Cornell World Languages Day is a free annual event highlighting the importance of language learning, cultural awareness, and global literacy. WLD invites middle and high school students from the greater community to campus, showcasing the opportunities for language learning and international studies at Cornell.

This in-person event is open to middle and high school aged students. You do not need to be affiliated with Cornell to participate.

REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED! Visit https://lrc.cornell.edu/wld to register.

World Languages Day is an interdepartmental event, organized by the LRC and Upward Bound and sponsored by many on- and off-campus units. Generous support is provided by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, the College of Arts & Sciences, and the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement.

Take your learning to the next level with minors from the Einaudi Center for International Studies and our programs. In this session, you'll learn about international minors that can help you expand your global knowledge. View a full list of minors.

Caribbean Studies
The Caribbean Studies minor will equip you to better understand the sociocultural, economic, and political forces—indigenous dispossession, slavery, capitalism—that shape the region and how those forces resonate globally.

European Studies
Explore Europe’s past, present, and future and demonstrate a knowledge of European languages, culture, politics, and international relations.

International Relations
Study global governance, politics, economics, history, languages, and cultures across national boundaries.

Migration Studies
Learn about how human migration and migrant experiences shape our world on the move.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu to learn more.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Lecture

Aluminum’s Past, Contemporary Coloniality and Porter Labor in Ghana

Reading aluminum’s infrastructural history alongside Accra’s contemporary market porters, this talk argues that women porters’ embodied labor extends and exposes the same extractive logics, revealing enduring coloniality within Ghana’s built and human infrastructures. Centering the everyday use of aluminum pans and the scientific history of aluminum, Bowles traces how an ordinary object mediates power relationships between traders and the state, facilitate modes of protection and mutuality among workers, and animates racial capitalism and uneven accumulation in a contemporary African city. In addition, this work explores intimacy and fugitivity as ethnographic methods that uncover porter work as a prototype of the global gig economy and the improvisational strategies of precarious workers.

Laurian Bowles is Vann Professor of Racial Justice; Associate Professor & Chair in the Department of Anthropology; and Director of the Davidson in Ghana Program at Davidson College.

Bio:

I am a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches, writes and teaches about social mobility and the visual economies of women’s labor in Ghana and the African Diaspora. My research attends to the way women’s activism take shape through ordinary forms of mobilization and refusals in public and intimate spaces. I am especially interested in the haptic nature of photographs, the circulation of pictures as material artifacts, and the way race, class, and queerness are formed through visual storytelling.

I have published articles in Feminist Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, The Journal of African History and African Arts.

My book, Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness and Modernity in Accra (Penn Press, 2025) draws on a decade of fieldwork with women porters in Ghana to illustrates how antiblackness, queer sexual politics, and feminized labor inform state and social sensibilities about what constitutes progress and modernity in Accra.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for African Development; the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program; the Africana Studies and Research Center; and the Department of Communication. Thank you!

Medicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world.

Stacey Langwick is a cultural and medical anthropologist. At Cornell, Professor Langwick teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the anthropology of medicine, the body, postcolonial science, toxicity, critical plant studies and Africa. Her scholarship is broadly concerned with the politics of knowledge, questions of evidence, and possibilities of care. Most recently, she has taken up these themes through a range of interlocking issues including the science of traditional medicine in Africa, the afterlives of botanical colonization, the problem of toxicity, the politics of intellectual property, questions of bodily and territorial sovereignty, the work of chronicity and the rise chronic disease, and the possibilities of gardens as sites of epistemological and ontological experimentation.

The world needs infrastructure more acutely than ever. A cumulative $106 trillion in investments is imperative to meet global infrastructure requirements through 2040, not only for traditional assets such as roads, ports, bridges, and power grids but also for the next generation of those assets—and an emerging intersection of systems and facilities across verticals, including data centers, charging stations, fiber-optic networks, and more. This unprecedented call for capital can no longer be answered by the public sector alone.

Private capital is meeting the moment. In 2025, global infrastructure fundraising reached a record of nearly $200 billion, surpassing the previous high of $180 billion in 2022. Limited partners (LPs) continue to name infrastructure as the asset class they most want to increase their allocations to (increasingly for both diversification and performance) and are also displaying a willingness to move up the risk curve. General partners (GPs) are doing larger, more complex deals, with notably large funds (several holding $5 billion or more of committed capital) gaining share as the industry matures. - Mckinsey & Co

Muna B. Ndulo, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International & Comparative Law; Elizabeth and Arthur Reich Director, Leo and Arvilla Berger International Legal Studies Program, Cornell LAw School. His focus is in the fields of constitution making, governance and institution building, international criminal law, African legal systems, human rights, and international law and foreign direct investments.