Event featuring Naila Kabeer
- Talk: 4-5:30 p.m. (Sage Hall, B09)
- Reception: 6-8 p.m. (Statler)
- Register

About the Speaker:

Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of International Development. Naila is also a Faculty Associate at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute and on the governing board of the Atlantic Fellowship for Social and Economic Equity. She has done extensive advisory work with international agencies (World Bank, ADB, UNDP, UN Women), bilateral agencies (DFID, SIDA, CIDA, IDRC) and NGOs (Oxfam, Action Aid, BRAC, PRADAN and Nijera Kori). Her most recent projects were supported by ERSC-DIFD Funded Research on Poverty Alleviation: Gender and Labour Market dynamics in Bangladesh and West Bengal. She is on the editorial boards of Feminist Economics and Gender and Development and on the international advisory board of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies She is also a member of the Inequalities Advisory Group, Bosch Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University Institute for Global Health.

Supported By:

Polson Institute for Global Development, EQUAL Lab, Brooks School of Public Policy

Join the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ undergraduate global scholars for a showcase of their capstone presentations providing public commentary and perspectives on global democracy.

Undergraduate global scholars advocate for building democracy on campus and around the world. They have partnered with the Einaudi Center's democratic threats and resilience faculty fellow Kenneth Roberts and Lund Practitioner in Residence Thomas Garrett—expert researchers and practitioners on building democracy—to design their projects.

Join Einaudi Center and Brooks School researchers for three-minute speed talks and community conversation on our contemporary moment.

Speakers will jump off from interdisciplinary and international research, experiences, and world events to provide a fresh perspective on current U.S. politics and public policy. Together we'll look at challenges faced and solutions found in a variety of academic fields and places around the world—to help us think through how to address emerging issues at home.

The event features clusters of speed talks on related topics—including free speech, U.S. elections, and international aid—with time for Q&A and conversation on each topic.

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Faculty Speakers

Lessons from Latin America

Kenneth Roberts, Democratic Threats Fellow (LACS) | GovernmentGustavo Flores-Macías (LACS) | Government and Public PolicySantiago Anria (LACS) | Global Labor and Work

International Implications

Magnus Fiskesjö (EAP/SEAP/PACS) | AnthropologyBryn Rosenfeld (IES) | GovernmentWilliam Lodge II (SAP) | Health Equity and Public Policy

Domestic Consequences

Mabel Berezin, IES Director | SociologyGautam Hans | LawMoon Duchin | MathematicsEllen Lust, Einaudi Center Director | Government and Public Policy

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Sponsors

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, partnering with Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy's Governance and Local Development Institute and Data and Democracy Lab.

Find out how graduate and undergraduate students can get started at Einaudi.

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents “Walls-as-Media: Between Cheng (Wall-City) and Ping (Wall-Screen)"

Speaker: Jinying Li, Assistant Professor, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

Description:

As global networks promise boundless access, we are facing increasing layers of walls. From computer firewalls to China’s Great Firewall, from the Facebook wall to the virtual walls in virtual reality, digital media, in fact, are largely walled. The existence of these walls shatters the myth of what Manuel Castells has famously called “the space of flows,” and highlights the significant functions of walled enclosure in managing, controlling, and mediating information, knowledge, and experience. It problematizes the enlightenment ideals of transparency, depth, openness, and universal knowledge, and underlines walled mediation as the fundamental condition of modern experience. My talk proposes a theoretical framework to explore the meanings and functions of the wall in media history by studying its archeological formation as a media device as well as its genealogical development as a discursive metaphor. I first examine the media archeology of the wall as a material artifact, focusing on cheng 城 (wall-city) and ping 屏 (wall-screen) as two archetypal walls in Chinese media history. In their various renditions and configurations, both cheng and ping define the wall as an asymmetrical and contradictory structure, which is simultaneously a blocking barrier that encloses a territory and community as well as a displaying surface that expresses feelings and powers. This duality between a barrier and a surface further informs the genealogy of wall as a discursive formation, which I examine by comparing the development of the wall as a structure metaphor with that of the window metaphor in the competing conceptions of screen as a media system. I argue that the wall presents an alternative genealogy from the window, shifting from optical apparatus to spatial devices. This conceptual shift from the window to the wall, from optical projection to spatial construction, is also a move away from the perspective-centric conceptualization of modern media, pointing toward surface-oriented media configurations of environmental management, mobility control and socio-political demarcation.

Speaker Bio: Jinying Li is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she teaches media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. She co-edited two special issues on Chinese animation for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and a special issue on regional platforms for Asiascape: Digital Asia. Her first book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), explores the connection between the anime boom and global geekdom. She is currently competing her second book project, Walled Media and Mediating Walls. Jinying is also a filmmaker and has worked on animations, feature films, and documentaries. Two documentary TV series that she produced were broadcasted nationwide in China through Shanghai Media Group (SMG). She is one of the co-writers of animated feature film Big Fish and Begonia (Dayu Haitang, 2016). She also produced an experimental VR documentary 47km (2017) in collaboration with Chinese director Zhang Mengqi at Beijing Film Academy.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

JOHN W. NIXON ‘53 DISTINGUISHED POLICY FELLOWS PROGRAM

Marielena Hincapié, Esq.
Distinguished Immigration Fellow and Visiting Scholar
Cornell Immigration Law and Policy Program

Marielena Hincapié is a nationally respected leader, legal and political strategist, and a leading voice in the national immigration conversation. She was key in supporting youth leaders in creating and successfully implementing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). She cofounded the Protecting Immigrant Families (PIF) coalition to address children and families' access to safety net programs. She is writing a forthcoming book Becoming America: A Personal History of A Nation’s Immigration Wars (Flatiron Books).