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Institute for African Development

Webinar on Economic, Social and Political Impact of COVID-19 on Africa

Covid-19
July 14, 2020

IAD Webinar on COVID

COVID-19 has brought untold havoc to every continent. Bread-basket regions are under quarantine, supply chains have slowed or vanished altogether, and the health infrastructures in many countries have buckled under the strain. This webinar focuses on the pandemic’s impact on the African continent. Given relative strengths and weaknesses, African countries have responded in myriad ways.

 

Panelists are experts actively engaged in working on the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa or on zoonotic avian influenza (bird flu H5N1) epidemics in Africa and Asia: Vusi Gumede, PhD, Professor, University of South Africa, Member, Presidential Economic Advisory Council, South Africa; Tolbert Nyenswah, MPH, Senior Research Associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, former Deputy Minister of Health for Disease Surveillance and Epidemic Control, Liberia; Jarra Jagne, DVM, Senior Extension Associate, Department of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences, Cornell; and T. Debey Sayndee, PhD, Professor and Director, Peace & Conflict Studies - Kofi Annan Institute for Conflict Transformation, University of Liberia.

Moderator: Muna Ndulo, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International & Comparative Law, Cornell Law School, and Director, Institute for African Development.

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Coronavirus: How Much Does Your Boss Need to Know about You?

Ifeoma Ajunwa ILR
June 30, 2020

"I'm not a privacy absolutist," says Ifeoma Ajunwa, IAD faculty member and assistant employment law professor at Cornell University in the US. "But we shouldn't allow pandemics to become pretexts."

The months of working from home has prompted a surge in firms buying software to monitor our productivity remotely, she says. These tools can track key strokes made on a laptop, activate webcams and take screenshots.

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Pandemic: What International Studies Tells Us

June 25, 2020

12:00 pm

Students: Join Einaudi Center regional experts for this #SummerPassport webinar--for all undergraduate and graduate students interested in global thinking and action.

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus may be the most significant world event of our century. It's a pandemic--a Greek word that means "all people." Around the world, all of us are experiencing this shared breakdown of public health, economics, and international cooperation.

Experts representing Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America will discuss the big questions facing our major world regions during this global crisis. What are reforms, new ways of thinking, and new challenges that will emerge out of the pandemic?

Moderator:

Rachel Beatty Riedl, Director, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Panelists:

Esra Akcan, 2019-2020 Frieda Miller Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; Associate Professor, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, Department of Architecture, Cornell University; Member, Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities.
Marcelo Borges, Professor of History; Boyd Lee Spahr Chair in the History of the Americas at Dickinson College, and Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes.
Expedit Ologou, Founder, Civic Academy for Africa’s Future, and Director of Politics and Governance Programs at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Benin.
Jenny Goldstein, Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University, an Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Faculty Fellow, and a core faculty member of Cornell's Southeast Asian Studies Program at Cornell University.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes.

Register now!

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

East Asia Program

Southeast Asia Program

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Institute for African Development

Institute for European Studies

South Asia Program

Faculty Conversation: Research in the Time of Coronavirus

June 4, 2020

12:00 pm

Across the world, our lives have been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. All fields of study are impacted, as our medical, agricultural, economic, political, and cultural systems are challenged. The crisis reinforces the need to think differently and boldly about the world today and the world ahead.

The Einaudi Center invites all Cornell faculty to come together for a conversation about ways forward. Join us to share reflections and identify pathways for collaborative projects and new research agendas.

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Each participant will be asked to share brief reflections on three interrelated questions:
1. How has the coronavirus affected your field and/or your research?
2. What are the most urgent questions that you see arising out of this moment?
3. What are the next-generation questions you imagine or the rethinking you see potentially occurring in the next phase, as we move beyond the pandemic?

Particularly when we cannot travel to planned conferences, seminars, research sites, our intellectual community can sustain us and catalyze new individual and collaborative projects with international partners virtually.

We encourage all participants to think about what parts of these questions they would like to take forward and what infrastructure or collaborators would be useful to put together a team with synergistic capacities. Contributions may be worked up into a series of short essays for the Einaudi website, a collective review for publication, and/or grant applications and seed projects.

Moderator: Rachel Beatty Riedl, Director, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Please send any questions or suggestions in advance of the conversation to rbeattyriedl@cornell.edu.

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

East Asia Program

Southeast Asia Program

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Institute for African Development

Institute for European Studies

South Asia Program

People

More than 40 IAD-affiliated faculty from across Cornell conduct research and teach courses related to African development, and more than 300 IAD graduate fellows now work in government, NGOs, academic institutions, and international organizations on the African continent—a testament to the institute's diverse constituency and impact.

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