The publications of Hanoi Grapevine's Finest (HGF) — an annual, audience-nominated recognition of outstanding contemporary art projects in Vietnam, running since 2019 — are now hosted on the Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL). Organized by Cornell University Library and Cornell's Southeast Asia Program, this conversation marks the launch of the HGF digital collection and explores what it means for a grassroots, bottom-up archive to enter an international digital library consortium. A cultural practitioner, an anthropologist, and a digital librarian think through questions of whose knowledge counts, how digital archives shape research narratives, and what happens when an audience-led record meets the infrastructure of international scholarly preservation.

Speakers:

Nguyễn Tú Hằng - Director of Hanoi GrapevineEmily Zinger - Southeast Asia Digital Librarian, Cornell University LibraryĐỗ Tường Linh - Director, Nguyen Wahed Gallery and Art Curator Vincom Center for Contemporary Art

More information forthcoming.

Rights of Nature represents a groundbreaking shift in environmental protection — a legal framework that recognizes rivers, forests, and other natural entities as having inherent rights to exist, flourish, and remain clean. This transformative model emerged in the Global South, led by Ecuador, the first country to enshrine Rights of Nature in its constitution. It has since inspired movements and legal debates worldwide, redefining the relationship between people and the planet.

Join us for a special Keynote in which lawyers, civil society activists, and academics discuss how Rights of Nature is being interpreted and applied in the courts of Ecuador and Colombia. They will also explore the challenges this paradigm faces and highlight the opportunities it creates for strengthening environmental protection and advancing sustainability. The conversation offers a rare, frontline look at the evolving global dialogue on environmental justice.

This work is part of a collaboration between the Ashley School of Global Development and Environment at Cornell and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. It is supported by a Cornell Global Hubs seed grant and the Polson Institute for Global Development.

Open access background reading: Special Issue: Integrating Ecology, Law, and Society to Protect the Environment. Journal of Integrated Global STEM: People, Technology and Policy. 3(1). Warner and Martínez-Moscoso (2026).

Register and see the full list of panelists.

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She earned her BA from Harvard University and PhD from Princeton University. In 2012, she was appointed Remarque-Ecole Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor; she has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; UC Davis; Cornell University; and Williams College. Apter was president of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2017-18. She is editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press, and serves on the editorial boards of Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, Comparative Literature, October, Diacritics, Sites, and Signs. A 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, Apter was awarded a two-year Mellon Grant (with Jacques Lezra) in 2011-12, for a seminar on “The Problem of Translation.” In fall 2014, she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.

Apter’s books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013), and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, 2006). She has also published extensively in Third Text, e-flux, October, boundary 2, New Literary History, Littérature, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Translation Studies, Cabinet, The Global South, Grey Room, Boston Review, differences, and Public Culture, among others.