In this exhibition, graduate student curators Lynda May Xepoleas '23 and Emily Hayflick '25 explore the different ways international students helped to foster cross-cultural understandings of dress on Cornell's campus in the mid-twentieth century.

"Inquiry-Based Language Learning"
Christina Rocha
ACS Athens

This talk will focus on inquiry-based learning within the language classroom, more specifically WHY it is important as well as HOW we can successfully engage our students to ask more questions, sparking their curiosity and motivation to learn more about the language, culture, and people we teach about. Inquiry-based learning helps build intercultural communicative awareness and competence while fostering student agency and a sense of connection to our community through conscious global citizenship.

Bio: Christina Rocha has been teaching languages (ESL, Greek, French, and Spanish) since 1999. She started her career in the U.S. public school system before moving internationally; she currently teaches Spanish and ESL at the American Community Schools (ACS) in Athens, Greece. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics and Language and Communication with a research interest and focus on inquiry-based language learning and global citizenship. She has recently authored two chapters in the 2021 IGI publication on this topic in the Handbook of Research on K-12 Blended and Virtual Learning Through the i²Flex Classroom Model.

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, which include wearing masks while indoors and providing proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.

Talk by Samah Choudhury (Religious Studies, Ithaca College)

Our contemporary moment has witnessed a precipitous rise in the presence of American Muslim comedians in pop culture - on television, movies, and on the stage. I map their unprecedented popularity to the contemporary moment when American “Muslim” humor is named as such, as well as the complications that arise from imposing a religious referent interchangeably with terms like “racial” or “ethnic” as they relate to the constitution of the 21st-century Western subject. This gendering, racialization, and a growing progressive consensus on issues of intersectionality have come to provide a common language for comedians to identify as Muslim over strictly racial and ethnic nomenclature. Yet this humor replicates a subjugating racialized, religionized, and "masculine" vision of Islam – outside of themselves – by limiting its articulation to normative Sunni ideals and injunctions. For comedians like Hasan Minhaj, there is an inconsistent stepping in and out in of language that names him as Muslim, Indian, Desi, or simply “brown” that relies on aesthetics of American Blackness to register an opposition to white secularity.

Samah Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Ithaca College. Her research surrounds Islam, humor, and the politics of social legibility in the United States. Her current book manuscript looks at the ways that Islam and Muslims are articulated through standup comedy and how they speak back to broader transnational practices and discourses of race, masculinity, and secularism. She holds a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill in Religious Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and the Religious Studies Program.

Photo: Netflix/Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj