Forging Lasting Peace: Movements for Justice in a Pluralist World (Bartels World Affairs Lecture)

In our ethnically, racially, linguistically, and religiously diverse world, how do we find common ground? Amid ongoing conflict and violence, how do we foster lasting peace? In our world full of inequalities, what practices of activism and solidarity lead to transformative change? Drawing on her experiences of mobilizing, demanding, and brokering peace, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee shares how action and activism can shape a just world.

A book signing and reception with refreshments will follow the lecture.

Lecture: 5:00–6:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumBook signing and reception: 6:30–7:30 p.m. | Park AtriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance: Reserve your ticket. Join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell.

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Learn more about our distinguished speaker by reading her book, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. Pick up your copy from The Cornell Store and bring it to the book signing! Buffalo Street Books will also have copies for sale at the event.

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How did Leymah Gbowee's protests lead to lasting peace? Read a Bartels explainer by Naminata Diabate.

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About Leymah Gbowee

Nobel Peace laureate Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist, trained social worker, and women's rights advocate. She currently serves as executive director of the Women, Peace, and Security Program at Columbia University's Earth Institute and is the founder and current president of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, founding head of the Liberia Reconciliation Initiative, and cofounder and former executive director of the Women, Peace, and Security Network Africa. She is also a founding member and former Liberian coordinator of Women in Peacebuilding Network/West Africa Network for Peacebuilding.

Host and Sponsors

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Part of Einaudi's work on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice, this year's lecture is cosponsored by Einaudi's Institute for African Development and Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, in cooperation with Peace is Loud. To learn more about Peace is Loud and discover other empowering women peacebuilders, visit www.peaceisloud.org.

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Einaudi Center’s flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

Arturo Escobar Location: Warren B74 and Zoom This talk examines emerging narratives of life that differ significantly from dominant anthropocentric perspectives of the world and their associated extractive modes of global development. Based on the notion of radical interdependence, these narratives propose a new foundation for social life and for designing worlds relationally, which is indispensable for confronting the terracide produced by mono-humanism. The talk will focus on one such emergent narrative – centered on notions of territoriality, communality, autonomy, re-existence, and pluriversality. Arturo Escobar is an activist-researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism, post-developmentalist transitions, and 'ontological design'. He was the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Political Ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and is currently affiliated with the PhD Program in Design and Creation at Universidad de Caldas, Manizales, Colombia; and the PhD program in Environmental Sciences, Universidad del Valle, Cali. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely on these issues with several Afro-Colombian, environmental and feminist organizations. Professor Escobar is the author of the celebrated study, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2nd edition, 2011). His more recent books include Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018), and Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (2020). He is currently working on a book, Designing Relationally: Making and Restor(y)ing Life), with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma. Featured image: "Energías Libres" by Angie Vanessita Sponsors: Polson Institute for Global DevelopmentLatin American and Caribbean Studies Program

Registration Link: https://cglink.me/2cm/r1538464

Lancet Citizens’ Commission
Pathways to Universal HealthCare for India’s 1.3 billion

The Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System is a cross- sectoral research endeavor to lay out a policy roadmap to achieving universal health coverage (UHC) for India’s 1.3 billion, after 75 years of failed efforts. A guiding principle for the Commission is that structural change towards UHC can only be attained through consultative and participatory engagement with the diverse sectors involved in health care and, most importantly, with India’s citizenry.

The Commission’s ‘big tent’ approach transcends traditional boundaries of expertise to actively engage stakeholders whose voices have rarely been heard in previous reports: those who deliver healthcare and those who receive it. It is thus a Citizens’ Commission in as complete a sense as we can envisage.

A consequence of this framing is that the Commission is explicitly confronting several hitherto-ignored schisms in the provision of Indian healthcare: between the public and private sectors in the delivery of care; between allopathic medicine and traditional medicine; between aficionados and sceptics of the role of technology in attaining UHC.

Our working hypothesis half-way through is that a (dramatic) shift in mental models at all levels is needed for India to be on a path towards UHC. Two overarching mindset changes include (a) Citizens shifting from being passive consumers of healthcare to an active and more informed participatory role, demanding access but also sharing responsibility and (b) Recognizing the role of the private sector in the health system and holding it accountable, rather than only relying on the state.

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School. For over two decades, he has studied entrepreneurship as a means to social and economic development in emerging markets. At HBS since 1993, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and Harvard, he has taught courses on strategy, corporate governance and international business to MBA and Ph.D. students and senior executives.

Este seminario tiene como ambito de mejor entender como funciona el programa de la Tarjeta del Trabajador Fronterizo (TTF) en Mexico, su desarollo y sus efectos sobre los trabajadores, la industria y la sociedad.

Los apresentadores incluyen Dra. Martha Rojas Wiesner (El Colegio de la Frontera Sur), Dra. Antonieta Barron (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico), Dra. Martha Garcia (El Colegio de la Frontera Sur) y Dr. Manuel Angel Castillo (El Colegio de Mexico).

La discusion tendra lugar en espanol y sera traducido en ingles.

La Migration Initiative, la Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic y The Center for the Study of Inequality apoyan a este evento.

This workshop seeks to understand working mechanism of the agricultural temporary foreign workers program entitled 'Tarjeta del Trabajador Fronterizo' in Mexico, its development and effects on workers, the industry and society.

Speakers include Dra. Martha Rojas Wiesner (El Colegio de la Frontera Sur), Dra. Antonieta Barron (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico), Dra. Martha Garcia (El Colegio de la Frontera Sur) y Dr. Manuel Angel Castillo (El Colegio de Mexico).

The event will take place in Spanish and will be translated into English.

The event is supported by the Migration Initiative, the Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic and the Center for the Study of Inequality.

Registration Link: https://cglink.me/2cm/r1538417

Subrina Shen is an assistant professor at the Department of Management at the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin.

When having a higher-status follower promotes exploration: Hierarchical inconsistency, goal alignment, and exploration in product development teams

A burgeoning stream of work views organizational internal inconsistency as an impetus for innovation and strategic change. Building on this literature, this paper examines an important yet under-studied aspect of internal misfit/inconsistency: global-local hierarchical inconsistency in product development teams, or the situation in which team members have misaligned rank orderings in the global (organizational) and local (within-team) hierarchies. In contrast to prior research which shows hierarchical inconsistency to increase conflict and thus hurt performance, we argue that the conflict induced by global-local hierarchical inconsistency could spark explorative search–an important antecedent for innovation and strategic change–when team members have aligned goals. We propose a novel mechanism–goal-aligned social rank enhancing behavior–to explain the positive effect of global-local hierarchical inconsistency. We empirically tested these arguments with data on A/B testing experiments around a social networking app product in a Chinese internet company between 2019 and 2021. The results show that hierarchical inconsistency encourages search and exploration when departmental goals are aligned in a team. Our study contributes to the burgeoning discussion around the impact of organizational internal misfit on innovation and strategic change as well as the literature on consequences of status inconsistency.

Subrina's research examines the creation, evaluation, and commercialization of innovative ideas in emerging technology sectors, with a contextual focus on artificial intelligence technologies. It is informed by both organizational sociology and strategy research.

​​​Subrina's work has been published in Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. Subrina's research has won a number of awards, including the 2021 Conference Theme Best Paper Award from the International Association of Chinese Management Research and the Best Paper Award from the 2018 International Conference on Innovation Studies.

"What Everyone Should Know about ASL and American Deaf Culture"
Corrine Occhino
Assistant Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Syracuse University

ASL (American Sign Language) is experiencing a pop-culture moment. In the past few years, ASL has been visible in TV-shows, movies, commercials, and in sports and news broadcasts. ASL programs are popping up in schools and colleges all over the U.S. Despite dips in enrollment for many college programs, student enrollment in ASL classes is at an all-time high, as it has quickly become one of the most popular languages to take on college campuses. But despite its growing popularity, the hearing world knows little about ASL, its role in Deaf culture, its status as a real, human language, or the daily frustrations many Deaf ASL signers experience as they fight for access and inclusion in a hearing world.

In this talk I will take you on a whirlwind tour of ASL and the signing communities who use it. In the first half of my talk, I will discuss ASL's roots in Deaf Education and the role segregation played in the creation of ASL varieties. I will talk about the communities of signers who use ASL, why ASL is a Deaf language, and why language deprivation is still a very real problem for deaf children in the U.S.

In the second half of my talk, I will talk about some interesting linguistic properties of ASL and what research on ASL has taught us about language, and language learning. I will end with a discussion of how learning ASL opens the door to understanding Deaf culture, but also invites us to interrogate the ways we can disrupt the hegemony of hearingness, making way for a more inclusive and equitable society.

Bio: Dr. Corrine Occhino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics and in the Department of Teaching and Leadership at Syracuse University. Dr. Occhino received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of New Mexico in 2016. In 2017, she joined the Center on Culture and Language at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology where she ran the ASL Assessment Project. She now runs the Multimodal Language Lab at Syracuse University, where she uses a combination of corpus-based, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic approaches to study language in the visual modality. Most recently, Dr. Occhino has published articles on the phonological organization and structure of ASL, sociolinguistic variation in ASL, and on the role of experience and construal in ASL-English bilingual language processing. Dr. Occhino also works on issues related to language access and social justice, equity, and inclusion in deaf communities, collaborating on research projects aimed at improving reproductive health outcomes for deaf women and increasing the representation of minoritized dialects of ASL and their signers in the documentation and study of ASL.

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, which include wearing masks while indoors and providing proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.

"Visualizing Black Lives: Representing Racism in Afro-Brazilian Media"

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Southern California.

Reighan Gillam researches the ways in which subjects experience, negotiate, and challenge stereotypical and controlling images. She examines these issues through the lens of Afro-Brazilian media producers in southeastern Brazil. She is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled Visualizing Black Lives, to understand how Afro-Brazilians turn to their racialized experiences as a source for visual content and the kinds of images they generate. In the Fall 2018, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center named her the Peggy Rockefeller Scholar.

Education

Ph.D. Anthropology, Cornell UniversityB.A. Anthropology, University of VirginiaThis talk is co-sponsored by Africana Studies and Research Center. Thank you.