Shop Talk: How to be interesting: nine keys for reader's attention

by Dmitry Bykov

Bio: I was born 12.20.1967, graduated Moscow University, spent two years in the Soviet Army, worked in most of post-soviet newspapers, published about 80 books, including 12 novels and 20 volumes of poetry. I was teaching in 5 schools and 7 universities in Moscow, New Jersey and California. All my activities are totally banned in Russia. Sounds strange but during this restless work I managed to marry 3 times (all my wives are friendly to each other and even to me) and to become father of two sons and one daughter. Children appeared to be even better than books.

This event is open to Cornell creative writing students only.

Russian dissident Dmitry Bykov is an Open Society University Network fellow and visiting critic based in the Einaudi Center’s Institute for European Studies (IES). One of Russia’s best-known public intellectuals, he is a novelist, poet, critic, satirist, and university professor.

Please join the Polish Program to celebrate the 155th Birthday of Maria Curie – the Polish scientist.

Expect a cake and a lecture “Curie Science 101” by Julia Thom-Levy, a Professor in the Department of Physics.

The exhibition about Maria Curie is available November 7 till December 7 on the street level of Klarman Hall.

The event is sponsored by Cornell Department of Romance Studies, the Embassy of Poland in Washington, DC & Cornell Institute for European Studies.

Contact person: Ewa Bachminska, Senior Lecturer of Polish (eb583@cornell.edu).

Perspectives in Global Development: Fall 2022 Seminar Series Speaker: Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić This lecture will explore the role of higher education in responding to conflict by opening up the questions of the responsibility of higher education institutions to educate the students, citizens, professionals and leaders of the future to act ethically in defense of the peace values. Since universities can be seen as microcosms of society the question arises whether the university programs prioritize the contribution to the public good and what their role and responsibility should be in educating young people to address some of the society's biggest problems. The lecture will discuss the potential of integrating peace pedagogies across the curriculum in university programs and it will use the example of International Research Project University Peace Hubs: Peace-building pedagogies in higher education (2018-2020), which aimed at illustrating and documenting good practices of teaching about peace and actively working for peace in places and contexts where politics, schooling and socialization processes remain or become challenging, deeply divided and polarized (Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, United Kingdom). The lecture will argue that the pedagogical experience of working directly with difference, controversial and sensitive issues, by integrating peace pedagogies and peace approaches to education in different discipline areas, can build student knowledge and values aimed for building skills of negotiation, intercultural sensitivity, deepened understanding of different world views and fostering attitudes of acceptance and respect. About the speaker Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić is an associate professor at the University of Sarajevo’s Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Philosophy. Her peacebuilding engagement began during the war in BiH with co-founding the organization Sezam (1994-95) and working on child war trauma, peace education and nonviolent communication with teachers and schools in conflict-affected communities. She is a 2003-04 Cornell University Hubert Humphrey Fellow Alumni. She holds an MPS in International Development and Education from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in English Language Pedagogy and Intercultural Education from Sarajevo University. Her teaching, writing and research interests focus on critical, peace and intercultural pedagogies in teacher education and language and culture didactics. She is the founder and the president of the Peace Education Hub, established in 2020 at the University of Sarajevo. She is currently a visiting associate professor at the University of Cornell where she will spend the 2022-23 academic year as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellow. Her research project “Teachers as Agents of Change: Education for Peace and Social Responsibility“ will enable her to collaborate closely with schools, teachers and teacher educators in Ithaca and the region, while also providing various lectures and seminars on her expertise, experience and research with students, professors and community members at Cornell in the 2022-23 academic year. About the seminar series The Perspectives in Global Development seminars are held Wednesdays from 12:25 – 1:15 p.m. eastern time during the semester. The series will be presented in a hybrid format with some speakers on campus and others appearing via Zoom. All seminars are shown in Warren 151. Students, faculty and the general public are welcome to attend. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development, the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the School of Integrative Plant Science as part of courses GDEV 4961, AEM 4961, NTRES 4961, GDEV 6960, AEM 6960, and NTRES 6960.

The European Studies Minor invites you to Pizza on the Patio, on Friday October 28 from 12:00 to 2:00 PM on the Uris Hall Terrace.

Bring any questions you have about the European Studies minor, upcoming courses, and summer opportunities. Be ready to try your hand at European trivia!

This event is open to undergraduate students.

With this workshop, we focus on gleaning: the widely practiced but long under-theorized right of the poor to take harvest remainders. More than simply the action of destitute people scavenging food, gleaning has been explicitly codified as entitlement and obligation: Leviticus not only entitles the poor to glean after the reapers, but obligates field owners to “not reap to the edge” of their fields, to leave for “the poor and the foreign.” Positing the right of the excluded in terms of the leftover, gleaning is fundamentally feudal: it premises aegis and common provision on the basis of changeless inequality; it formulates welfare in terms of an “excess” that must not be recirculated back into homogenous surplus value. Taking this feudal category as a lens onto our late-liberal world, this workshop asks how gleaning persists today. We invite economic and cultural anthropologists, legal scholars, theologians, historians and activists to discuss such well documented practices as scavenging, moonlighting, hacking, pilfering and coin-shaving with attention to that which is claimed as the leftover. Ultimately, we ask: how do people lay claim to aegis, social provision and their right to a commons today, through and despite liberal idioms of civic equality, lawfulness and smooth circulation?

Featuring papers by Amiel Bize, David Boarder Giles, Daniel Caner, Xenia Cherkaev, Catherine Fennell, Vinay Gidwani, Cristiano Lanzano, Peter Linebaugh, Tamta Khalvashi, Lori Khatchadourian, Gustav Peebles, and Bettina Stoetzer

As well as presentations on enclosure and access in publishing with Eileen Frandenburg Joy of Punctum Books and Ramsey Kanaan of PM Press.

Workshop schedule: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SbIMOAlnzK_qeAkpCHdmpU01U3eNI9jk/ed…

Events sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Anthropology Department, and co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of History, and the Institute for European Studies.

Xenia Cherkaev will speak about her forthcoming book Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice (Cornell UP 2023). The book tells a radically new story of how the Soviet system functioned and why it failed. Mediating between today’s popular narratives of “Soviet times” and the ownership categories of Soviet civil law, it shows the Soviet Union as an explicitly illiberal modern project, reliant in theory and fact on collectivist ethics. A historical ethnography, its narrative begins in the 2010s with former Leningrad residents’ stories of gleaning industrial scrap from worksites. Placing these stories in conversation with Soviet legal theories of property and with economic, political and social history, this book shows the Soviet Union as a “socialist household economy,” whose members were guaranteed “personal” rights to a commons of socialist property rather than private possessions. It traces the development of such “personal” rights though three historically significant turns – during the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s – and shows how the Soviet project unfolded in dialogue with contemporaneous neoliberal thought in one overarching debate about the possibility of a collectivist modern life.

Event co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of History, and the Institute for European Studies

Memorably born during debates about what to do with the King, the left/right divide was not the only opposition, nor indeed the most dominant, available at the time. The Terror, for instance, opposed the Mountain to the Plane or the Marais: the Mountain was composed of radical Jacobin deputies who dominated the Committee of Public Safety – most famously Robespierre – who sat across the highest benches of the Assembly, whereas the Plain or the Marsh sat on the lower benches, closer to the tribune. What consequences for our understanding of history and contemporary politics of seeing political dynamics not through a left/right divide but a centre/extremes one?

Speaker
Hugo Drochon, University of Nottingham

Register for virtual viewing.

This event is hosted by the Institute for European Studies. It is co-sponsored by French Studies, History, and Government.

How will we meet the most pressing demands of our time?

Join us for a two-day symposium that brings together the Cornell community and international partners to discuss the most urgent challenges around the world and how we can work together to address them.

Building on the first Global Grand Challenge, Migrations, symposium participants will help identify the next university-wide research, teaching, and engagement initiative to harness Cornell's global expertise.

The symposium, hosted by Global Cornell, will focus on five interdisciplinary themes, with panelists bringing their research and perspectives to bear:

Knowledge | Water | Health | Space | International Collaboration

Register today!

If you can't attend in person, please join us virtually:

Day 1: Wednesday, Nov. 16Day 2: Thursday, Nov. 17

Wednesday, November 16

Welcome: President Martha Pollack
Panel 1: Knowledge: What Counts, for Whom, and to What Ends?
4:30–6:00 ET, Klarman Hall, Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium

A panel of Cornell faculty and Global Hubs partners discuss innovations in higher education, social media, and legal frameworks; new forms of knowledge production and inequalities in access; and security, privacy, disinformation, and the role of knowledge in democracies.

Read about the panelists.

Remarks, Provost Michael Kotlikoff
Reception, 6:00 ET, Klarman Hall Atrium

Thursday, November 17

8:00–5:00 ET, Clark Hall, room 700 (7th floor)

Breakfast, 8:00 ET

Panel 2: Water: Worldwide Challenges and Approaches
9:00–10:30 ET

Faculty from Cornell and partner universities explore the most critical challenges related to changing global water conditions, including access to clean drinking water; water governance, norms, and customs; trade-offs between drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower; rising sea levels and water-dependent communities; and new solutions for wastewater, ocean plastics, and pollution.

Read about the panelists.

Panel 3: Health: An Integrated Global Perspective
11:00–12:30 ET

Faculty from Cornell and partner universities explore vital issues related to health, including equity, nutrition, mental health and well-being, disease, communication, new technologies, sociocultural norms, One Health, sustainable agriculture and ecosystems, elder care, and the business of medicine/health.

Read about the panelists.

Lunch, 12:30 ET

Panel 4: Space: In a Galaxy Not So Far Away
1:30–3:00 ET

Faculty from Cornell and partner universities explore urgent topics related to our global engagements with outer space, including intergovernmental collaboration and defining a new space policy; private space travel and exploration; historical lessons for colonization; new technologies, materials, and visualizations; intelligent life; resources and extraglobal markets; and access and inequalities.

Read about the panelists.

Panel 5: International Collaboration:< /b>Taking Action for Our Global Future
3:30–5:00 ET

In this final session, panelists discuss opportunities and challenges for creating truly collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships in an unequal world. Faculty from partner universities share ideas for collaborating on the four themes introduced earlier in the symposium, and participants explore the tension between respect for local cultures and universalisms implicated in scientific inquiry.

Read about the panelists.

Register in-person or virtually for one or all sessions!