“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.

Panel discussion with filmmaker Giulia Bertoluzzi

Film Overview:

Set primarily in Zarzis, Tunisia, and the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, Strange Fish tells the story of Tunisian fishermen who have been rescuing migrants and recovering the dead along the world's deadliest migration route since the early 2000s. The film’s title, a reference to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” links the deaths of African migrants en route to Europe and the lynching of African Americans. In Strange Fish, as the camera moves between images of the sea, fishing livelihoods, and shipwrecks, viewers learn how local fishermen have been affected by and responded to this violence, including their work to maintain a migrant cemetery. The film is in French and Arabic, with English subtitles. Running time: 55 minutes. More information and streaming options.

Panelists:

Giulia Bertoluzzi is a journalist and co-founder of Nawart Press, a collective of independent journalists. Her film Strange Fish, which won the EU’s Media Migration award in 2017 and wasreleased in September 2018, has received awards in several international festivals and distribution in cinemas and on television. In 2016/2017, she co-wrote and co-directed Far Right: A New Frightening Normal, a documentary on the rise of the extreme right in Europe, broadcast by Al Jazeera. In 2016, she was nominated for the Doc/IT Women Award at the Venice Festival for A Kurdish Women’s Dream. In 2015, Rai Storia broadcast the itinerant project Railway Diaries: A Woman’s World, a long reportage on the Silk Road featuring women’s voices. In 2014, she collaborated on the documentary film Una storia sommersa(A Submerged Story), which won the Premio Morrione/Ilaria Alpi for investigative journalism.

Amade M’charek is Professor of Anthropology of Science at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. She is the PI of the RaceFaceIDproject, an ERC-consolidator project on forensic identification and the making of face and race. Her work centres on the ir/relevance of race in science and society. She has published widely on genetic diversity, population genetics and forensic DNA practices, as well on biomedical practices. Through her current research on forensics and migrant death she has developed an interest into (post)colonial relations, circulations and extractions.

Eleanor Paynter is a Postdoctoral Associate in Migrations with Cornell’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Her research is in the area of critical refugee studies, specializing in asylum, testimony, and migrant rights. She focuses on Africa –Europe migration, with work on the Black Mediterranean and the necropolitics of border control that draws on ethnography and oral history, as well as writing, film, and visual media.

Panel moderator: Natasha Raheja, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell. Her current writing and film work explores questions of migration and citizenship along the India-Pakistan border.

This discussion is sponsored by Cornell Cinema, Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge (part of Global Cornell), and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

This talk analyzes the relationship between dam building, border wars, and India's settler colonial politics in Kashmir, particularly in the aftermath of the removal of Articles 370 and 35A that maintained Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in the Indian union. I will discuss how controlling vital Himalayan rivers fortifies Hindu reimagining of Kashmiri territory while forcibly integrating the region into India's extractive economy.

Mona Bhan is Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She is also the co-editor of HIMALAYA, the journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Bhan has authored Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? (Routledge); and co-authored Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (Cambridge). She also recently co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press), with scholars from the Critical Kashmir Studies collective, of which she is a founding member.