Join the Cornell University Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the South Asia Center at Syracuse University for the 2024 International Studies Summer Institute (ISSI)! This year, we will explore plant and animal migration around the world and at home. ISSI is a professional development workshop for practicing and pre-service K–12 educators.

Participants will explore the patterns and causes of plant and animal migration in a global context, as well as how they affect and are affected by human society. Scholars from Cornell University and Syracuse University will share their research and expertise from across different regions of the world, including Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Object-based learning will be a specific focus. Sessions will include an introduction to the Einaudi Center’s culture kits and how they can support hands-on learning about plant and animal migration in different countries. Culture kits are a collection of cultural artifacts from around the world, tailored for use in K-12 classrooms. We will also feature an overview of Latin American and East Asian artwork on these topics at the Johnson Museum of Art and an introduction to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird kits.

Who Can Participate

We welcome practicing and pre-service K–12 educators of all subjects and grade levels who work in New York State. While this year's institute will have more of a scientific focus than in past years, we believe this year’s theme will benefit educators of all subject areas, especially in developing cross-disciplinary, project-based activities with a global focus.

Benefits

As a participant, you will...

gain tools and knowledge to apply in your classroom around issues of plant and animal migration internationally and in our backyards.

connect issues affecting yourself and your students here in the U.S. with other parts of the world.

“recharge” intellectual batteries and deepen your own understanding and appreciation for plant and animal migration.

have the option to complete a lesson plan for additional CTLE hours that incorporates content from the workshop, with the support of our outreach staff.

receive a free eBird kit from the Lab of Ornithology, targeted for the grade band of choice ($70-$110 value).

Enrollment is open now!

Questions? Contact outreach coordinator Sarah Plotkin.

International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell) in partnership with the Language Resource Center.

Register on CampusGroups to receive a reminder. Registration is not required.

The Latina/o Studies Program Fridays with Faculty luncheon seminar offers an opportunity for Latina/o and non-Latina/o students of all levels and disciplines to meet faculty and administrators from across the university for informal conversation about their current research/work in progress. All are welcome!

Fridays at 12 noon @ 429 Rockefeller Hall

September 20 TBD

September 27
Derek Chang
Associate Professor
Department of History/Asian American Studies
College of Arts and Sciences

October 25
Elizabeth Jonas, MSW
International Student Community Liaison Therapist, CAPS
Cross Campus Collaborator For Student Thriving

Leslie Whitcomb, Ph.D.
International Student Inclusion Specialist
OVPIA/Office of Global Learning
Cross Campus Collaborator for Student Welcome and Succe

November 1
Karen Jaime
Associate Professor
Latina/o Studies/Performing and Media Arts
College of Arts and Sciences

November 15
Raymond Craib
Professor
Department of History
College or Arts and Sciences

November 22
Tejasvi Nagaraja
Assistant Professor of Labor History
School of Industrial and Labor Relations

In The Culture Trap, Derron Wallace argues that the overreliance on culture to explain Black students' achievement and behavior in schools is a trap that undermines the historical factors and institutional processes that shape how Black students experience schooling. This trap is consequential for a host of racial and ethnic minority youth in schools, including Black Caribbean young people in London and New York City.

Since the 1920s, Black Caribbeans in New York have been considered a high-achieving Black model minority. Conversely, since the 1950s, Black Caribbeans in London have been regarded as a chronically underachieving minority. In both contexts, however, it is often suggested that Caribbean culture informs their status, whether as a celebrated minority in the US or as a demoted minority in Britain.

Drawing on rich observations, interviews and archives in London and New York City schools, Wallace suggests that the use of culture to justify Black Caribbean students’ achievement obscures the very real ways that school structures, institutional processes, and colonial conditions influence the racial, gender and class inequalities Black youth experience in schools. Wallace reveals how culture is at times used as an alibi for racism in schools, and points out what educators, parents and students can do to change the beliefs and practices that reinforce racism.

Derron Wallace is the Jacob S. Potofsky Chair in Sociology and Associate Professor of Sociology and Education at Brandeis University in Boston, USA. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. From 2022 to 2023, Wallace was a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Durham University. A sociologist of race, ethnicity and education, Wallace’s research focuses on structural and cultural inequalities in urban schools and neighbourhoods as experienced by Black youth. In 2023, Wallace received the American Educational Research Association’s Early Career Award for research on the social context of education. He also received the Doris Entwisle Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association for research on the sociology of education.

This inter-disciplinary conference brings together experts on questions of climate change, agrarian transformations and labor to help us reflect on the future of work.

Overview

The future of work is hot. Literally. Unpredictable seasons, droughts, floods, warming temperatures, rising seas, and a host of other climatic factors are changing what work is, what it means, and what it does to the body. These effects are unevenly felt across geographies and forms of difference.

These effects spill out beyond the factories, fields, and construction sites scholars conventionally associate with legible acts of labor. Self-employed or “informal” workers in cities face new threats from the compounding factors of rising heat and air pollution. Ecotourism sectors have been reconfigured to make climate crisis, extinction, and other consequences of planetary change into sites for “disaster tourism” and consumption. A low-paid service industry coalesces around climate dystopia. The bodily effects of heat and work are newly burdening women, who disproportionately perform unremunerated, devalued reproductive labor in domestic spaces. Questions about the future of work in the context of climate crisis, then, are as much about techno-fixes as they are about home and family.

See the full list of speakers on the registration page.