Cosponsor: Department of Global Labor and Work

Latin America’s “left turn” at the beginning of the twenty-first century was unprecedented in its scope and duration, producing 32 presidential victories by left-of-center parties or leaders in 11 different countries between 1998 and 2015. Despite notable achievements in reducing poverty and extreme inequalities, leftist parties found it difficult to “deepen” democracy by empowering popular majorities, and they suffered a series of agonizing political defeats between 2015 and 2019 that allowed conservative forces to reclaim their customary hold on state power. This project traces the different origins and trajectories in power of “populist” and “social democratic” currents within the Latin American left. Through a comparative analysis of several leftist cases, it also examines how their alternative conceptions of democracy carried the seeds of their own demise, setting the stage for new forms of political polarization in the region.

Santiago Anria is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Labor and Work at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is the author of When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective.

Speaker: Laura T. Murphy, Policy Advisor, Department of Homeland Security and Professor of Human Rights, Sheffield Hallam University

Laura Murphy will discuss the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the landmark forced labor legislation that prohibits goods made in the Uyghur Region of China from import into the United States, including the effects of the law after two years of implementation. She will discuss the methods researchers use to uncover forced labor in China and the critical importance of that work to government efforts to prevent forced labor-made goods from entering the US. She will also discuss the government’s collaborations with industry and civil society to effect meaningful change for workers and protect the rights of people globally.

Bio: Laura T. Murphy, Ph.D. is Policy Advisor to Under Secretary Robert Silvers in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Policy. Her role in the Office of Policy is to advise on forced labor, in particular on the implementation and enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. She is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. Her recent academic work focused on researching forced labor in the Uyghur Region of China and identifying risk of forced-labor-made goods in international supply chains. She has worked internationally on forms of forced labor and human trafficking, including in West Africa, India, the United States, and Canada. She is author of numerous academic books and articles on the issue of forced labor globally.

Introduced by faculty host, Magnus Fiskesjö (Anthropology).

Cosponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Contemporary Muslim Societies Program, Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies Program, the Department of Global Labor and Work (ILR), and the Global Labor Institute, Government, as well as the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

This year's Annual Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture is titled: From Research Assistants to Professors: Scholars from China as Experts on China, 1920-1960 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Professor Emeritus, History, University of Washington

This talk will look at the growth of China studies as an academic field in the US with attention to its changing demography. China Studies was tiny in the 1920s, with few colleges offering anything, and returned missionaries or their children the main teachers. Graduate students were often sent to Europe, where Sinological training was more advanced. World War II brought more American men into the field, but the Cold War had even greater impact as the US government decided not to send Chinese foreign students back to China and funded numerous research projects that allowed many to retrain as China experts. That gave them time to find academic jobs as US higher education gradually expanded. The growing presence of faculty members who had grown up in China, while never part of a strategic plan, is one reason that the US leaped ahead of Europe in Sinological studies by the 1960s.

Patricia Ebrey short bio:

Patricia Buckley Ebrey is professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington. Her scholarship has focused on the imperial period, especially the Song dynasty. Among her best-known books are The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (1993), The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (1996), and Emperor Huizong (2014). Her most recent book is a co-authored set of translations, Chinese Autobiographical Writing (2023).

Introduced by TJ Hinrichs (History) and Suyoung Son (Asian Studies).

Talk by Carole McGranahan (Anthropology, University of Colorado)

What does a day of ethnographic research look like? In this talk, I present one day, over the course of thirty years of research with the Tibetan community, sinking into what it feels like to be immersed, to notice, to ask, to listen. I move across field sites – Kathmandu, Toronto, New York – and among people, mostly Pala, Ama, and their families. This is about what it means to make home as a refugee, to learn ethnographically, and to commit to a community. It is an exercise in theoretical storytelling across place and over time about how research grounded in Kathmandu and stories of Tibet extends across continents and oceans to Himalayan North America.

Carole McGranahan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, USA, and a scholar of contemporary Tibet and the Himalayas. She is the author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (2007) and Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (2020). She is currently co-editing The Tibet Reader, a volume on Ethics and Ethnography, and finishing a book about theoretical storytelling.