limited infrastructure. Timor-Leste serves as a case study for how inclusive, low-cost technologies can sustain nutrition and biodiversity data flows amid climate variability, informing future research and policy at the ocean–human health interface across SE Asia.

About the Speaker
Originally from Australia, Lydia O’Meara is an international nutritionist passionate about sustainable food systems for nutrition. Lydia is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, working in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health. She is also an Emerging Leader Representative for the WHO World Health Summit in the Asia-Pacific. Her three-year Cornell fellowship focuses on developing and validating a novel mobile phone–based tool for high-frequency monitoring of diets among low-literate women in remote, resource-limited settings, with current fieldwork in Timor-Leste. With over seven years’ experience, Lydia has worked with organizations including UN Nutrition, the FAO, and WorldFish on food security and nutrition research across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Her current work centers on aquatic foods for nutrition and the design of sustainable, equitable food systems in the context of climate change and anthropogenic pressures. Her research has been published in high-impact international journals, including the Lancet Planetary Health, Global Food Security, and PNAS. When she’s not working, Lydia enjoys exploring local foods and cultures.

Gatty Lecture Series Join us for a talk by Patrick Daly, Staff Scientist, Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
In 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives, causing massive loss of life and billions of dollars of damage, displacing hundreds of thousands of households, and triggering one of the largest international post-disaster reconstruction efforts in history. It is arguable that the loss of life was so high because few were prepared for a tsunami of that magnitude, as there were then no known historical or geological evidence for paleotsunami in the region. This talk brings together evidence from almost two decades of historical and geo-archaeological research that I have participated in after the 2004 event in Aceh, Indonesia to build a detailed paleo-tsunami history. I discuss how we combined archaeological landscape survey across over 40km of coastal areas surrounding the city of Banda Aceh, with stratigraphic, sedimentological, micro-fossil, and geochronological analysis of deposits uncovered within a cave on the Sumatran coast to conclusively show that the 2004 event was only the most recent in a long history of massive, destructive tsunami that have hit areas inundated by the 2004 tsunami. I end my talk by situating our results within other paleo-tsunami studies conducted around the region to propose an over 7,000 year timeline of major tsunami occurrence in the eastern Indian Ocean.

About the Speaker
Patrick Daly is a Staff Scientist for Sustainability and Resilience in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He completed a PhD. at the University of Oxford in environmental archaeology in 2003, and held post-doctoral and research appointments at Cambridge University and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. He founded the Risk and Society research cluster at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, where he worked as a Principle Investigator until 2024. Employing a combination of anthropological and environmental archaeological methods, his research focuses upon human responses to changing environmental conditions and long-term recovery from large-scale disasters. He has spent the past two decades conducting research on historical hazards across southern Asia and community level recovery following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He is currently working on a monograph on post-disaster reconstruction: The Aftermath of Aid: Capacity Building, Development and Sustainability in Post-tsunami Aceh.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Mark Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies (Asian American) at Vanderbilt University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
This talk explores how legal advocates fought to defend civil liberties during the martial law era in the Philippines (1972-1981). During martial law, legal activists tried to challenge the Marcos regime in Philippine courts while trying to avoid legitimating martial law. Other legal advocates sought to garner international support while maintaining the centrality of Filipino people’s voices and experiences. The Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), an organization started by former Senator Jose W. Diokno and other lawyers to fight for the civil liberties of everyday Filipinos helped lead such fights. So too did anti-Marcos activists in the National Democratic Front (NDF) of the Philippines and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). This work operated on a local level with documentation efforts and habeas corpus filings as well as an international level, with examples such as the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) trial against the Marcos government in 1980. Despite the challenge of laying claim to the law against an authoritarian state, legal activists continued to advocate against the regime’s excesses and worked to shift local and international opinions against the Marcos state. Their work greatly contributed to transnational efforts to document human rights violence in the Philippines and offers insights into productive collaborations between grassroots and international solidarity activists.

About the Speaker
Mark John Sanchez teaches Asian American and Philippine history courses at Vanderbilt University. He is currently completing a book on the making of a transnational opposition to the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. He is also working on a project on Philippine labor migration, speculation, and gambling.

This talk examines the history of the environmental clauses in Chile’s constitution. That constitution was imposed at gunpoint by the Pinochet dictatorship and has been widely assailed for preserving the “guardrails” of Chile’s neoliberal economic model. Surprisingly, the 1980 constitution, designed in a secretive and anti-democratic process by conservative legal scholars and politicians, included surprisingly innovative language on environmental rights. And, as this paper demonstrates, this language was not toothless. It established the basis for two landmark legal cases in the Supreme Court over water and water rights while Chile was still ruled by Pinochet during the 1980s. These cases signified major victories for Chile’s robust environmentalist and indigenous rights movements.

Thomas Klubock is John C. Coleman Professor of History, University of Virginia. He is the author of three books on Chile, Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951, and a co-editor of The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

More Auspicious Shores chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and promoting a pan-Africanist agenda while simultaneously fulfilling their 'civilizing' and 'Christianizing' duties. Through a close examination of the Afro-Barbadians, Caree A. Banton provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa. Banton reveals how, as former British subjects, Afro-Barbadians navigated an inherent tension between ideas of pan-Africanism and colonial superiority. Upon their arrival in Liberia, an English imperial identity distinguished the Barbadians from African Americans and secured them privileges in the Republic's hierarchy above the other group. By fracturing assumptions of a homogeneous black identity, Banton ultimately demonstrates how Afro-Barbadian settlement in Liberia influenced ideas of blackness in the Atlantic World.

Caree Banton is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora History and the Director of the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. Banton earned a BPA in Public Administration and BA in History from Grambling State University in 2005. She received a MA in Development Studies from the University of Ghana in July 2012 and completed her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in June 2013. Her research focuses on movements towards freedom, particularly around abolition, emancipation, and colonization.
Much of her work also explores ideas of citizenship, nationhood, and race in the 19th century. Her research has been supported by a number of fellowships, including the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center, and the Nancy Weiss Malkiel Fellowship.

High rates of micronutrient deficiency persist in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and disproportionately impact populations with limited access to nutrient-rich foods. In response, national agricultural research programs and international organizations are prioritizing biofortification as a strategy to improve the nutritional value of staple crops. This presentation will examine efforts to scale these crops throughout the region and summarize specific research and applied interventions that address the broader food system, exploring the intersections of policy, processing, market access, the food environment, and human behavior.

Dr. Victor Taleon is a Research Fellow at IFPRI, specializing in the nexus of crop biofortification and food processing. With a Ph.D. in Food Science and Technology from Texas A&M University, he investigates the stability and bioavailability of micronutrients in staple crops like maize, beans, and rice. His research focuses on the post-harvest value chain to identify strategies that preserve the nutritional benefits of biofortified foods from farm to plate. Dr. Taleon collaborates with partners across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America to scale these solutions and combat hidden hunger.

In this talk, I analyze the relationship between criminal governance and citizen claim-making for public goods. Millions of people across Latin America live in urban peripheries marked by uneven state presence but where criminal organizations are often present and govern everyday life. What impact does this overlapping reality have on the strategies citizens use to make claims on the state for public goods? A comparative analysis across three peripheral Mexico City neighborhoods shows that claim-making strategies vary in both level – individual or collective – and mode – brokered or direct. I argue that criminal governance influences claim-making through two channels: social capital and political brokerage. I use this argument to structure a comparative analysis of claim-making for a basic but fundamental public good: water. The study contributes to broader debates on distributive politics, citizenship, and democracy.

Eduardo Moncada is the Claire Tow Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College of Columbia University, and he is also the Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. His research examines the origins, dynamics and consequences of crime and violence in Latin America, with a focus on how criminal governance shapes political life. He is the author of Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America (Stanford University Press) and Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America (Cambridge University Press). He is also co-editor of Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics (Cambridge University Press). In his current research, Moncada is examining how variation in the ways that criminal organizations govern territories shapes how citizens make claims on the state for public goods and services. Moncada’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

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.