The LACS summer research grant provides funding for in-country research costs for graduate pre-dissertation work in Latin America or the Caribbean. (The grant does not cover international airfare; students should also apply for an Einaudi Center Travel Grant for airfare.) LACS will offer up to three research grants to qualified graduate students who need to conduct field research over the summer of 2022. Grant amounts may vary from $500 to $1,500. The Graduate Minor in Latin American Studies graduate minor in Latin American (and Caribbean) studies allows students to acquire in-depth knowledge of the region, which will enhance their expertise for future research and professional advancement. The main requirement is to have a Latin American studies field faculty member as a member of a student’s committee.

Contact: lacs@cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/latin-american-and-caribbean-studi…

The Latin American Studies Minor is an undergraduate minor across disciplines that will allow students to explore the history, culture, government, politics, economy and languages of Latin America and the Caribbean. Qualifying courses can be found in almost every college. LACS is happy to offer engaged and/or research internships in Ecuador for summer 2022.

Contact: lacs@cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/latin-american-and-caribbean-studi…

Andressa Lanchotti

The Minas Gerais State Prosecutor’s Office actions in search for reparation for the Vale’s mining disaster in Brumadinho

On January 25, 2019, three tailings’ dams owned by Vale, a Brazilian multinational corporation which is the largest producer of iron ore and nickel in the world, located in the Córrego do Feijão mine, in the city of Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, collapsed, releasing more than 10 million m³ of tailings in the Paraopeba River, destroying the flora and fauna found along the way, and killing 270 people.

Since the disaster, the Minas Gerais State Prosecutor’s Office took several actions searching for reparation to the affected communities, to restore the disaster-affected environment and to prevent future mining disasters. As a result of this work, the recovery of the Paraopeba hydrographic basin is currently at an advanced stage and concrete improvements were achieved in the state control system of mining tailings disposal.

Andressa Lanchotti has a bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of São Paulo, Brazil (1998), master’s degree in international environmental law from the Limoges University, France (2008) and master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil (2010). She holds a PhD in Fundamental Rights and Public Liberties from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain (2013), and conducted postdoctoral research at the Postdoctoral Program in Democracy and Human Rights of the University of Coimbra, Portugal (2018).

Since November 1999, she is a public prosecutor working for the Minas Gerais State Prosecutor’s Office (MPMG), where she served as environmental prosecutor, handling mostly conflicts related to mining, housing and urban development and their environmental impacts. Her work includes research, mediation, negotiation, conflict resolution, identify and initiate civil and criminal complaints and prosecutions. She also served as Coordinator of the Support Center for the Environment (CAOMA) and coordinated the task forces that were created by the MPMG to mitigate the impact of the mining disasters in Brazil (2016 – 2020).

She taught courses and created the Post-Graduate Course "Environmental law and Sustainability: Theory and Practice”, offered by the Minas Gerais State Prosecutor’s Office Center of Studies and Professional Development (CEAF/MPMG) and Dom Helder Law School (2017-2018). She is also the author and co-author of books and author of several articles about environment, human rights, and sustainable development.

She is current a Humphrey Fellow at Cornell University, where her field of study is natural resources, environmental and climate change.

Pedro Rossi (Chile)

The Environmental agenda in Chile, new legislations and future challenges

Chile is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change in Latin America, with high levels of pollution and a huge water crisis. That’s why the Congress and the Ministry of Environment have been working on different legislations to improve the country’s environmental standards. Among the new laws that has been approved in the last years we can mention: the urban wetlands law, the single use plastics law, and the light pollution law. There are also some important bills waiting to become Law, like the biodiversity law bill and the framework law on Climate Change.

Chile is also in the middle of a constituent process that is going to restructure a large part of the legal order, especially in the environmental area, so it’s important to analyze not only the legislative reforms but also some of the main debates in the Constitutional Convention, because the new constitution will set the basis for the future legislation.

Pedro Rossi is a Lawyer, with a bachelor’s degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile (2013) He is a problem-solver professional with experience in the public sector, in areas such as environmental law, science and legislative processing.

Since 2010, he started worker as a junior advisor in the Ministry General Secretary of The Presidency, after getting his degree he worked for five years at the National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT), solving legal problems of researchers and centers financed by the State of Chile. Then, he returned to the Ministry of the Secretary General of the Presidency where he was in charge of the fulfillment of the legislative Government plan.

The last three years he worked as a legislative advisor in the Minister of Environment, where he was responsible of leading the environmental agenda of the Ministry at the Congress and advise the Minister and the Undersecretary. He had to coordinate, elaborate and study the bills and motions related to the top priorities of the environmental agenda. Likewise, he oversaw conducting the political debate between the Executive and Legislative branches and handling parliamentary motions within the lawmaking process of those bills.

He is current a Humphrey Fellow at Cornell University, where his field is Natural Resources, Environmental Policy and Climate Change.

The Lower Tapajós River is a multiethnic territory located in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon Forest, in the Pará state. This region is the dwelling place of 13 indigenous peoples, hundreds of traditional riverside communities, and dozens of quilombos (formerly enslaved communities with a background of anti-racist struggle). One of the main perils they are now facing is the expansion of both soy monoculture plantations and the infrastructure the exportation of the grains demands. In this presentation, I want to approach the process of creating a soy monoculture landscape over the place where a multispecies tropical forest existed, by following two traces left behind in this process: the remaining of forests and communities as a "farce" and the emergence of viruses (especially hantavirus). I will particularly focus on the role of pesticides in emptying communities and allowing more space for soy plantations to expand.

Fábio Zuker is an anthropologist and journalist. He is the author of The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon (forthcoming May/22 with Milkweeds editions). He holds a master’s degree from Paris’s School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences and is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo. As a journalist, he has been three times a Pulitzer Center grantee and has written articles for different media outlets, including Thomson Reuters Foundation and Mongabay.

Registration Link: emiconference.com

The Emerging Markets Institute Conference 2022

Reinventing Global Value Chains

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.

The theme of the 2022 Conference, “Reinventing Global Value Chains”, invites speakers to envision the connections that are evolving between industries, governments, and environments, which have compounding effects on trade and economic development, especially as we reach into a post-pandemic world riddled with uncertainty.

Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program

The speaker has changed her title and abstract (4/21/22). Below is the new abstract for the title above:

In 1905, as the Russo-Japanese War deepened and the rise of the Meiji Empire began to take hold including Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, a thousand Koreans left their homes for Yucatán, Mexico, thereby becoming the first case of Korean migration to the Americas. Without the protection of the Korean government and lured by Mexican and Japanese contractors with the false promise of wealth and comfort, these migrants were sold into indentured servitude to work in the henequen plantations of the Yucatán. One of the most recognized writers of the Korean New Wave, Kim Young-ha recuperates this slice of history that had been silenced by all the nations involved – Korea, Japan and Mexico – in his novel Black Flower (2003). In this talk, I examine Kim’s rewriting of history that situates the 1905 Korean migration to Mexico not as a minor episode in Korean national history, but rather as a central event in the transpacific chain that links Korea and Mexico within contemporary global history. The novel’s reconfiguration of global/national history is hinged on two interlinked narrative technologies: first, Black Flower utilizes Japanese imperialism as a ready-made trope to not only construct the idea of a putative Korean nation, but also to directly connect Korean independence to the Mexican revolution; second, the novel ineluctably legitimizes the current discourse of South Korea as a multicultural trans-nation by situating the birth of the Korean modern nation in Latin America and highlighting the mobility and heterogeneity of (Korean) national borders­. I contend that the current historical moment in which South Korea is imagined as a global trans-nation and sub-empire calls for a certain recuperation of this transpacific history which places the Korean Mexican indentured worker as the modern subject of the South Korean nation.

Co-Sponsor: Cornell University Public Health Program

This presentation draws from a chapter in Alex Nading's book in progress, Non-Traditional Causes: Kidney Disease, Climate Change, and Life Support in Nicaragua’s Sugar Plantation Zone. In it, he follows the treatment trajectories of former sugarcane plantation workers in Nicaragua who have been consigned to hemodialysis due to a novel condition called Chronic Kidney Disease of Non-Traditional Causes (CKDnt). In order to access dialysis treatment, these patients rely on the material and financial support of their former employers at the plantation company--a company whose labor and environmental policies they blame for the onset of CKDnt. The talk describes how, joined together in a loose activist alliance, patients and their families confront the ambivalence of end-of-life care. While many ethnographic studies have noted that dialysis can sever patients from the lives they had known prior to treatment, in the case Professor Nading describes, the treatment operates in a way that pulls patients more deeply into the social and economic fabric of the plantation.

Alex Nading is a medical and environmental anthropologist. His research, mostly focused on Nicaragua, has examined transnational campaigns against dengue fever, bacterial disease, and chronic kidney disease, as well as grassroots movements to address these issues. In all his work, he uses ethnographic methods to bring the theoretical concerns of medical anthropology together with those of critical environmental studies and science and technology studies. His teaching includes courses on the anthropology of global health, anthropological methods, and international development. He is also the editor of the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly and is currently working on a book entitled Non-Traditional Causes: Kidney Disease, Climate Change, and Life Support in Nicaragua’s Sugar Plantation Zone from which his talk will be derived.

Keyword: Public Health

This talk by Mey-Yen Moriuchi (LaSalle University) explores the history of Chinese migration to Cuba, which began with the coolie trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1847 and 1874, approximately 150,000 Chinese were brought to Cuba under termed contracts to fulfill a labor shortage on the sugarcane plantations. They suffered harsh conditions and were treated severely.

Chinese coolies were generally viewed as dutiful and submissive, and their voices have largely been confined to the margins of literature and history. However, the 19th-century testimonies and illustrations of Chinese coolies denounce the savagery and cruelty of the Spanish overseers, while simultaneously revealing that the coolies were not passive victims. The coolies demonstrated agency, courage, and resistance in the act of migrating, in their words, and rebellions.

Coolie labor played a major role in reshaping Cuba’s sugar economy and its existing systems of production. In addition, the amplified presence of the Chinese in Cuba challenged existing paradigms of race and nation. Cuban society was no longer black and white. The growing Chinese population forced a reconsideration of this traditional binary vision of society and, in the formation of a new Chinese-Cuban identity, complicated notions of what constituted cubanidad.

This event is co-sponsored by the Einaudi Center's East Asia Program.

The European university extension tradition started in the decade of 1870 in Cambridge and Oxford universities, and rapidly spread through Europe in the form of conferences of cultural diffusion and “Popular University”. In its origin, university extension is the result of two interconnected processes: the European university reform under the German model and the concern of modern states to build national systems of general literacy. In the beginning, extension practices expressed the pedagogical optimism of Enlightenment, the hygienist influence, and the democratization of knowledge and culture, particularly among two groups of people excluded from a university education: workers and women. University extension was conceived as a “movement”, and that is why it has transformative potential.

This university extension tradition arrived in Latin America in the early Twentieth Century. By the connection with the university, social, and political processes in Latin America, and by being part of the program of the University Reform Movement, known as “La Reforma de Córdoba”, university extension suffered a deep transformation, and now we can talk about a Latin American extension, from a reformist tradition. From these processes, university extension gained conceptual complexity and depth, ample and rich repertoire of practices, and, at the same time, a deeper ambiguity in its meanings and definitions. As a concept located in the unstable frontiers that the university generates with its surroundings, our reflection on extension requires us to go beyond the academic field and consider the historical, social, and political processes that overdetermine them.

The presentation will cover this topic and answer the following questions: What subjects, pedagogical conceptions, and political orientations articulated the Latin American university extension in different historical times, from the Twentieth Century to the present? What subjects, pedagogical and epistemological conceptions, and what meanings and political orientations were challenged, tensioned, or articulated in the production of university extension in Latin America? What lessons can we draw to think around the challenges of the relationship between university and society today?

Agustín Cano Menoni received his BA in Psicology from Universidad de la República (Uruguay), his Master in Social Project Management from LUMSA-Università (Rome, Italy) and his Ph.D. in Pedagogy from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is currently a professor, extensionist, and researcher at the Universidad de la República de Uruguay (UDELAR), where coordinates the Núcleo de Intervención e Investigación en Educación y Territorio of the Programa Integral Metropolitano of UDELAR. He is a undergraduate and graduate professor at the Institute of Education of the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences of UDELAR, and a member of the National System and Researchers of Uruguay. He is the author of the book "Cultura, Nación y Pueblo: la extensión universitaria en la UNAM (1910-2015)", published in 2019 in Mexico by the UNAM, as well as numerous articles and chapters of books on topics of university extension and Latin American University.

This is a hybrid lecture. Professor Caparrós will be speaking in-person at G01 Stimson Hall as well as virtually, use the link below to register to attend virtually.

MartÍn Caparrós is a distinguished Argentine author, writer, and narrative journalist, and one of the fundamental Latin American voices of our time. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot award by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, for outstanding reporting on America; specifying work on his nonfiction book-length work El Hambre (Hunger: The Mortal Crisis of Our Time, 2016), in which the author visits both the richest and poorest people of the earth in order to explore why hunger is one of today’s big unresolved issues. The book has been translated into 14 languages.

He was the recipient of the prestigious Herralde Prize (2011) for his novel, Living; the Planeta Prize (2004) for his novel, Valfierno; and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1994). He also writes biweekly columns for The New York Times and Spain’s El País. His expertise interconnects with a range of cross-disciplinary topics including inter-American dialogue, food insecurity, and climate change.

This event is part of Caparrós’s first visit as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large (ADW-PAL) to Cornell. His on-campus residency runs March 7-11, 2022. He was elected as an ADW-PAL in 2019. His appointment runs through 2025.