Keynote Speaker: Nanjala Nyabola
Cornell Students: Critical Reflections

Nanjala Nyabola, author of Travelling While Black-Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move, will be in conversation with professors Rachel Beatty Riedl, Kim Yi Dionne, and postdoc Eleanor Paynter.

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer, political analyst, and activist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Nyabola writes extensively about African society and politics, technology, international law, and feminism for academic and non-academic publications. Her first book, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya (Zed Books, 2018), was described as "a must-read for all researchers and journalists writing about Kenya today." Nyabola's ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding the current global online era, reframing digital democracy from the African perspective.

Nyabola’s latest book, the critically acclaimed Travelling While Black; Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move, (available electronically from the Cornell Library) is a stark reminder that the world needs to be seen through the lens of others. Her work has featured in publications including African Arguments, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy (magazine), The Guardian, New African, The New Humanitarian, The New Inquiry, New Internationalist, and World Policy Journal.

Nyabola holds a BA in African studies and political science from the University of Birmingham, an MSc in forced migration and an MSc in African studies from the University of Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Following the dialogue, students will present select prose, poems, and visual art published as part of Global Cornell's Race and Racism Across Borders, a call that asked students and alumni to reflect on the new knowledge gained about racial dynamics when they crossed a literal or figurative border.

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The foreclosure of asylum in the European Union and the militarization of the EU borders have resulted in EU pushbacks of refugees and migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia to European countries that do not belong to the EU, such as Bosnia. This panel critically examines the foreclosure of asylum at the EU/Bosnia border as a case study of the global apartheid regime that produces humanitarian crises while denying refugees mobility and safety. What might accountability for the damages wrought by global apartheid look like? And what kinds of futures can we imagine and fight for?

Panelists:

Nidžara Ahmetašević is an independent scholar, journalist, and activist and the author of many articles, essays, and reports, including The Dark Side of Europeanisation: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Border Regime and People on the Move in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2018: Stuck in the corridors to the EU.

Catherine L. Besteman is the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and the author of four books, including Militarized Global Apartheid.

Azra Hromadžić is an O’Hanley Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University and the author of Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Moderated by Saida Hodžić, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.

This panel is organized as part of the Institute for European Studies’ Migration Series for its AY 2020-21 theme Repair and Reparations and sponsored by the Migrations Forum. It is co-sponsored by the American Studies Program, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Near Eastern Studies, the Society for the Humanities, and the South Asia Program. You may find information about past events and video recordings at https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/institute-european-studies/events/….