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Featured Speakers:

Iván Duque Former President of Colombia (2018-2022) Colombia
Heather Henyon Founding Partner Mindshift Capital, UAE
Andrew Karolyi Charles Field Knight Dean and Harold Bierman Jr Distinguished Professor of Management Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, USA
Mark Mobius Founding Partner Mobius Capital Partners, UAE
Juan Pablo Ortega Co-founder and CEO Yuno, Puerto Rico
Shaanti Shamdasani CEO & Founder S. ASEAN International Advocacy & Consultancy - SAIAC, Indonesia
Vera Songwe Chair and Founder Liquidity and Sustainability Facility, Africa
Marcos Troyjo Transformational Leadership Fellow University of Oxford
Edward Tse Founder and Chairman Gao Feng Advisory Company, China

The Cornell Emerging Market Institute Conference is the United States’ leading annual forum for discussing the ongoing trends and phenomena in our world’s rapidly growing emerging markets. Bringing together heads of the world’s largest multilateral institutions and preeminent business, the conference fosters engaging discussions on economic development and this year, specifically, through the lens of global supply chains.

The Conference is hosted at Cornell’s landmark Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City and will feature a variety of key-note speakers, thought-provoking panel discussions, networking sessions, and two sponsored competitions: the Cornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch Competition and the Cornell EMI Corning Case Competition. The Conference also marks the launch of the Institute’s Annual Report, a collection of research and articles from the past year developed by researchers within Cornell as well as the Emerging Multinationals Research Network in collaboration with OECD Development Center, UNCTAD, IFC, and Inter-American Development Bank.

This year’s conference is centered around the compelling theme Risks and Realignments:

Emerging markets are in flux—no longer the future, already central to the present. And yet Capital is flowing as if there is doubt, with new partnerships dawning, old questions lingering. The EMI Conference straddles the crossroads, here to capture a seminal moment, when crises — even the specters of financial contagion — may not have to threaten us, so much as invite us to think anew. This Conference reaffirms our commitment to building bridges, as risks spill over, as potential realignments draw closer. The conference will hold 4 panels, the Cañizares Award ceremony, and the competition finals:

Central Bank Digital Currencies: Looking Back and Looking ForwardReorganizing investments in Emerging MarketsRealignments: Multilaterals and Sovereign Wealth FundsLaunch of the EMI Report 2023Cornell EMI Corning Case CompetitionCornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch CompetitionJoin us.

Cornell University’s Emerging Market Institute is holding its annual conference on November 3rd at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, NYC.

The Emerging Markets Institute holds an Annual Conference every first Friday of November, in which Emerging Markets are brought to the forefront of discussion. Within the conference, EMI also holds the finals of the and the . Stay connected to the EMI Conference website to find more about the speakers and agenda, and follow our newsletter.

An Environmental and Technological History of Cold War Mega-Projects in Latin America

Weaponizing Geography demonstrates the consequences of unbuilt mega-projects. Sebastian Diaz Angel will discuss the untold story of how a series of high modernist Cold War projects came into being and what their proponents hoped to achieve, as well as the successes, failures, and consequences of their actions. It examines the so-called “South American Great Lakes System” (SAGLS), a geographical and environmental engineering project (1964-1973) proposed by the Hudson Institute of New York, a think tank related to the U.S. Department of Defense. With the support of influential Latin American elite members, engineers, and war strategists, this think tank sought to transform the major rivers of the continent into a series of massive interlocked, channelized, and navigable artificial reservoirs. Much like the North American Great Lakes, these waterways would provide (in theory) inexpensive riverine transportation, inexhaustible sources of hydropower, and a landscape facilitating large-scale agroindustry, mining, and counterinsurgency operations in allegedly “unexploited and unexplored” tropical regions.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the speaker

Before starting his Ph.D. at Cornell’s History Department, Dr. Sebastian Diaz Angel had an M.A. in Geography, a B.A. in History, and a B.A. in Political Sciences. He worked as the Digital Map Curator at the National Library of Colombia, lectured at Externado University, and led Razón Cartográfica, an academic network promoting research on the history of geography and cartography in Colombia and Latin America. Sebastian specializes in maps studies and has a profound interest in environmental history, science and technology studies, geopolitics, public history, and the digital humanities.

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

"Language Revitalization, Cultural Reclamation, and Global Indigeneity"
Américo Mendoza-Mori
Lecturer and Faculty Director for the Latinx Studies Working Group, Harvard University

In recent decades, revitalization and reclamation programs for Indigenous languages have emerged at universities, both promoting the language and fostering community empowerment, particularly among youth. We will explore strategies to incorporate Indigenous cultures and languages of the Americas within the Humanities and Social Sciences as relevant and complex curricular components.

For this presentation, we will discuss opportunities for building up academic and cultural programming to challenge and expand traditional notions of Indigeneity as a "thing of the past" into relevant and pressing issues, and to reflect on how colleges and language departments can support more diverse spaces for the representation and visibility of Indigenous cultures, scholarship, and voices, in connection with curricular goals. We will specifically explore the case of Quechua-language initiatives in the global advance of the language. Quechua is the most spoken Indigenous language family of the Americas, with 8-10 million speakers in South America.

Bio: Américo Mendoza-Mori teaches and researches on Indigenous and Latinx Studies at Harvard University where he is a Lecturer and Faculty Director for the Latinx Studies Working Group. Dr. Mendoza-Mori is involved with different research and community-oriented projects to raise awareness of the relevance of Quechua languages and literatures, Latinx and Latin American cultures, and Indigenous systems of knowledge. His work has appeared in a variety of academic publications, a TEDx Talk, and he has been featured at major institutions such as the United Nations and in international media (The New York Times, BBC, NPR, The Guardian).

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. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center 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.

Talk by Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard (English Language and Literature, University of Chicago)

“Is the ‘Coolie Woman’ A Banker?” revisits the figure of the “coolie woman” during Indian indenture in the British West Indies. Histories of indentured Indian women have focused on the experience of recruitment, labor exploitation, and especially violence at the hands of planters or would-be husbands. Instead, this talk looks instead to the bangles, necklaces, and anklets they carry in plain sight. Following brief but revealing references to jewelry through craft and financial histories, travel writing, poetry, photography, and painting, the “coolie woman” becomes an agent of global finance. Jewelry is a little-seen source of value, her collateral against the violence of the plantation and of companionate marriage.

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she writes about the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and in the broader Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Parsard is working on her first book project, “An Illicit Wage,” an aesthetic history of hustling, sex work, and hoarding as practices of freedom. Her scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies and can be found in American Quarterly, Small Axe, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and Representations.

Find out more about this study abroad opportunity in Ecuador. Politics of Sustainable Development in Latin America is a multi-term, four-credit course that will bring students onsite in Ecuador during the January term. Students will travel to Quito, Ecuador to begin their field study at Cornell's Global Hub partner institution, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). Following their in-country orientation, students will then relocate to the indigenous community of Sacha Waysa in the Amazon region of Ecuador to work with local partners and the Yakum Foundation on projects related to biodiversity, agroforestry, reforestation, food sovereignty, and community planning.