Emily Vázquez Enríquez writes at the intersection of the environmental humanities and the fields of border and migration studies. Her first book project theorizes the concept of border biomes to think about the mutual entanglement between human and nonhuman entities in relation to border settings and migration flows in the Americas. In my work, she examines questions of ecopolitics in transnational settings, the relationships between migrants and border communities with border ecologies, and queries regarding the different forms of environmental racism faced by immigrants.

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Grand Challenge Mellon Grant, and Department of Comparative Literature.

Joni Adamson is President's Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI) at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She writes on the centrality of the environmental humanities to the sustainability sciences, the design of desirable futures, climate fiction and film, Indigenous literatures and scientific literacies, the rights of nature movement, and the food justice movement. Her research has been supported by many awards and grants, including the 2019 Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. She is the author and/or co-editor of eight books and special issues and 80 articles, chapters, reviews and blog posts which have been widely cited, reprinted, and translated into Mandarin and Spanish. She has been invited to keynote conferences and lecture in Australia, China, England, Italy, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and throughout the U.S. Her organizational activities helped lay the foundations for transnational environmental American Studies and the environmental humanities.

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Grand Challenge Mellon Grant, and Department of Comparative Literature.

Rita Indiana Hernández is a Dominican writer, musician, and performer. In addition to her popularity as a singer-songwriter, she is widely regarded as one of the most important Dominican authors of her generation. Her viral music success has made Rita a household name in the Dominican Republic where she is popularly referred to as "La Montra" (the monster). Her literary career began in the 1990s with short works included in zines such as Vetas. Around the time she published her second novel, Papi, she began experimenting with musical and visual projects as part of different performance groups, such as Casifull and Miti Miti. Her popularity as a musician grew even more after the 2010 release of the album El juidero, recorded with her band Rita Indiana y los Misterios. She subsequently published two more novels, Nombres y animales (2013) and her science fiction experimental novel, La mucama de Omicunlé (Tentacle 2015). Her focus on dismantling mythologies and rebuilding from the rubble appears in her most recent novel, Made in Saturn (2020). She was also named one of the one hundred most influential Latino/a personalities by the Spanish newspaper El País. Daniel Alarcón describes her 2021 album "Mandinga Times" as “apocalyptic” in his New Yorker review; she calls it a songbook for the end of the world

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Grand Challenge Mellon Grant, and Department of Comparative Literature.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of the award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004), Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008), and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). She won the 2007 Richard J. Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting and edited Best Women’s Travel Writing (Travelers’ Tales, 2010). UNC Press published her latest book, All the Agents & Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands, in 2017. Griest co-founded the Youth Free Expression Network, an anti-censorship organization for teens that is a program of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) in New York City. She once logged in 45,000 miles on a 42-state journey across America, documenting history that is generally overlooked in classroom textbooks for a non-profit educational website called The Odyssey. She has been a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City since 2005, a member of PEN since 2008, a Macondista (of Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Workshop) since 2009, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 2013, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle since 2018. In 2015, she served as a literary ambassador to Venezuela and Colombia as part of the International Writing Program’s Lecture Tours, and in 2018, she became a live storyteller for The Moth.

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Global Grand Challenge, and Department of Comparative Literature.

"Inquiry-Based Language Learning"
Christina Rocha
ACS Athens

This talk will focus on inquiry-based learning within the language classroom, more specifically WHY it is important as well as HOW we can successfully engage our students to ask more questions, sparking their curiosity and motivation to learn more about the language, culture, and people we teach about. Inquiry-based learning helps build intercultural communicative awareness and competence while fostering student agency and a sense of connection to our community through conscious global citizenship.

Bio: Christina Rocha has been teaching languages (ESL, Greek, French, and Spanish) since 1999. She started her career in the U.S. public school system before moving internationally; she currently teaches Spanish and ESL at the American Community Schools (ACS) in Athens, Greece. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics and Language and Communication with a research interest and focus on inquiry-based language learning and global citizenship. She has recently authored two chapters in the 2021 IGI publication on this topic in the Handbook of Research on K-12 Blended and Virtual Learning Through the i²Flex Classroom Model.

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.

The Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in the 1970s by a group of predominantly Puerto Rican artists on New York’s Loisaida (or Lower East Side), is the birthplace of the nuyorican aesthetic. In a live, virtual, Chats in the Stacks talk, Karen Jaime discusses her new book, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021), in which she documents how the Café, despite a popularly understood hetero-masculine history, has operated as a queer space since its founding, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Jaime’s new research, which draws from hip-hop studies, critical race, queer, literary, and performance theories, also examines how the term “Nuyorican,” originally a pejorative, race/ethnic identity marker, was reclaimed by the community it targeted and how it is connected to an aesthetic practice that recognizes and includes queer and trans artists of color.

Sponsored by Olin Library, the talk is followed by a live Q&A.

Jaime is assistant professor of performing and media arts and Latina/o studies at Cornell University. She is a former Institute for Citizens and Scholars Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellow (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Center), a former Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow, and a former Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While her poetry and critical writing have been published extensively, Jaime is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host and curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe from 2003 to 2005.

Dial-In Information

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SedjCm0MSGu4QxxhWmFO2w

"Bilingual Community-Based Language Pedagogy: An Arab-Jewish Language Café in Jerusalem"
Yarden Kedar
Israel Institute Visiting Faculty, Department of Psychology, Cornell University

The Good Neighbors – Abu Tor/Al-Thuri project is a grassroots, volunteer-based initiative that started in 2014 in order to promote a shared life approach and to build a joint community between Jews and Palestinians who live side by side in Abu Tor, a binational neighborhood, which is located on the seam between East and West Jerusalem.
This unique project, which is extraordinary given the long geopolitical and national conflict and the explosive daily tension between Arabs and Jews, includes initiatives such as language courses in Arabic and in Hebrew; a community organic garden; "Abu-Job" – a job placement project; a bilingual street library; and a variety of community events and festivities that are organized by and intended for Jerusalemites from both nationalities.
We focus on the Language Café, an authentic, bottom-up local initiative in which Jews and Palestinians actively teach and learn Hebrew and Arabic from each other. This study explores the unique bilingual pedagogy that has evolved in the Language Café and the participants' perceived language learning process and its outcomes (i.e., their motivations to learn the language of the other group, their attitudes toward the learning situation, and its potential outcomes, particularly sociocultural outcomes).
The findings reveal that the pedagogical model that has been developed and employed by the Language Café non-professional tutors promotes values of equity, equality, and mutual respect among the Jewish and Palestinian participants alike. Moreover, this new model builds on the language and cultural repertoire of the participants, hence affording them the opportunity to learn and teach each other's language and culture. Despite the long-standing political tension, the language tutors seem to have created a safe learning environment that allows both Jewish and Palestinian participants to feel at ease. Participants express genuine interest and desire to learn the language and culture of the other national, religious, and cultural group. Furthermore, they report having gained not only conversational language skills in the languages they wanted to learn but also novel insights about each other's cultures, enabling them to engage in various social activities within their neighborhood and beyond.
These findings may contribute to the development and advancement of both formal and informal pedagogical frameworks worldwide – in language as well as other subject matters – based on inter-group appreciation and collaboration. Such frameworks could also bring about more tolerant and integrated societies in conflict zones.

Bio: Yarden Kedar is an Israel Institute Visiting Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. He has served as Head of the Early Childhood Education Department in the Faculty of Education at Beit Berl College between 2015-2021. He is also the Head of the Language and Cognition Development Lab at Beit Berl College.
Dr. Kedar received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology (2007) from Cornell University and then became a Kreitman Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University (2007-2010), focusing on the neurolinguistic aspects of syntactic processing in young children.
Dr. Kedar's research interests relate to Language Acquisition, Cognitive Development, and Early Childhood Education across several cultures and languages and a variety of child populations (e.g., infants, children, and adults; monolinguals and bilinguals; Arabic, English, and Hebrew learners). In other lines of research, he explores the interaction between language and socioemotional aspects of development such as immigration, gender, and various preschool educational environments.

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.

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, in partnership with the Society for the Humanities, presents this symposium featuring five cutting-edge researchers whose work crosses disciplinary lines to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Join postdoctoral fellows Mohamed Abdou, Eman Ghanayem, Bamba Ndiaye, Eleanor Paynter, and Grace Tran for a discussion of their work in the fields of migration studies and global racial justice. Topics will include identity, colonialism and decolonization, indigeneity and dispossession, refugee studies and mobility, economic and social justice, and critical race theory. Learn how new approaches and developments are changing scholarship in these critical fields.

Einaudi Center director Rachel Beatty Riedl will introduce the event, and Viranjini Munasinghe (Department of Anthropology) will moderate.

Speakers

Mohamed Abdou, Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Non-statist Indigenous and Muslim Conceptualizations of Sovereignty: The Decolonial Inseparability of Race from Religion"

Eman Ghanayem, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature and Society for the Humanities"Being Native, Being Refugee"

Bamba Ndiaye, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Music and Society for the Humanities"From Mbas Mi to Mbëkk Mi: Covid-Induced Migration and Social Movement Advocacy in Senegal"

Eleanor Paynter, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Witnessing Migration 'Crises': Race, Coloniality, and Asylum in Italy"

Grace Tran, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Migrations Initiative"What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Transformative Effects of Vietnamese-American Engagement in 'Marriage Fraud' Arrangements"

Learn about the Laidlaw Undergraduate Leadership and Research Program. Open to first- and second-year students, this 2-year program provides generous support to carry out internationally-focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and join a global network of like-minded scholars from more than a dozen universities.

Join us to learn more about the program, its benefits, and the application process, as well as tips for approaching potential faculty research mentors and writing a successful application. Sponsored by the Tatkon Center for First-Year Students and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.