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Long absent from global health policy, improving the material quality of housing as a means of disease control is making its way back on the malaria research agenda—but what version of the home becomes articulated by those measures remains contested. To provide orientation to those debates, we offer an account of how the home has historically conjugated malaria control, from international eradication programs to latter-day approaches designed to correct the shortcomings of previous domestic interventions. We suggest how, despite many creative efforts to enfold the lived realities and material conditions of local homes into malaria control, these interventions have struggled to fully capture the affective, fiscal, and material processes through which domestic comfort is pursued and sustained over time.

Attention to construction and brickworks offers an alternative vision for the mosquito-proof home, one that, we believe, offers a platform from which to reconnect malaria control to what I describe as a ‘post-growth’ mode of development. The most used building material in the world, bricks are cheap, durable, modular, low-maintenance, energy-efficient, and have great potential for recycling and reuse. Those properties present an exciting opportunity for mosquito-borne disease control—a field dominated by commodity-based solutions designed at a distance from their situations they are ultimately deployed at scale. Designed with both human and mosquito vitalities in mind, tethered to a stepwise process of construction, brickworks enhance protective affordances of domestic space working precisely interim situations and dynamics socio-material circumstances that have historically been ignored by malaria control programs and their preoccupation with discrete, sealed spaces. More than a vector control tool, transforming the humble brick can help rearticulate aspirations for social progress within an enterprise circumscribed by biosecurity anxieties and humanitarian commitments, providing the foundations for more expansive imaginary for healthy and climate-resilient living.

Thursday, April 11, 2024, Uris Hall, G-08 Speaker: Joseph Kimani, Executive Director, Slum Dweller International (SDI - Kenya)

On May 3-4, 2024, the Institute for African Development, in collaboration with the Polson Institute for Global Development and the Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University, will host a symposium on Imagining Just Environmental and Climate Futures in Africa.

Organized by the Institute for African Development, Polson Institute for Global Development, and the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Governments engage in transnational repression when they reach across borders to silence dissidents living abroad. Tactics for transnational repression include assassinations, abductions, threats, and direct action against dissidents’ families and friends living within the repressive government’s territory.

This panel will focus on this global phenomenon and its local consequences for students and faculty members at Cornell, U.S. campuses more broadly, and other communities around the world. It will include the voices of dissidents affected by transnational repression as well as scholars and experts working in the field.

This is a panel discussion following the April 24 documentary In Search of My Sister screening. The film chronicles Rushan Abbas's relentless pursuit of truth and justice.

About the Panelists
Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Division, specializes in countries of the former Soviet Union. Previously, Denber directed Human Rights Watch's Moscow office and did field research and advocacy in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. She has authored reports on various human rights issues throughout the region. Denber earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from Rutgers University and a master's in political science from Columbia University, where she studied at the Harriman Institute. She speaks Russian and French.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is a prominent scholar of Iranian and Middle Eastern history. Her research addresses issues of national and cultural formation and gender concerns in Iran, as well as historical relations between the U.S., Iran, and the Islamic world. She is the author of highly influential works, including Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946, which analyzed land and border disputes between Iran and its neighboring countries. These debates were pivotal to national development and cultural production and have significantly informed the territorial disputes in the region today. Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran, a wide-ranging study of the politics of health, reproduction and maternalism in Iran from the mid-19th century to the modern-day Islamic Republic.

Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs. Rushan Abbas’s activism started in the mid-1980s as a student at Xinjiang University, co-organizing pro-democracy demonstrations in Urumchi in 1985 and 1988. Since she arrived in the United States in 1989, Ms. Abbas has been an ardent campaigner for the human rights of the Uyghur people. Ms. Abbas is the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) and became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism for Uyghurs following her sister’s detainment by the Chinese government in 2018. Ms. Abbas has spearheaded numerous campaigns, including the “One Voice One Step” movement, which culminated in a simultaneous demonstration in 14 countries and 18 cities on March 15, 2018, to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps.

Sean Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies (IDS) MA program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He received his MA in Visual Anthropology (2001) and his PhD in Cultural Anthropology (2003) from the University of Southern California. While completing his Ph.D. and following graduation, he worked for 7 years for the United States Agency for International Development in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs in the five Central Asian Republics. He also taught for two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Europe, Eurasian, and Russian Studies before coming to the Elliott School in 2008. Academically, he has written extensively on the Uyghur people of China and Central Asia, about whom he wrote his dissertation, and his 2020 book The War on the Uyghurs (Princeton University Press).

About the Moderator
Rebecca Slayton, Director of the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, is an associate professor of science and technology studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching examine the relationships among risk, governance, and expertise, focusing on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (MIT Press, 2013), shows how the rise of a new field of expertise in computing reshaped public policies and perceptions about the risks of missile defense in the United States. Her second book project, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair. Slayton is also working on a third project that examines tensions intrinsic to creating a “smart” electrical power grid—i.e., a more sustainable, reliable, and secure grid.

Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

The literary event, hosted by the Institute for African Development's Humphrey Fellowship Program at Cornell and Okere City, is set to unite people from across the globe to contemplate the enduring legacy and influence of Okot p'Bitek, a towering figure in 20th-century African literature. Renowned for his seminal works "Song of Ocol" and "Song of Lawino," which have been translated into over 30 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, p'Bitek's writings encapsulate a poignant, poetic exchange between Lawino, a rural champion of African traditions, and her husband Ocol, who grapples with cultural estrangement and Western influence. Juliane Okot Bitek, daughter of the late author and a distinguished professor of creative writing at Queen's University, Canada, will deliver the keynote address. Okot p'Bitek's critical exploration of African culture, politics, and colonialism through his teaching, research, and prolific writing remains an enduring testament to his scholarly contributions.

This event is sponsored by Cornell University’s Institute for African Development with funds from the US Department of Education UISFL Program.

Register to watch the web version of the event here:

https://cornell.zoom.us/j/96624897395?pwd=QSszOVU3V0E3bWcxVWNaeTRyTlZtZ…