Inequality, Labor, and Migration in East Asia

Through the Prism of Global Pandemic Virtual Workshop

Long-standing demographic changes will have serious implications for the nature of work, spatial mobility, and the overall distribution of resources in the countries of East Asia. Has the Coronavirus pandemic seriously affected any of the aforementioned areas and, if so, how? Join us for an inter-and cross-disciplinary workshop that explores the ongoing pandemic and its implications for inequality, labor, and migration in China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Korean peninsula, and Taiwan.

The workshop will begin with introductory remarks before moving to several short (approx. 20 minutes) presentations around the theme and will then conclude with several affinity group breakout rooms to further facilitate in-depth conversations. Participants from all disciplinary backgrounds and career stages are welcome and we especially encourage advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and fixed-term researchers to both present and participate.

This event is hosted by East Asia Program's core faculty member, Tristan Ivory (International and Comparative Labor, ILR), and Kun Huang, Ph.D. Student (Comparative Literature) - she is also an officer of the Graduate Student Steering Committee (GSSC) of EAP with the generous cooperation in planning from Vivian Shaw (Harvard College Fellow, Department of Sociology, Harvard University) and Sujin Eom (Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, Dartmouth University) .

This panel will bring together scholars who provide new perspectives on the material and moral reparations of the postcolonial, post-Nazi and post-communist eras in Germany, as well as the significance of these restitutions in serving as models for transitional justice and international law. It will explore both material and moral reparations, such as return and restitution of property that had been confiscated, monetary payments as compensation, and educational steps to take accountability for the past. The panel will not only acknowledge these reparations to ex-citizens and refugees, but also question the limits of established formulas and the lack or inequality of restitutions throughout the history of today’s Germany.

Speakers List:

Ruti Teitel | New York Law SchoolRebecca Boehling | U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, University of MarylandNicholas Mulder | Cornell UniversityTiffany Florvil | The University of New MexicoModerated by Esra Akcan | Cornell University

The panel is sponsored by the IES of Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. It is organized as part of IES’ Migration Series for its AY 2020-21 theme Repair and Reparations. You may find information about the past events including their video recordings here: https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/institute-european-studies/events/….

Waste work across South Asia is structured by caste, especially as low or non-caste groups (Dalits) have remained historically dominant in this form of labor. This continues to be true in contemporary Pakistan, where uneven urbanization driven by a consumption-based economy has shifted spatial relations along the lines of caste, class, and religion. Unsurprisingly, during this time, markets for waste materials and work have expanded rapidly, while creating renewed space for kabāṛīan (junkyard owners) and bīopārīan (middlemen or brokers) to enter this line of trade. This talk tracts through spaces—jhuggīān (huts), junkyards, warehouses, furnaces, manufacturing plants—where waste materials are worked with and exchanged, being procured and transformed into resources to be used in remaking commodities. Recent discussions of informality within South Asia have highlighted the contradictory situation faced by labor: excluded from formalized sectors of capitalist economies, relations of work and exchange have emerged to generate surpluses that are simultaneously directed at need and accumulation. By tracing the relations of work and exchange surrounding waste materials, this talk argues that informality undergird more formalized sectors of capitalist economies, uneven urbanization across much of Pakistan, and the reproduction of historical inequalities and interdependencies, in which caste-based forms of difference remain essential.

Waqas H. Butt is an anthropologist at University of Toronto Scarborough whose work focuses on the intersections of caste, labor, infrastructures, and waste in urban Pakistan. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore and the Punjab, his current book project examines the ways in which waste workers, who are drawn predominantly from low or non-caste (Dalit) groups, have become essential components of urban life through the everyday and intimate workings of waste infrastructures. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the University of California, San Diego. His work has appeared in academic journals such as CITY, American Ethnologist, ILWCH, among others, as well as newspapers and magazines in Pakistan.

Ithaca Premiere>2019 > Brazil > Directed by Sandra Kogut
With Regina Case
"A chaotic class dramedy where the help and the helped wind up switching places, Three Summers (Trs Ver›es) marks another occasion for Brazilian actress Regina Case (The Second Mother) to shine in the role of a housekeeper trying to overcome stiff social barriers and find her own slice of happiness." (The Hollywood Reporter) In Portuguese. Subtitled. More at www.distribfilmsus.com
1 hr 34 min

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first play date.
Reservations can be made here:
https://cinema.cornell.edu/virtual-cinema-order-form

1996 > Hong Kong > Directed by Wong Kar Wai
With Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Yeung
Wong Kar Wai's take on love and loss in a '90s, urban, neon-lit setting, but a darker film than its companion piece, Chungking Express. "An exhilarating rush of a movie. Go-for-broke visual bravura." (LA Times) In Cantonese & Mandarin. Subtitled. Cosponsored with the East Asia Program.
1 hr 36 min

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first play date.
Reservations can be made here:
https://cinema.cornell.edu/virtual-cinema-order-form

Rajasingham’s talk will draw from her book, Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times, to argue that Sri Lanka’s thirty-year ethnic war, and post-conflict contexts must be understood as shaped by the forces of global capitalism. She makes her arguments through an examination of ethnographic fictions— work invested in documenting the external world—to unpack how war and neoliberalism intersect. The talk will turn to the work of Shobasakthi, a Paris-based Dalit writer and actor, who fled the Tamil Tigers as a child soldier during Sri Lanka’s separatist war. In his novel Gorilla and the film Dheepan, he depicts life in Sri Lanka and Paris as conditioned by, “neoliberalism in the shadows,” an economic form deeply entangled in ethnonationalism and racism. The talk will explore, further, how the characters in novel and film resist racial capitalism through formal aesthetic experiments and embedded forms of witnessing.

Maitra’s talk will argue for the need to see queer identity politics in contemporary India as a multiply mediated fragmentation regulated by neoliberal capital. The first half of the talk will scrutinize the neoliberal logic of diversity shaping the rhetoric of a queer film festival in India—the KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival—and its strategic cinephilic alliance with the corporatized language of LGBTQ+ rights. The second half of the talk will examine how the film Devi (Karishma Dube, 2017) troubles this logic of inclusion through a sustained aesthetic attention to the gendered and classed inequalities mediating and splitting lesbian identity in the post-colony.

Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham is associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Colgate University. She teaches Marxism, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminism. Her book, Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War was published in the series, Critical Insurgencies, out of Northwestern University Press. She is presently working on her second book project on Global Apartheid and the War on Terror, which discusses the ongoing and recalibrated forms of segregation that the War on Terror has enabled.

Ani Maitra is associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Colgate University. His teaching and research interests span the fields of postcolonial and diaspora media cultures and gender and sexuality studies. His essays have appeared in edited volumes and journals like Camera Obscura, Continuum, differences, Film Quarterly, Jindal Global Law Review and World Records. Maitra is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern University Press, 2020).

Image: Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, Grandma’s Courtyard II, 2004. Copyright © by Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan.

This panel will explore the theme of reparations and restitutions to bring justice to the residual inequalities caused by slavery and colonization. It will focus on the recent developments to institute a sort of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Belgium, which was approved in Summer 2020 in the form of a parliamentary Special Commission to scrutinize the country’s colonial past. The multidisciplinary panel puts into conversation scholars who will comment on the history of Belgium colonization in Congo, on the recent movements in conjunction with Black Lives Matter including the toppling of the King Leopard II Monument that sparked the demand for accountability, and on the current debate around truth and reconciliation in Belgium, as well as its place in other transitional justice processes around the world.

Speakers’ list:

Pablo de Greiff, New York University

Amah Edoh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Pedro Monaville, New York University Abu Dhabi

Liliane Umubyeyi, Avocats Sans Frontières

Moderated by Esra Akcan, Cornell University

The panel is sponsored by the IES of Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. It is organized as part of IES’ Migration Series for its AY 2020-21 theme Repair and Reparations. You may find information about the past events including their video recordings here: https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/institute-european-studies/events/…

Valerie Hudson joins the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) for a discussion of her new book, "The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide" (Columbia University Press, 2020).

The author will join us for a discussion of their work. No formal presentation will be given; please read in advance. A link to the reading will be sent with the registration confirmation.

About the author

Valerie Hudson, University Distinguished Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair, Professor of International Affairs at Texas A&M University

Dr. Valerie Hudson, University Distinguished Professor, joined the faculty of the Bush School in 2012 as the holder of the George H. W. Bush Chair. An expert on international security and foreign policy analysis as well as gender and security, she received her PhD in political science at The Ohio State University and comes to Texas A&M University from a senior faculty position at Brigham Young University. Hudson directs the Bush School’s Program on Women, Peace, and Security.

In 2009, Foreign Policy named her one of the top 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers. Her coauthored book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, and the research it presents, received major attention from the media with coverage in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, and numerous other outlets. The book also received two national book awards. Another coauthored book, Sex and World Peace, published by Columbia University Press, was named by Gloria Steinem as one of the top three books on her reading list. A recent book, with Patricia Leidl, is The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy, published in June 2015. Her newest coauthored book is The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 2020). She was also recently named a Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis by the International Studies Association.

Dr. Hudson has developed a nation-by-nation database on women, the WomanStats Database (http://www.womanstats.org/), that has triggered both academic and policy interest (the latter includes its use by both the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and various agencies of the United Nations). Using this data, Hudson and her co-principal investigators from the WomanStats Project have published a wide variety of empirical work linking the security of women to the security of states, with research appearing in International Security, American Political Science Review, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, and Politics and Gender.

Dr. Hudson offers courses on women and nations (the foundations course for the Women, Peace, and Security concentration), foreign policy analysis, and a capstone on Women, Peace, and Security. Throughout her career, Dr. Hudson has demonstrated a strong commitment to collaboration with other scholars both in her own field and in other disciplines and has received significant research grants, including grants from the US Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative and the National Science Foundation, to support her work in international affairs. Her research and teaching experience is also complemented by three major teaching awards and numerous research awards, and she has recently been awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. She was also a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Australian National University in early 2017.

Hudson served as vice president of the International Studies Association for 2011-2012. She is a founding editorial board member of Foreign Policy Analysis, and also serves or has served on the editorial boards of The American Political Science Review, Politics and Gender, the American Journal of Political Science, and International Studies Review. More information can be found on her professional website, https://vmrhudson.org.

This World Economics Roundtable event focuses on gross capital flows and their implications for financing trade deficits and for fiscal and financial stability. The World Economics Roundtable series is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, CRADLE, and Cornell Law School.

Global goods and services trade deficits and their financing have been an important subject of policy discussion. The pandemic again brings these issues into focus, as the pressing need for developed economies to increase spending could raise concerns about their ability to finance trade deficits.

National accounting methodologies and most mainstream economic theories have emphasized foreign real saving, or net capital flows, to finance and sustain trade deficits. At the same time, few economists and policymakers would dispute that large flows of foreign or domestic monetary financing, or gross capital flows, play a key role in determining international financing patterns and financial stability.

These two issues are typically not analyzed together in a coherent framework, with the real and the financial sides often kept apart for simplicity. The panelists will tackle the question of how developed nations’ trade deficits are financed by net and gross capital flows—and how we can understand the interactions of both categories of financing.

Panelists:

Maurice M. Obstfeld, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, Professor of Economics at U.C. Berkeley, and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics

Authors of the 2020 Bank of England staff working paper, How Does International Capital Flow?: Michael Kumhof (BOE), Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul (BIS), and Andrej Sokol (ECB)

Moderator: Binyamin Applebaum, New York Times

“The world’s ten richest men have seen their combined wealth increase by $540 billion during the pandemic, while the crisis threatens a lost decade in the fight against poverty,” revealed the Oxfam Inequality Report 2021, published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Davos Dialogues.' The India supplement of the Global Inequality Report highlighted “India’s 100 billionaires have seen their fortune increase by $178 billion since March 2020, enough to give every one of the 138 million poorest Indian people a cheque of $1,288."

Oxfam’s 2021 report “The Inequality Virus” found that Covid-19 has the potential to increase economic inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began over a century ago.

In this webinar Oxfam Inequality experts will talk about the journey of Oxfam’s Inequality work globally and in India, and whether it has been an effective strategy to advocate for a more just and sustainable society. Glimpses of Oxfam India’s work to address inequality will also be highlighted.

Max Lawson is Head of Inequality Policy for Oxfam International. He has previously Head of Policy and Campaigns at Oxfam Great Britain, and has helped author some of Oxfam’s most high profile papers. He also worked for Oxfam as governance adviser for some years, working in over 25 countries on budgets, governance and public spending. He moved to Nairobi in January along with Oxfam International’s whole headquarters.

Amitabh Behar, Chief Executive Officer of Oxfam India, is a global civil society leader, and an authority on tackling economic and gender inequality and building citizen participation. Mr. Behar currently serves as the Vice-Chair of the Board of CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society across the globe. He also serves on the boards of several other organisations, including the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, an Indian public policy think tank. Prior to Oxfam, Mr. Behar was the Executive Director of National Foundation for India and served as the Convener of National Social Watch Coalition and the Co-Chair of Global Call to Action Against Poverty, a network of over 11,000 civil society organisations.