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

Anti-democratic politics is a global phenomenon. Apart from the United States, countries in Europe, Latin America, Africa have seen the rise of populism, polarization, and illiberal politics. This event is an informal conversation among Einaudi Center faculty Mabel Berezin (IES), Ken Roberts (DTR and LACS), and Rachel Beatty Riedl (Einaudi Center director and DTR) and renowned Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol, AD White Professor-at-Large, on American democracy’s place among global challenges to democracy.

This event is hosted by the Institute for European Studies in collaboration with the Einaudi Center's Democratic Threats and Resilience research priority.

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. The author of twelve books, twelve edited collections, and more than seven dozen articles, Skocpol is recognized as one of the most cited and widely influential scholars in the modern social sciences. Her work has contributed to the study of comparative politics, American politics, comparative and historical sociology, U.S. history, and the study of public policy. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. Skocpol edited Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) and co-edited the influential Social Science Research Council collection Bringing the State Back In (1985). Since the 1990s, Skocpol’s research has focused on US politics in historical and comparative perspective. Her Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992), won five scholarly awards. Her most recent book is Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (edited with Caroline Tervo, 2020). Skocpol is an elected member of all three major U.S. interdisciplinary honor societies: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, she co-founded, and currently directs, the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), whose mission is to improve public policy and strengthen democracy by encouraging nonpartisan public engagement by university-based scholars. SSN has grown into a national organization of over 900 scholars from 200+ universities, focused on bringing evidenced-based policy research to the public discourse.

A Conference in Honor of Leslie A. Adelson,
Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies (Cornell University)

The conference is generously co-sponsored by Cornell University Departments of Comparative Literature, History of Art, Literatures in English, Near Eastern Studies, Philosophy, and the Africana Studies and Research Center; the Jewish Studies Program; the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program; the Institute for German Cultural Studies; the Institute for Comparative Modernities; the Institute for European Studies; the Society for the Humanities; the Max Kade Foundation, Heinrich & Alice Schneider Fund, and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

This event is free and open to the public.

PROGRAM

Friday, April 12

2:00 Welcome and Introduction

2:30-3:30 Session 1
Anna Maree Parkinson (Northwestern University)
Hubris and Hope: Minor Details

Yasemin Yildiz (University of California, Los Angeles)
The German Widow Next Door: A Recurrent Figure of Transmission in Turkish-German Literature

MODERATOR: Patrizia McBride (Cornell University)

3:30-4:00 Coffee Break

4:00-5:30 Keynote Lecture: Fatima El-Tayeb (Yale University/Intersectional Black European Studies Project/Race, Migration, and Coloniality in Europe working group)
Transformative Archives and the Intersectional Black European Studies Project

MODERATOR: Paul Fleming (Cornell University)

Event website: https://events.cornell.edu/event/hope-possibility-german-studies-and-th…

5:30-6:30 Reception

Saturday, April 13

11:00-12:00 Session 2
Bettina Brandt (Pennsylvania State University)
From Vienna to Boston: Psychoanalytic Rescue Networks (1938)

Ela Gezen (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Aras Ören, the Archive of Migration and Traditions of Tomorrow

MODERATOR: Anette Schwarz (Cornell University)

1:30-2:30 Session 3
John Namjun Kim (University of California, Riverside)
Adelson's Riddle of Referentiality: Figures of “Nothingness” in Yôko Tawada

Dennis Wegner (Cornell University)
To Burst on Stage: Trans-Formations in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Dramatic Works

MODERATOR: Mari Jarris (Cornell University)

2:30-3:30 Session 4
Esther Kondo Heller (Harvard University)
In Black Music – The Poetry of Raja Lubinetzki

B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
The Radiant Reader and an Illuminated Alphabet

MODERATOR: Erik Born (Cornell University)

3:30-4:00 Coffee Break

4:00-5:30 Round Table Conversation: Interdisciplinary German Studies at Cornell
Gerard Aching (Africana Studies and Research Center, Romance Studies)
Esra Akcan (Department of Architecture, Institute for Comparative Modernities)
Brett de Bary (Asian Studies, Comparative Literature)
Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature, Literatures in English, Institute for Comparative Modernities)
Annette Richards (Music, Graduate Field of German Studies)
David Yearsley (Music, Advisory Board, Cornell University Kluge Archive)

MODERATOR: Peter Gilgen (Institute for German Cultural Studies, German Studies, Comparative Literature)

5:30 Concluding Remarks