Please join the Cornell University Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the South Asia Center at Syracuse University for the 2025 International Studies Summer Institute (ISSI)! ISSI is a professional development workshop for practicing and pre-service K-12 educators. This year we will explore the theme of global media literacy.

Participants will engage in sessions that explore both the challenges that new media technologies and practice have enabled globally, as well as how to assist students in the US to understand and analyze information from around the world. Scholars from Cornell University and Syracuse University will share their research and expertise from across different regions of the world, including Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Sessions will include a workshop that will introduce K -12 educators to the key principles and practices related to media literacy education from a global perspective, connecting it to questions of power structures, global flows of media, and democratic practices. Another session will focus on the role of artificial intelligence and cultural bias in social media content moderation in international contexts. This year’s ISSI will also feature presentations by staff from the Johnson Museum of Art and the Cornell University Library, sharing resources for teachers.

Speakers include:

Wunpini Mohammed, Assistant Professor of Comunication, Cornell Univesity

Srivi Ramasubramanian, Newhouse Professor and Endowed Chair, Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University

Hannah Toombs, Engaged Learning Librarian and Librarian for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Olin Library, Cornell University

Farhana Shahid, PhD Candidate, Information Science, Cornell University

Carol Hockett, Hintsa Family Manager of School and Family Programs, & Krystyna Piccorossi, Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in Pre-K–12 Museum Education, Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Brian Sengdala, PhD Candidate, Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University

EXTENDED deadline: 20

ISSI program schedule:

Morning

8:30 - Check-in & breakfast

9:00 - Welcome: Dr. Ellen Lust, Einaudi Center Director

9:15 - Hannah Toombs, PhD, Engaged Learning & LACS Librarian, Cornell University

10:00 - Dr. Srivi Ramasubramanian, Newhouse School, Syracuse University

11:00 - Breakout sessions with Code^Shift team

11:40 - Report out with Dr. Srivi Ramasubramanian

Afternoon

12:10 - Lunch offered to all participants

1:15 - Carol Hockett & Krystyna Piccorossi, Johnson Museum, Cornell University

2:00 - Dr. Wunpini Mohammed, Dept of Communication, Cornell University

3:05 - Farhana Shahid, PhD Cand, Information Science, Cornell University

3:50 - Brian Sengdala, PhD Cand, PMA, Cornell University

4:30 - Closing: Sarah Pattison, PhD, Einaudi’s Assoc Director of Academic Programs

(photo credit: Adam Cohn)

A talk hosted by the Society for Buddhist Studies.

Even after his demise in 2013, S. N. Goenka’s vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin continues to flourish as one of the most significant and influential meditation movements with a strong emphasis on non-sectarian, universal, and scientific Dhamma as an ideal way of life. However, Daniel Stuart’s recent biography – the only one available in English – challenges this emphasis, portraying Goenka’s life and teaching as coming out of clashing “identities” – between a global teacher of non-sectarian vipassana and a traditional guru of Burmese and Indian descent with cultic, conservative and devotional backgrounds and commitments. This talk critically examines these assertions and provides how best to understand a global meditation movement such as Goenka’s, especially when it comes to claims like secular, non-sectarian and universal practice in response to modern secular episteme. Furthermore, it argues that the failure to recognize religion as a discursive category and a lack of critical self-reflexivity in knowledge production inevitably leads to a complete misunderstanding of the movements, the Buddhist cultural logic, and its leaders in a typical Orientalist fashion.

About the Speaker:
Htet Min Lwin is a scholar of religion, social movement and revolution. Currently at York University in Toronto, he is writing a dissertation on the state's institutionalization of Buddhist monastics in Southeast Asia, for which he has been awarded the American Council of Learned Societies' 2024 Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies. He is also co-chair of Burma Studies Group under the Association for Asian Studies, and student director (2022-24) of EIR of the American Academy of Religion. He is a visiting scholar at Cornell's Southeast Asia Program for archival research during summer 2025.