"Dyslexia, ADHD, Autism: Encouraging and Supporting All L2 Learners"
Sara Lee
Associate Teaching Professor of German, Arizona State University

Up to 20% of people in the U.S. have dyslexia, which means that about 4-6 students in every classroom struggle with reading and writing, spelling, and executive functions. How does this manifest in second language acquisition?
This workshop will introduce dyslexia from a medical and educational perspective and explain how it presents in second language learning. We will conduct error analyses on writing samples to determine which errors are developmentally expected in language acquisition or could point toward auditory processing challenges or dyslexia.
In the second part of the workshop, we will focus on classroom methodology to support learners with dyslexia and consider how universal design can help address the heterogeneity in learner needs in general activities and assessments.

Bio: Sara Lee is an Associate Teaching Professor of German at Arizona State University. She is a certified K-12 teacher and dyslexia therapist. Sara combines her knowledge and experience to be a strong advocate for neurodiverse learners of world languages. Her current research is developing an error analysis and intervention to increase spelling proficiency for learners of German. As a German Educational Multiplier, she travels nationally and internationally to give workshops and presentations on how language educators can support their neurodiverse learners. Sara is the 2024 Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (SWCOLT) Teacher of the Year and a finalist for the 2025 ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year.

This 90-minute workshop will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the German Educational Multipliers Network, established by the American Association of Teachers of German and the Goethe-Institut.

"Linguistic Perception and Production in Heritage Language"
Gláucia Silva
Professor of Portuguese, UMass Dartmouth

Heritage language (HL) speakers tend to assess their linguistic competence in binary terms, such as "good" and "bad," and to consider that they speak "slang" or a "broken" language (Byram et al., 2021). However, research on HL production does not confirm these perceptions: Rinke et al. (2024) show that structures that prove most challenging for HL bilinguals are also problematic for monolingual speakers. Furthermore, Torregrossa et al. (2023) indicate that age and formal instruction in the HL may lead to better performance in those challenging structures. Drawing on examples from Portuguese grammar, this talk discusses research on linguistic production in HL, including gender and verb tenses, as well as the perception of learners in relation to instruction and to their own abilities in the HL.

Bio: Gláucia Silva is a Professor in the Department of Portuguese at UMass Dartmouth. She specializes in heritage and foreign language learning, with a focus on Portuguese. Professor Silva has co-authored four Portuguese language textbooks and is the author of Word Order in Brazilian Portuguese (De Gruyter, 2001/2013). She has also published several scholarly articles and book chapters, both in English and in Portuguese. Her graduate advisees have investigated different aspects related to Portuguese language and linguistics, such as the roles of attitude and motivation in learning Portuguese, service encounters in Portuguese in Massachusetts, gay articulations of desire in Rio de Janeiro, the impact of anxiety on learning Portuguese, using songs in the foreign language classroom, task-based language teaching, and mother-child interactions in a bilingual family, among others.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center, the Department of Romance Studies, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program through its Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

"Doing It (Gender) Justice: Reimagining Language Education Through Trans Knowledges"
Kris Aric Knisely
Associate Professor of French and Intercultural Competence, University of Arizona

As people who teach, learn, and research language, the time for us to work toward forms of gender justice that honor and revel in the knowledges and linguistic practices of trans people has long since been here and it grows ever-more overdue in the ongoing wake of globalized and localized forms of anti-trans, anti-education, and other oppressive actions (Knisely, 2023; Knisely & Russell, 2024). If we are to move toward gender justice in language education, we need not only increasingly inclusionary pedagogies, materials, research, and languaging, but also to think beyond the confines of inclusionary discourses alone. When we unscript the cisheteronormativities and cislingualism that are engrained in much of our field, we open ourselves up to new ways of thinking about language-as-social-verb, learning as participation in languaging communities, and education as a site for gender justice, among other key concepts (e.g., trans translanguaging, undoing competence). In this session, we will engage with some of the burgeoning research into trans ways of doing and teaching language in order to reimagine what we do as language scholar-educators, deepen our understanding of what it means to work toward gender justice in our field, and, ultimately to “stand in the tensions of our own humanity, our own languaging and gendering, our own doing and undoing, and look through it for what might be our greater potentiality” (Knisely & Russell, 2024, p. 254). Together, we will ask: What will we do to work toward a world where language enriches the livability of all of our lives?

Bio: Dr. Kris Aric Knisely (Ph.D., French and Educational Studies, Emory University) is Associate Professor of French and Intercultural Competence as well as affiliated faculty in both SLAT and TSRC at the University of Arizona. Knisely’s research focuses on the interplay between the social, relational practices of doing language and doing gender, particularly as they relate to language education and to trans linguacultures. Dr. Knisely’s work has appeared in a variety of venues including Contemporary French Civilization, CFC Intersections, Critical Multilingualism Studies, Foreign Language Annals, The French Review, Gender and Language, and The Modern Language Journal, among others. Knisely is also co-editor (with Eric Russel, UC-Davis) of Redoing linguistic worlds: Unmaking gender binaries, remaking gender pluralities (Multilingual Matters).

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

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This talk will explore the critical intersection of war rhetoric and the state of exception in Ecuador. This topic unveils how language and legal frameworks shape political authority and societal responses in times of crisis. War rhetoric, often employed to evoke urgency and solidarity, has been a recurring tool in Ecuadorian political discourse, especially in addressing issues such as organized crime, drug trafficking, and social unrest. This rhetoric frames these challenges as existential threats, demanding extraordinary measures to safeguard national security and public order. Such discourse justifies and amplifies the use of states of exception, a constitutional mechanism that temporarily suspends certain human rights to empower the state to act decisively. However, the state of exception has also been used to expedite the discussion of tax statutes in the legislative and to evade the independent control of public expense in defense. This raises critical questions about the balance between state authority and constitutional limits and the potential for abuse under the guise of emergency powers.

In Ecuador, the deployment of war rhetoric has become increasingly evident in recent years, particularly as the government confronts escalating violence and organized crime. While these measures may be very popular in certain sectors of society, they also normalize authoritarian practices and undermine democratic institutions. This lecture will examine war as a legal category, the facts that were used to justify the application of the state of exception, the response of the judicial institutions, and the response of a significant portion of the society that decides to ignore legal institutions to support the establishment of an authoritarian regimen. Ultimately, we will reflect on the delicate balance between addressing genuine threats and preserving the constitutional guarantees that underpin a democratic society.

David Cordero-Heredia, J.S.D. ’18 is a Law Professor of Law at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador currently affiliated to Cornell University as Visiting Fellow of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. He has been a visiting professor at the Andean University Simón Bolívar (UASB), the University of the Americas (UDLA), and the University of Azuay (UDA). From 2018 to 2019, he co-taught the International Human Rights Clinic: Policy Advocacy at Cornell Law School as a Senior Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow. His research work deals with the interaction of social movements and the legal field with a focus on indigenous peoples.

In this event, we will be officially launching the archive Todosomos, a collection of handwritten testimonies by Venezuelan migrants who crossed the border from Venezuela to Colombia between 2019 and 2021. The event will have several panels and include interventions by the founders of Todosomos, the library team in charge of the processing and transcription of the archive, Venezuelan artists and writers, a representative of the NGO Ithaca Welcomes Refugees, and a talk by Professor Zeb Tortorici (NYU). It will also include a lunch, a reception, and a pop-up exhibit of the handwritten notebooks. This event is free and open to the public.

View the event program

The recent U.S. election is likely to have significant impacts on immigration policy and practices. Based on experience with the previous Trump administration and standing efforts among Republicans in Congress, these changes may impact Cornell students, staff, and faculty. Join Cornell’s Migrations Program in a conversation about the current state of immigration policy.

This is a virtual-only meeting open to Cornell faculty, staff, and students. Registration is required.

Panelists

Shannon Gleeson, School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Brooks School of Public PolicyLaura Taylor, Director of International ServicesStephen Yale-Loehr, Cornell Law SchoolModerator

Wendy Wolford, Vice Provost for International Affairs and Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development in the College of Agriculture and Life SciencesHost and Sponsors

The Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, builds upon the work of Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge to inform real-world policies and outcomes for populations that migrate.

Regions of the world are historical constructions yet over time they have seemed to become more and more fixed. This talk will cut across linguistic and cultural boundaries and re-examine conceptualizations of regions in the Americas and the wider Atlantic World, showing evidence for a very polyglot, cross-imperial and interconnected Greater Southern Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second half of the eighteenth century saw the growth of the Windward Islands, the southern Dutch Antilles and the southern rimland. These developments, together with the continued importance of well-established Barbados, make it possible to conceive of a new zone of interaction, encompassing Venezuela and its offshore islands, the Guianas, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Lesser Antillean chain from Dominica to the Grenadines. Historians continue to reconsider the boundaries of the Caribbean, resulting in a shifting understanding of traditional regions in the Americas. They now increasingly focus on the relationships between the islands and territories of North, Central and South America that touch the Caribbean Sea.

This talk will explore the strong connections from most of the Lesser Antilles to the Spanish mainland and the Guianas. Furthermore, it will claim that the Southern Caribbean had special importance in the context of the Atlantic World since it helped to connect the North and South Atlantic. Southern Caribbean colonies were a source of news about events on the South American continent especially during the Spanish American War of Independence. Economic, political, scientific, and even missionary networks also consolidated across the sub-region and helped to forge new bonds across the North and South Atlantic. Ultimately, the Revolutionary Greater Southern Caribbean provides a good case to reconsider how regions are constructed and how they change over time.

Dexnell Peters is currently Lecturer in Caribbean and Atlantic History at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus. He was previously a Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick and Supernumerary Fellow and Bennett Boskey Fellow in Atlantic History at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Dexnell has a PhD in Atlantic History from Johns Hopkins University. He is broadly interested in the history of the Greater Caribbean and the Atlantic World. Dexnell's current research project, through the main themes of geography and the environment, inter-imperial transitions, migration, the plantation economy, politics and religion, makes a case for the rise of a Greater Southern Caribbean region (inclusive of Venezuela and the Guianas) in the late eighteenth century, showing evidence for a very polyglot, cross-imperial and interconnected world. His first book, written in collaboration with historian Shane Pantin at the University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine, focused on the history of the campus’ Guild of Students in commemoration of the organization’s fiftieth anniversary and covered key issues of student movements, decolonization and post-independence in the former British Caribbean colony of Trinidad & Tobago.

The global history of the interrelationship between race, migration, and real estate is still in its infancy, even as it promises a particularly rewarding angle on histories of how mobility and inequality have been intertwined. The Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, which during the second half of the nineteenth century received large numbers of European immigrants and underwent spectacular urban transformations, offers a window onto these problems. In recent decades, historians have increasingly viewed this migration through the lens of Argentine elites’ discourses of “whitening,” but they have rarely examined the concrete urban effects that European immigration had for the city’s Afro-descendants, who in the 1830s still constituted more than a quarter of the population. This talk attempts to do as much by looking at the formation of a Black neighborhood through real estate acquisition as well as the ensuing process of dispossession. While the empirical focus is micro-historical, the explanatory horizon is broader: The paper ultimately seeks to derive more general findings about the history of capitalism and inequality in the nineteenth-century Atlantic.

Michael Goebel is the Einstein Professor of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin and co-director of the university’s Center for French Studies. Since his Ph.D. (University College London, 2006) he has also worked at the European University Institute, Harvard University, and the Geneva Graduate Institute. Following his 2015 book Anti-Imperial Metropolis, which won the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, he has increasingly grown interested in the emerging field of global urban history. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the SNSF-funded project Patchwork Cities, which explores the history of segregation in port cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On Monday, April 9, Michael Goebel will be giving another lecture, "Contagion, Inevitability, and Teleology: Imperial Disintegration and Nation-State Formation in Global History."

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Government, Department of History, Institute for Comparative Modernities, and Institute for European Studies.