Scholars, artists, and organizers who understand the violence of displacement deeply and intimately narrate and theorize how borders, militarized imperialisms, and their colonial genealogies shape people’s lives and foreclose right to both home and refuge. Featuring presentations, performances, films, installations, conversations, and dialogues that reimagine connections between here and there, the past and present, personal and political.

This is an in-person symposium with a hybrid keynote. Register in advance to save your spot in person!

Thursday, April 20, 2023, 4.30pm, Physical Sciences Building 401: Opening Keynote

Opening Remarks
Saida Hodžić (Cornell University)

4.45 KEYNOTE DIALOGUE

On Refugee Grief: An Intergenerational Remembrance

Yến Lê Espiritu (University of California, San Diego)

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (University of California, Los Angeles)

This intergenerational remembrance is a portal to a discussion on refugee grief, not as a private or depoliticized sentiment but as a resource for enacting a politics that confronts the conditions under which certain lives are considered more grievable than others.

Moderator: Carla Hung (Cornell University)
6.15 pm Reception: Word of Mouth

To join the keynote virtually, register in advance.

Panels on Collaborations, Enclosures, Routes, Lives and Deaths, and Borders

FRIDAY April 21, AD White House
8.30am Breakfast: Cornell Express

9AM COLLABORATIONS: JOINING FORCES

Identity and the Search for Belonging: From Palestine to Syria, to Europe, and Back

Nell Gabiam (Iowa State University); Abu Salma Khalil and Adam Khalil (Toulouse, France)

A conversation about a documentary film about the journey of Palestinian refugees from Syria to Europe, narrating the experience of displacement of the Khalil family and that of other Palestinian refugees who shared this journey.

Letters from Inside U.S. Detention
Jane Juffer (Cornell University) and Carla

A dialogue that situates the letters Carla wrote Jane from inside immigration detention as a part of the genre of the testimonio.

Collaborative Advocacy against Toxic Land Use and Migrant Detention

Emma Shaw Crane (Columbia University) and Guadalupe De La Cruz (American Friends Service Committee)

A presentation about two collaborative research projects in South Florida investigating the intersection of confinement and environmental racism and a reflection on possibilities for just collaboration between researchers and organizers to end migrant detention.

Moderator: Chantal Thomas (Cornell University)

10.45am Break

11AM ENCLOSURES: MOVEMENTS

Re-Placing Memories through Land Based Practices

Troy Richardson (Cornell University)

A presentation on the layered histories of violence toward Indigenous peoples in the US southeast orchestrated to deny Indigenous peoples access to their homelands and the ongoing struggles for and successes in maintaining land-based practices for Indigenous resilience and resistance.

Barzakh as Method, Barzakh as Process: Making Sense with the In-between in the Strait of Gibraltar

A. George Bajalia (Wesleyan University)

Building from ethnographic work in Tangier, Bajalia presents on forms of being-in-common that exist outside of, or adjacent too, categories of belonging such as migrant, immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeker.

Migrant Encounters in Bihać: Anthropologies of Dislocation, Extraction, and Refusal

Azra Hromadžić (Syracuse University)

A reflection on multiple dislocations –the migrants’, the locals’, and the author’s —to illuminate knowledge production, ethnographic extraction, and refusal in the Balkans and beyond.

Records in Limbo: On the Lore of Crossing Borders

Amir Husak (The New School)

A work-in-progress narrated/live documentary cinema performance about the experiences of refuge and displacement - including Husak's own - as a thorny body of knowledge in constant need of rethinking.

Short Film: The Stitch (2018, 8 min)

Asiya Zahoor (Cornell University)

This silent film portrays a challenging topography of a Kashmiri village near the Line of Control, a de facto border between India and Pakistan, as traversed and observed by a girl who engenders an alternative reality and cartography via her art.

Moderator: Masha Raskolnikov (Cornell University)

1.15pm Lunch: Angkor Cambodian

3PM ROUTES: KNOWLEDGES

Old Benjamin the Refugee

Vinh Nguyen (University of Waterloo)

A narration of Nguyen’s physical retracing of Walter Benjamin’s 1940 escape route via the Pyrenees across the French-Spanish border to explore Benjamin’s refugee experience, and in turn, the import of his thought for refugee studies.

Wanted: Refugee Returns to Germany

Saida Hodžić (Cornell University)

A reflection on the different meanings of the terms “wanted” and “return,” exploring refugees as deportable and criminalized legal subjects and former refugees/new precarious migrants as desired essential workers in the context of the German state and Bosnian post-war refugee returns.

Departure Scene: Redacted Intimacies among UnCitizens in Jordan

Eda Pepi (Yale University)

A reflection on the redaction of intimacies that arose during Pepi’s sudden departure from her fieldwork in Jordan, where dependent nationality forbids women, but not men, from passing their citizenship to children they have with foreigners.

The Place of Liminality in Writing Experiential History

Mostafa Minawi (Cornell University)

A reflection on liminality of existence as a multi-generational refugee and the author’s resulting interest in researching and writing about historical characters living inhabiting a liminal space.

Moderator: Nicole Thuzar Tu-Maung (Cornell University)

Defiant Dreams

Sharifa Elja Sharifi (Cornell University)

A depiction of multiple displacements from Afghanistan and the artist's defiant dreams.

Moderator: Nicole Thuzar Tu-Maung (Cornell University)

5.15PM GHOSTS: FILM SCREENING AND CONVERSATION WITH DIRECTOR

Jeff Palmer (Cornell University)

Ghosts tells the story of three Kiowa boys’ daring escape from a government boarding school in Anadarko, Oklahoma in 1891, to attend a ghost dance ceremony at a distant Kiowa encampment.

Moderator: Ami Yayra Tamakloe, Cornell University

6.15 Dinner: Asempe Kitchen

SATURDAY, April 22, AD White House
8.30am Breakfast: Gimme Coffee

9AM LIVES AND DEATHS

Stories No One Wants to Hear: Refugeehood and Diasporic Unbelonging in Bosnian Chicago

Larisa Kurtović (University of Ottawa)

A series of sketches of diasporic life of Bosnian refugees—including petty cigarette smugglers, truck drivers, and those taken by the precursors of what is today known as the opioid epidemic—in the late 1990s Chicago, asking what is left of the refugee experience in the absence of a happy end.

K’s Suicide

Milad Odabaei (Princeton University)

A narrativization of K.’s story of return to Iran and suicide relating the limits of language and legibility to the queer experience of refugees.

The Feeling of Interruption

Abosede George (Barnard College)

A reflection on the recurrent feeling of life being interrupted that was the author’s condition as an undocumented person.

Proactive Grief (A Second Installment)

Eman Ghanayem (Cornell University)

A reflection on how Palestinians grieve and anticipate death through the author’s personal reflections on family and community.

Moderator: Brian V. Sengdala (Cornell University)

11am Break

11.15AM BORDERS: ANCESTORS

Leave Not What You Carry: Reflections on Kinship, Belonging, and Identity at the Haitian-Dominican Border

Karina Edouard (Cornell University)

A reflection on the author’s grandparent’s migration and her experience at the Haitian-Dominican border exploring the contradictions, tensions, and afterlife of border crossing as an entry point into what it means to be of a community, not simply in one.

Un/Settling: Living Borders, Materializing Elsewheres

Aradhana Sharma (Wesleyan University)

An autoethnographic meditation on unsettled and disarticulated life alongside borders, examining family lore and ethnographic vignettes that emerge out of the division of Punjab and the construction of India and Pakistan in 1947, illuminating the condition of ongoing displacement and un/settlement in a world of ever-evolving borders.

An Un/Official Archive: Passports, Phone Diaries, and Prints

Natasha Raheja (Cornell University)

A reflection on how my Sindhi refugee grandmother's personal archive from the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition speaks to the ways nations, states, and families come together and fall apart across colonial borders in South Asia.

Connected Fields: Embodying Ethical Dhaqan in Canada

Hannah Ali (Cornell University)

A presentation on Somali-Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area who turn to dhaqan – an embodied African philosophy that prioritizes connections to ancestral land, elders, and the Somali language – to navigate social exclusions and craft ethical futures of community, family, and friendship that contest the modern Canadian state.

Moderator: Sarah R. Meiners (Cornell University)

1.15 pm Lunch: Loumies

2.15 PM WRITING SESSION FOLLOWED BY A CONVERSATION: YOUR PRESENTATION MAKES ME THINK OF

3.30 pm Symposium End

INSTALLATIONS
AD White House Room 109
Friday 9am-8pm; Saturday 9am-3.30pm

Refugees Know Things: Podcast Launch and Installation
Saida Hodžić (Cornell University)

Listen to podcast episodes featuring conversations with refugee scholars, artists, and activists.

“Refugee Patriots, Refugee Punks,” with Mimi Thi Nguyen (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)

“Building Power: Hope is a Verb,” with Zrinka Bralo (Migrants Organise, London)

“Critical Refugee Studies,” with Sabrina You and Yến Lê Espiritu (University of California San Diego)

Transnational Network and Conversations about Salvadoran/Central American Migration: Podcast Installation

Sofia Villenas (Cornell University) and Patricia Rodriguez (Independent Scholar and International Analyst/Advocate, Earthworks: Ending Oil & Gas Mining Pollution)

Listen to podcast episodes featuring stories of migration and the right to stay. A collaboration between Cornell University, Ithaca College, US-El Salvador Sister Cities, the Association for the Development of El Salvador (CRIPDES), and WRFI Community Radio in Ithaca.

Video Performance: Saltwater at 47 (2016, 5min 46 sec)

Selma Selman (Resident, Rijksakademie Amsterdam)

A video performance about a Roma woman getting her first passport and going on her first seaside vacation at age 47; addressing themes of dispossession, un/citizenship, and family love.

Video Performance: Haram (2019, 10 min)

Selma Selman (Resident, Rijksakademie Amsterdam)

Haram speaks of religion and waterboarding. No matter which God I believe in - as a woman who disobeys social rules that I’m subjected to, I am constantly making sins. In order to clean myself of my accumulated sins, I am washing myself with pure water. This work is also related to state practices of waterboarding and the struggle to maintain oneself while drowning in a foreign land as both refugee and immigrant.

Short Film: Sindhi Kadhi (2018, 8 min)

Natasha Raheja (Cornell University)

A short film about the intimate relationship between the filmmaker and her Partition refugee grandmother as they cook a traditional Sindhi recipe, recalling the quality of lotus root and other ingredients in Pakistan.

Cosponsored by Anthropology, Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, the Society for the Humanities, South Asia Program, Southeast Asia Program, History, Asian American Studies, American Studies, European Studies, Reppy Institute, Migrations Inititiative, Government, Performing and Media Arts, the Institute for Comparative Modernaties, the South Asia Program, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, Africana Studies, Near Eastern Studies, and the Latina/o Studies Program.

MITWSrg originated in the mid-1980s as a faculty caucus in the English Department. It is now a research group that includes faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the humanities and the social sciences from various departments in the College of Arts and Sciences – and beyond. For more information, please email mitws@cornell.edu if you would like MITWSrg to be the sole or primary sponsor for an event you are planning to organize in minority, indigenous, or third world studies, please send a brief proposal to MITWS’s faculty coordinators Professor Helena Maria Viramontes at hmv2@cornell.edu, or Professor Satya P Mohanty, at mohanty@cornell.edu.

This is an in-person symposium with a hybrid keynote. Register in advance to save your spot in person! To join the keynote virtually, register here.

Jouvay, the midnight jamboree heralding the start of carnival on West Indian islands transposed to the Neerlandophone world, presents an ongoing conversation about how to human in singular-multiple ways which are sensitive to relations between so-called species, spirits, saints, mythical characters, and devils.

Another ecosystem, boundless and disenchanted by difference, is imagined and temporarily created in daaance. With three aaa’s, daaance rather than dance encompasses movement, singing, drumming, reverence, language, food, sacrifice, ritual, politics, politricks, and passion. This other ecosystem, perpetually negating systematicity, is a space and a short-offered time where inter- and intra-subjective play, sounding out, and daaance allow for different futures to be imagined and new forms of human-ing that embraces relations with non-human animals and life and death to be practiced. It is a refusal of exclusion and a move towards making inequity inexact.

In introducing Trans-Caribbean-Thought a queer cousin of decoloniality, critical race studies, postcoloniality, Marxism, and Feminism an extra option is offered for keepers of nonconformity to remain transmitters of one-pluriversal Love.

Dr. Francio Guadeloupe is senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean studies and Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is author of Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2009) and Black Man in the Netherlands: an Afro-Antillean Anthropology (University Press of Mississippi, 2022).

Hybrid Event (see registration link below)

Keywords: Trans-Caribbean-Thought; Neerlandophone; humanocentrism; music; human-ing; relationality

A discussion and a reflection on the Brazilian film "Aquarius" (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016).

Dr. Carolyn Fornoff is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in Romance Studies.

This is an in-person event and it is open to everyone.

This is a meeting in which students of Portuguese and the Portuguese-speaking community at Cornell will meet students, professors, teachers, and representatives of Afro-Brazilian organizations to read (or partially read) "O Olho Azul" by Toni Morrison.

The meeting will be in Portuguese and it is open to everybody.

Registration in advance is required.

"Real-World Tasks in the Classroom: Myth or Reality? Exploring Task-Based Language Teaching"
Koen Van Gorp
Assistant Professor and Less Commonly Taught Languages Coordinator, Michigan State University

Tasks are everywhere. They are the things we do in daily life. Long (2016) argues that task-based language teaching (TBLT) is the strongest empirically supported teaching approach around. However, for many instructors of commonly and less commonly languages, TBLT is still an innovative approach that deviates from more familiar structure-based or form-focused teaching methods. They find it difficult to incorporate real-world tasks in their classrooms. Are real-world tasks the only option or can instructors integrate more pedagogical tasks? What do they look like and how do they incorporate (or not) grammar and vocabulary?

This talk will focus on what makes a task different from a traditional language classroom activity or exercise, and how real-world and pedagogical tasks can drive classroom (and beyond) learning. This talk aims to provide you with the foundational principles of TBLT so you can make tasks work for students and classrooms.

Bio: Dr. Koen Van Gorp is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Linguistics program and Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Coordinator in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University. He is also Co-Principal Investigator and Head of Research for the National LCTL Resource Center (NLRC) and serves as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Education (KU Leuven, Belgium). His main research interests are task-based language teaching and assessment, and multilingualism in education. He is founding Co-Editor (together with Kris Van den Branden) of TASK. Journal on task-based language teaching and learning and Treasurer of the International Association for Task-Based Language Teaching (IATBLT).

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. 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.

The program will feature music from Latin America, including the works of Brazilian composers Heitor Villa-Lobos, Claudio Santoro, Cesar Guerra-Peixe, and Argentinian composers Esteban Benzecry, Astor Piazzolla, and Luis Gianneo. Violinist and PhD Candidate in Music and Sound Studies, Rafael Torralvo joins Duo Portinari for a set featuring Armorial music from northeastern Brazil.

This event is funded in part by the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) and by a USIFL grant to LACS from the U.S. Department of Education.

Formed by Peter Pas, Viola Soloist of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and Soledad Yaya Principal Harpist of the Goiânia Philharmonic Orchestra, Duo Portinari performed throughout the Americas, Europe, and Australia. Duo Portinari’s recording of Michael Kurek's Sonata for Viola and Harp reached #1 on the Billboard Classical chart in 2017. Duo Portinari’s current project includes a new CD featuring music of Latin American composers. The name of the duo pays homage to the Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari.

Soledad Yaya attended the Cordoba Conservatory of Music, continuing her studies in Buenos Aires with Oscar do Campo, and later in Paris under the tutelage of Marielle Nordmann. She formerly held a position with the São Paulo Experimental Orchestra of the Municipal Theater of São Paulo and currently serves as a Professor of Harp at the Baccarelli Institute in São Paulo.

Peter Pas attended Indiana University, where he studied with Atar Arad. He later received the prestigious Performer's Certificate for his Senior Recital from that institution. He concluded his studies at Yale University with Jesse Levine. In addition to his position as Viola Soloist of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Peter Pas also serves as violist of the OSESP Quartet, a chamber ensemble formed by the principal players of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and Professor of Viola and Chamber Music at the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra Academy. Peter Pas is sponsored by Thomastik-Infeld and Bam Cases.

Born in Brazil and educated in the United States, Rafael Torralvo holds a BM and a MM degree in violin performance from James Madison University and West Chester University of Pennsylvania, respectively. He is an alumnus from the Frost School of Music, at the University of Miami, where he received a MM degree in musicology. Rafael also holds a MA in Arts from Cornell University where he currently is a PhD Candidate in Music and Sound Studies. Rafael has an active career as a violinist and chamber musician, appearing in concert engagements throughout Europe, the United States, and South America. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the "Encontro Internacional de Cordas." In recognition of his efforts to enhance the cultural life of his community, Rafael received the Fumagalli Trophy, the most prestigious award bequeathed by the city of Limeira, his hometown.

The concert will take place on Wednesday, April 12 at 5 pm in the Common Room of Alice Cook House, on West Campus. The event is free and open to the public.