Abstract

The industrialized practices of rice production in the Dominican Republic create extensive environmental and social costs through fertilizer and pesticide run-off, soil erosion, economic vulnerability, and low labor standards. Dr. Payton and Dr. Cox will discuss the challenges and promises of a sustainable rice certification scheme in the province of Montecristi in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Payton has led this certification effort for several years, largely through his leadership of AgroFrontera, a local Dominican NGO, with assistance from Dr. Cox as an academic partner and consultant.

About the speakers

As Executive Director of AgroFrontera, Frederick Payton leads programs that enhance biodiversity conservation and improve the economic performance and social responsibility of local, national and international food systems, with particular focus on improving livelihoods of small-scale farmers and artisanal fishers. Dr. Payton has worked at the Institute of Community and Area Development and the Office of International Agriculture at the University of Georgia and was a senior scientist and interim director of the International Potato Center’s Central American and Caribbean regional office. Dr. Payton has served on the board of directors of Organic Farming Research Foundation, Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture and Georgia Organics. He holds a Ph.D. in Horticulture from Cornell University.

Michael Cox is an environmental social scientist who studies environmental policy and governance with a focus on community-based natural resource management and a socio-ecological systems research consultant with AgroFrontera. He has conducted empirical fieldwork-based analyses of irrigation systems in the Southwest United States, Peru and Kenya. His current empirical work is focused on community-based fisheries and rice farming systems in the Dominican Republic, where he collaborates with AgroFrontera, a local Dominican NGO. He is the co-founder and co-host of the In Common Podcast, which is the official podcast of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. He is finishing a book project on environmental property rights, to be published in 2023.

Seminar hosts

This seminar is co-hosted by Perspectives in Global Development and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Seminar Series.

The Perspectives in Global Development seminars are held Wednesdays from 12:25 – 1:15 p.m. eastern time during the semester. The series will be presented in a hybrid format with some speakers on campus and others appearing via Zoom. All seminars are shown in Emerson Hall 135. Students, faculty and the general public are welcome to attend. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development, the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the School of Integrative Plant Science as part of courses GDEV 4961, AEM 4961, NTRES 4961, GDEV 6960, AEM 6960, and NTRES 6960. Learn more about the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Seminar Series.

Joshua Savala relates that the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) looms large in the history of Peru and Chile, and has been the structuring element in historical scholarship. In this talk, based on my recent book Beyond Patriotic Phobias, I explore points of collaboration and parallel histories shared between Peruvians and Chileans.

In particular, he highlights the overlooked cooperative relationships of workers across borders, including maritime port workers, doctors, and the police. These groups in both countries were intimately tied together through different forms of labor: they worked the ships and ports, studied and treated disease transmission in the face of a cholera outbreak, and conducted surveillance over port and maritime activities because of perceived threats like transnational crime and labor organizing. By following the movement of people, diseases, and ideas, Savala reconstructs the circulation that created a South American Pacific world. The resulting story is one in which communities, classes, and states formed transnationally through varied, if uneven, forms of cooperation.

About the Speaker:

Joshua Savala received his PhD in 2019 from the Department of History at Cornell and is currently an Assistant Professor at Rollins College, where he also serves as the Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program. He specializes in the history of Peru, Chile, labor and working-class history, and oceans in history. He published his first book, Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World in 2022 with the University of California Press.

"Guiding SLA Principles and Assessment"
Florencia Henshaw
Director of Advanced Spanish, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The goal of this interactive session is to help language educators understand how they can develop materials and implement classroom strategies that are informed by core principles of proficiency-based instruction, and doing so will help their students develop communicative ability in the target language. First, we will focus on setting goals informed by the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, and we will review some fundamental aspects of second language acquisition, particularly as they pertain to proficiency-oriented instruction. Then, participants will evaluate to what extent specific activities help to maximize proficiency development by dissecting their merits and shortcomings.

Bio: Florencia Henshaw has a Ph.D. in second language acquisition and teacher education from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is now the Director of Advanced Spanish. She is an award-winning educator who has published and presented nationally and internationally on technology integration and research-based pedagogical practices. Dr. Henshaw is also the host of Unpacking Language Pedagogy (available as a podcast and YouTube channel), where she summarizes and discusses research articles, activities, terms, and various topics related to language teaching. Her co-authored book, Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory goes to the Classroom, aims to help educators visualize how to put principles into action.

This event is part of the Spring 2023 LRC Learning Community Common Ground: Moving SLA Theory into Practice, organized by the Central New York Humanities Corridor Working Group on Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC). Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Mellon Foundation.

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

Registration is required. 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.

Leonidas Iza, President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), will discuss the goals, consequences, shortcomings, and gains of the indigenous peoples' uprisings of 2019 and 2022 in Ecuador.

Since the '80s, CONAIE has been deemed one of the most influential social movements in Latin America. CONAIE influenced the last two Ecuadorian constitutions, and it bolstered regional debates on self-determination, pluri-nationality, rights of nature, and prior consent. However, the last two major collective actions have faced a different reality:

A new polarization in politics and new identities of the offspring of the first national uprisingMr. Iza will discuss these new obstacles and identities and the future of the indigenous movement in Ecuador.

About the Speaker

Segundo Leonidas Iza Salazar, is an Ecuadorian indigenous leader. He is a member of the Kichwa nationality, people Panzaleo. Mr. Iza is the current President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador CONAIE). He studied Environmental Engineering at the Universidad Técnica de Cotopaxi. Mr. Iza started as a community leader as a teenager; before he was elected President of CONAIE, he was President of the Indigenous Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC). He became national and international notoriety after participating in the indigenous uprising of 2019.

He was a crucial part of the negotiation team of CONAIE with the government in a live broadcast conversation. He is a controversial actor in national politics with high support from the CONAIE's grassroots and the working class. Because of his participation in his movement's collective actions, Mr. Iza has been prosecuted for several crimes with no conviction. The New York Times included him as one of the "Guardians of the Future'' in 2022, a list of indigenous leaders advocating against climate change.

Publications

His book "El Estallido'' (The Outbreak, 2020) is a detailed chronicle of the 2019 indigenous uprising and a profound reflection on the current identity and future of the indigenous movements of Ecuador.

Alicia is helpless. War memories invade her mind like threatening thunder. Uprooted by the armed conflict, she tries to reshape her life in La Sirga, a dilapidated hostel on the shores of a great lake in the highlands of the Andes. There, on a swampy and murky beach, she will try to settle down until her fears and the threat of war resurface again.

A Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight).

About the Film Director

William Vega is a graduate of the Universidad del Valle's School of Communications and Journalism. He specialized in Film and Television Screenwriting at the School of Arts and Entertainment (TAI) in Madrid. Vega has worked as a director, screenwriter and assistant director on numerous film and television projects. His first film La Sirga earned him outstanding reviews and a reputation as one of the Colombian film industry's young, promising talents. The film had its world premiere at the 65th Cannes Festival Directors' Fortnight and has been selected for major festivals around the world including the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the Latin Horizons section of the San Sebastian Festival.

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Pizza will be served

Karl Offen's presentation explores a multigenerational family letter collection to illustrate the relationship between family biography and Atlantic geographies from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Among the 300 documents in the letter collection that he and a colleague tracked down from a distant heir and are now held by Special Collections at the University of Bristol Library. In this presentation, Karl will focus on 40 letters written by an upper-middle-class homemaker from Bristol, England, Elizabeth Symons.

Most of Elizabeth’s letters were sent to her brother, Robert Hodgson, a trader and the British superintendent on the Mosquito Shore in eastern Central America (1768-1775). Elizabeth’s daughter and son-in-law gathered and preserved the documents to press property claims on the shore following the family’s demise in the early nineteenth century.

Combining a broad range of domestic and Atlantic themes from the period, the intimate letters provide a rare opportunity to describe how an ordinary Bristolian woman experienced and contributed to transatlantic trade and Atlantic geographies in her everyday life, and how these interacted with developments in Mosquitia, a British enclave in eastern Central America.

About the Speaker

Karl Offen is a historical geographer and political ecologist whose research explores Atlantic environmental history, the history of cartography, and Afro-Amerindian interactions in Central America, Colombia, and the Caribbean basin. He has an MA in Latin American Studies and a PhD in Geography. He is currently a Professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University.

A Keynote Event for Displaced. Detained. Undeterred: A Critical/Creative Symposium

Thursday, April 20, 2023, Physical Sciences Building 401

4.30 Opening Remarks
Saida Hodžić (Cornell University)

4.45 KEYNOTE DIALOGUE

In this keynote, speakers Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Yến Lê Espiritu offer an intergenerational remembrance of Đại Tá [Colonel] HồNgọc Cẩn,our cậu hai [oldest maternal uncle] and ông hai[oldest granduncle] respectively, an Army of the Republic of Vietnam officer who was publicly executed by a Communist firing squad. This remembrance is a portal toa discussion on refugee grief, not as a private or depoliticized sentiment but as a resource forenacting a politics that confronts the conditions under which certain lives are considered moregrievable than others. Focusing on quotidian memory places, particularly Internet memorialsconstructed by the Vietnamese diasporic community, they will discuss how and why South Vietnam’swar dead have become so central to the refugees’ retellings of South Vietnamese losses in theUnited States. At the same time, they point out that these commemoration efforts can and dolead to harsh and unrelenting attacks against the living, especially those who harbor morecritical visions of the diasporic community.

The keynote will be followed by a reception.

To attend the keynote in person, register here. To attend the keynote virtually, register here.

Speakers

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine, Dr. Gandhi is the co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives.

Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her books Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) and Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (co-editor) have charted an interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies, which reconceptualizes “the refugee” not as an object of rescue but as a site of social and political critiques. Dr. Espiritu is also an inaugural member of The Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

The quietest desert on the Mexican side of the border is about to be crossed by the biggest all-terrain car race in the world. In OFF THE ROAD, three die-hard fans seek to escape the monotony to find a place for themselves in this rip-roaring event.

About the Director

José Permar is an Ariel Award-winning Mexican filmmaker. He was nominated for a Student Academy Award and received a Special Mention at Berlinale for his documentary AURELIA AND PEDRO. His short films OUTSIDE and BEAST have screened at the Morelia International Film Festival, the Latin American Film Festival, and IFSVF in Beijing.

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Pizza will be served.

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We are happy to credit Kanopy for using the film, Off the Road, including its title and film image, on our website and for promotional posters across campus.

Autocracy has been on the rise in global political affairs over the past decade, becoming a focal point of academic and public debate. Less attention has been focused, however, on the rise of social protest movements that contest authoritarian regimes in a large number of countries. This panel seeks to draw lessons from previous democratic social movements in Portugal, Italy, and Chile to analyze what role they play in opening up autocratic regimes and paving the way for democratic transitions.

Panelists
Tiago Carvalho, Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia, Instituto Universitario de Lisboa and Co-Chair of the Social Movements Research Network of the Council of European Studies
Sidney Tarrow, Emeritus Maxwell Upson Professor of Government, Cornell University
Ken Roberts, Richard J. Schwartz Professor Government, Cornell University

Moderator
Prof. Rachel Beatty Riedl, Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, and Professor of Government at Cornell University

Register for virtual viewing.

Hosted by the Institute for European Studies in collaboration with the Einaudi Center’s Democratic Threats and Resilience global research priority, this event is cosponsored by the center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and by the department of Government.

Join us for some arroz con leche and conchas on the house to celebrate the beginning of the spring semester

Please register via Campus Groups: https://cglink.me/2ee/r1956225

OPEN TO THE CORNELL COMMUNITY!