Learn how the coronavirus crisis is affecting immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, including new healthcare, public benefits, and detention policies these populations face. Einaudi Center Migrations faculty fellows Steve Yale-Loehr and Gunisha Kaur will discuss Weill Cornell and Cornell University’s efforts to assist immigrants through Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell.

Moderator: Eleanor Paynter, Einaudi Center Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow

Register now!

In this talk, I develop a critical approach to the concept of “nation-ness” through an analysis of the work of two contemporary performance artists from the Venezuelan diaspora: Deborah Castillo (Caracas, 1971) and Violette Bule (Valencia, 1980). Forced to leave Venezuela because of political repression, fear of violence, economic hardship, and lack of institutional support for their work, the two artists moved to New York, where they developed installations and performances that put the Venezuelan reality in dialogue with new spaces, different cultures, and international audiences. I propose that, as a result, an approach to the nation emerges from their work that deviates from the strict ideological frameworks within which the concept is discussed in Venezuela, and which trap it within the extreme political polarization that separates those who support the government and those who are part of the opposition. Without completely distancing themselves from the issues at the center of this polarization, the two artists rely on “critical crafting,” and DIY practices to shed light on the nuances and complexities that permeate the efforts to remember, imagine, and re-present the nation outside the nation. I will propose that, through an emphasis on materiality and crafting, their work, rather than simply remembering Venezuela and reproducing it as spectacle to be passively consumed, provides the possibility to intervene in systems of power and representation that determine which bodies are visible and which are not, which bodies have power and which do not, and which bodies are mourned and who should mourn them. Furthermore, it offers the space and the means to question national identity, to reflect on one’s own position in society, and to advance social change.

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_O-t4vcovRbenBC_0onuzjg

Lecture will be given in Español and not sub-titled.

Recent reconfigurations of political subjectivities in South America that gave impulse to the new rise of the right gravitate around hate as the political affect that infuses new tonalities in the public sphere. These reconfigurations of subjectivity, however, are inseparable from another transformation that seems unrelated: that of the technologies, circuits and publics of writing. By looking at recent aesthetic interventions on the interface between hate and writing, this presentation will discuss the complex and unstable nature of hatred, and its capacity for transformation and for opening new interpellations.

***Please note this seminar will be in Spanish only, no translator or subtitles***

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_u_vp2Di_RxWtQMdtyAclgA

Drug cartels in Mexico have openly attacked mayors and local party candidates, as part of their strategy to develop subnational criminal governance regimes. Political vulnerability, afforded by intergovernmental partisan conflict, and political opportunities, opened by subnational elections cycles, are causally related to the probability of attacks against mayors and party candidates. These attacks have subsequently affected citizen participation and engagement with electoral politics.

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DuCJhmmCRROCo1ZrbjwrtQ

Abby Córdova will present a chapter of her book project entitled, “Violence against Women and Political Participation in Contexts of Criminal Violence.” In this chapter, she explores one of the three central questions of her book: How does criminal organizations’ territorial control exacerbate female residents’ vulnerability to gender-based violence? Drawing from literatures on criminal violence and civil wars, she argues that criminal organizations engage in violence against women as part of their strategy to help maintain territorial control. More specifically, with a focus on gang violence in El Salvador, she posits that in territories where the state has a low presence, criminal organizations’ hegemony results in a spiral of violence against women in the streets of neighborhoods and within homes. This dynamic, she argues, is largely perpetuated by diminished reporting rates resulting from fear of gang retaliation and more negative perceptions of the police. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, she examines whether women’s experiences with gender-based violence vary depending on whether they reside in a gang-controlled territory or a nearby zone. Her analysis relies on data from five different sources, including three nationally representative victimization surveys and two national censuses on population and school characteristics. Using a novel spatial indicator of gang territorial control, she maps out distances from survey respondents’ census tract of residence to known gang-controlled areas, finding support for her hypotheses.

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GwjBMQ55TLGz42AHLCqqXw

South Asia and Latin America represent two epicenters of migrant care work and the globalized reproductive market. Yet scholars and the media continue to examine them in geographical and conceptual isolation. South of the Future closes both these gaps. It investigates nannying, elder care, domestic work, and other forms of migrant labor in the Americas together with the emerging “Wild West” of biotechnology and surrogacy in the Indian subcontinent. The volume is profoundly interdisciplinary and includes both prominent and emerging scholars from a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, law, literary and cultural studies, science and technology studies, and social policy. These contributors speak to the dynamic, continually changing facets of the nexus of care and value across these two key regions of the global south. By mobilizing specific locations and techno-economics and putting them into dialogue with one another, South of the Future rematerializes the gendered, racialized bodies that are far too often rendered invisible in structural analyses of the global south, or else are confined to particular geo- and biopolitical paradigms of emerging markets. Instead, these bodies occupy the center of a global, highly financialized economy of creating and sustaining life.

This book is based on presentations and conversations at the South Asia Program symposium, “Gujarat/Guatemala: Marketing Care and Speculating Life,” held May 6-7, 2016 at Cornell University. Several videos of interviews with conference participants are now vailable for online viewing.

Anindita Banerjee is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her research focuses on science fiction and technocultural studies, environmental humanities, media studies, and migration studies across Russia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin and African Americas. Her first book, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity won the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book prize from the University of California. She is an editor of three other books, South of the Future: Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas (with Debra Castillo), Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (with Sonja Fritzsche), and Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader.

Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is past president of the international Latin American Studies Association. She specializes in contemporary narrative and performance from the Spanish-speaking world (including the United States), gender studies, comparative border studies, and cultural theory. Her most recent books include South of the Future: Speculative Biotechnologies and Care Markets in South Asia and Latin America (with Anindita Banerjee) and The Scholar as Human (with Anna Sims Bartel).

Registration is required for this virtual event