Extractivism haunts the planet and leaves in its path the pain and tears of people who, ironically, suffer the blessing of mineral wealth. Extractivism produces invaded territories, dispossessed communities, persecuted leaders, devastated forests, annihilated biodiversity, desiccated lagoons, poisoned rivers, undrinkable waters, and unbreathable air. Ecuador, the country with the greatest biological diversity on the planet per square meter, has also been devastated by extractivism. In this planetary penumbra, the Rights of Pacha Mama or Rights of Nature in the Andes and in Ecuador are a spark that can be fanned. Pushed by indigenous peoples, ecologists, and intellectuals, in 2008 the Constituent Assembly recognized the Pacha Mama or Mother Nature as the holder of rights, and many historic fights have followed. In this talk Yaku Pérez Guartambel will present insights from his new publication Climate Emergency and the Ecology of Hope.

Presented in Spanish with English interpretation

Yaku Pérez Guartambel is a Kichwa Kañari leader, lawyer, teacher, and author of nine books. He has led historic legal proceedings in defense of the rights of nature in the Andes and the Amazon. For this work, he was detained six times and has also been the target of kidnappings and an attempted murder. He has dedicated thirty years to ecosocial fight in Ecuador for indigenous communities’ access to water, including as president of the Confederation of Kichwa Peoples of Ecuador (ECUARUNARI) and as the leader of a social movement that impeded water privatization in Ecuador. As a political leader, he has been elected the Prefect of Azuay Province and was a presidential candidate in Ecuador in 2021 and 2023 with a post-extractivist agenda focusing on the defense of water.

North American Practices of Forced Displacement, Detention, and Humanitarian Oversight in the 1940s

Nation states abide by international humanitarian law unevenly. They misrepresent their internal operations and deceive monitoring agencies. Yet, they often feel bound to give international agents the opportunity to observe and report, thus facilitating the endeavors they evade. During the Second World War, states notoriously evaded international law to perpetrate atrocities. Even the United States and Canada, whose mistreatment of civilians never generated international alarm, obscured their domestic undertakings from an international gaze. Nevertheless, humanitarian actors gained remarkable access to sites of mass internment and displaced people across the globe. In the decades since, their reports have served as fraught documentation for survivor communities, reflecting the biases of their creators yet capturing rare moments of traumatic pasts.

This presentation investigates the engagement of the United States and Canada with international humanitarian oversight of detention during the 1940s and its legacy within survivor communities, drawing from international, national, and community archives.

Delving into one case study, this presentation examines the creation and subsequent recontextualization of humanitarian photography in survivor communities. In doing so, it reveals the making of what Cathy Schlund-Vials calls, in a different case of twentieth-century displacement, a “transnational set of amnesiac politics.” In tracking the journey of these images, this paper situates North American wartime detention within the politics of liberal internationalism and considers what their remembering and forgetting can tell us more broadly about the commemoration and representation of histories of forced displacement.

About the Speaker
Kaitlin Findlay is a doctoral student in the Cornell History Department. Her research examines forced displacement, humanitarianism, liberal internationalism, and memory in the mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Kaitlin completed her BA in History (Honours) at McGill University and her MA Thesis at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has over seven years of experience in community-engaged and public history, including with the award-winning Landscapes of Injustice project. She has published with McGill-Queen’s University Press and The Canadian Historical Review.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Hosted by the Gender and the Security Sector Lab, the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies, and the Reppy Peace and Conflict Studies Program, The Transition Home: Key Challenges for African UN Peacekeepers Upon Return is a unique collaborative effort, bringing together qualitative and quantitative evidence from surveys and interviews in Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Zambia.

In recent years, global shifts in peacekeeping contributions have led to African countries being some of the largest contributors of peacekeeping. Yet, many of the countries lack resources and have limited funding for their state security forces. On one hand, deployment to peacekeeping missions helps provide the country’s security forces with training, new experience, and funds. On the other hand, there is less information about the challenges that these peacekeepers face upon return.

This event is based on a policy brief that explores four potential challenges for African peacekeepers after they return from operations: relationship, psycho-social, economic, and career challenges. The report finds that the main challenges for returned peacekeepers upon their return appear to be relationship and financial. Women were more likely to experience financial challenges and social stigma whereas men had more physical and mental health problems. Psychosocial, mental health, and physical problems were more prevalent in the military than the police. The report ends with a series of policy recommendations. The policy brief will be available here after the event.

Register to attend this virtual event.

About the Panelists

Dr. Sabrina Karim is an Associate Professor in the department of Government. Her research focuses on conflict and peace processes, particularly state building in the aftermath of civil war. Specifically, she studies international involvement in security assistance to post-conflict states, gender reforms in peacekeeping and domestic security sectors, and the relationship between gender and violence. She directs the Gender and the Security Sector Lab.
Dr Maggie Dwyer is a Senior Lecturer in African Studies and International Development in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Security Research within the University of Edinburgh and is also a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
T. Debey Sayndee is Professor / Director, Kofi Annan Institute for Conflict Transformation (KAICT), University of Liberia. He has worked for many years on the complex nexuses of conflicts in West Africa, particularly Liberia and Sierra Leone. He has also served as a consultant for the UN, the University of Wyoming, and Women’s Campaign International on peace, security, and development issues. He is a Public Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer, Radio Broadcaster, and Mediator. He has contributed to several publications, most recently, Incomplete DDRR: A Prescription for Prolonged Fragility in Liberia; Post-War SSR in Liberia; and co-published: African Truth Commissions; and Social Mobilization and the Ebola Virus Disease in Liberia.
Addison Barton is a third-year PhD student and two-time Reppy Fellow whose research focuses on practices of humanitarian restraint in armed conflict. Host
Cornell University’s Gender and the Security Sector Lab
University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies
Reppy Peace and Conflict Studies Program

Photo credit: Clair MacDougall.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research in any field or teaching in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only. The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months.

Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called "green border" between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa are lured by government propaganda promising easy passage to the European Union. Unable to cross into Europe and unable to turn back, they find themselves trapped in a rapidly escalating geopolitical stand-off. An unflinching depiction of the migrant crisis captured in stark black-and-white, this riveting film explores the intractable issue from multiple perspectives: a Syrian family fleeing ISIS caught between cruel border guards in both countries; young guards instructed to brutalize and reject the migrants; and activists who aid the refugees at great personal risk.

Thirty years after Europa Europa, three-time Oscar¨ nominee Agnieszka Holland brings a masterful eye for realism and deep compassion to this blistering critique of a humanitarian calamity that continues to unfold. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Green Border is a poignant and essential work of cinema that opens our eyes and speaks to the heart, challenging viewers to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people every day.

Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland will join for a Zoom Q&A with Professor Ewa Bachminska, Senior Lecturer of Polish Language in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell, following the screening on Sunday, September 15, 2024 at noon.

Green Border screens as part of our "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

"Türkiye’s Christian Sites: Seven Churches of Revelation and Holy Sites, House of Virgin Mary, Early Christian Settlements and pilgrimage" lecture with Pelin Kumbet Cagman, visiting scholar at Cornell University.

Part of the "Exploring Turkish Language and Culture" lecture series.

Dr. Pelin Kumbet is currently a visiting researcher in the department of English and a Turkish language instructor at Language Resource Center at Cornell University. She is an Associate Professor in the department of Western Languages and Literatures at Kocaeli University, Turkiye. During her Ph.D. studies at Hacettepe University, Turkiye, she conducted her doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation discusses the cruciality of enacting dynamic, evolving, and living posthuman(ist) ethics, which embodies the acknowledgment of inherent and intrinsic values of all beings through different posthuman body representations, which was published as a book titled as Critical Posthumanism: Cloned, Toxic and Cyborg Bodies in Fiction. Dr. Kumbet’s general research interests include posthuman theory and ethics, posthuman bodies, transhumanism, medical and environmental humanities, ecocriticism in particular, the intersections between posthumanism, environmental humanities, gender issues, and science fiction. Her recent publications are “Toxic Agentic Legacy in Turkish Waters: From Sacrosanct Bodies to Toxic Bodies of Water,” “Invisible Agencies: Toxic Repercussions of Chernobyl and Bhopal,” “A Posthuman Quest for Establishing Self-Image Through Nature in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves” and “Reclaiming the ethno-divided land, identity and legacy in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees.” She has also been teaching Turkish as second language and has been working on the intersections between Blue humanities, Turkish waters and trauma, eco-psychology and displacement.

Photo credit: Wilhelm Salzenberg (* 20. Januar 1803 in Münster; † 23. Oktober 1887 in Vernex-Montreux, Schweiz)Edited by Verlag von Ernst & Korn Berlin, 1854, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

CANCELED: This seminar will be rescheduled for the spring semester.

Technology Ecosystem to Support Precision Nutrition and Health

Bio: Dr. Mehta is a physician with training and expertise in nutrition, epidemiology, infectious disease, and diagnostics. He is currently the Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. He is also the Founding Director of the Cornell Center for Precision Nutrition and Health and co-director of the NIH-funded Center for Point of Care Diagnostics for Nutrition, Infection, and Cancer (U54) as part of the POCTRN+ network. Dr. Mehta is the program director of the NIH-supported training program (T32) on artificial intelligence and precision nutrition. He also co-leads the Research Coordinating Center for the NIH’s Nutrition for Precision Health Initiative (U24), and directs the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell. The central theme of his research is the interplay between nutrition and disease, including facilitating field-friendly assessment for both and elucidating how nutrition can be used as a modifiable risk factor to improve health and associated outcomes, often in the context of pregnancy and early childhood. This is achieved through a combination of active surveillance programs, the invention of point-of-care diagnostics, and randomized controlled trials primarily in India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

Dr. Mehta received his medical degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India and followed it up with doctoral degree in Epidemiology and Nutrition from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including a NIH technology accelerator challenge prize for innovative global health diagnostics, the Norman Kretchmer memorial award for nutrition and development, the Rainer Gross Prize for innovations in nutrition and health, and the SUNY Chancellor award for scholarship and creative activities.

The IAD seminar series examines a broad range of critical concerns in contemporary Africa including food production, human resource development, migration, urbanization, environmental resource management, economic growth, and policy guidance. The weekly presentations are made by invited specialists.

Pierre Thiam is a chef, author, and social activist best known for bringing West African cuisine to the global fine dining world. He is the Executive Chef of the award-winning restaurant Nok by Alara in Lagos, Nigeria and the Signature Chef of the five-star Pullman Hotel in Dakar, Senegal. He is also the executive chef and co-owner of Teranga, a fast-casual food chain from New York City. His company Yolélé Foods advocates for smallholder farmers in the Sahel by opening new markets for crops grown in Africa; its signature product, Yolélé Fonio, is found in Whole Foods, Amazon, and other retailers across America.