The new film from the critically acclaimed filmmaker of American Promise, looks at the complex politics of immigration and race in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, using a combination of magical realism and hidden camera techniques. Director Michèle Stephenson will do a Q&A session via Zoom with the audience.

Co-sponsored by the Migrations Initiative, Department of Anthropology, and Department of History

Please register through the following link:
https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5jrGp_7CRniDXYgvKp_s7g

Sugarcane was one of the first crops introduced into Brazil by the Portuguese, and it has dominated the country’s political and economic formation since. In recent years, the highly modern, input-intensive ethanol industry has taken hold in a new region of Brazil, the former soybean fields of Mato Grosso do Sul. In this talk, Fernanda will outline her research into conflicts in this new sugarcane region between large-scale, highly-capitalized agro-industrialists and indigenous peoples who claim historic rights to the land in Mato Grosso do Sul. Through a case study of the Raízen-Caarapó ethanol plant, she will examine changing land use patterns, livelihoods and norms as expressed through claims to the land.

Fernanda Santa Roza Ayala Martins is a PhD student in the Social Sciences Graduate Program on Development, Agriculture and Society (CPDA) in the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ). She is a visiting PhD student with Global Development in CALS with a scholarship from the Brazilian Federal Foundation for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES).

Abstract

The dynamics of aggregate public opinion|particularly Stimson's (1991) measure of policy mood|have been long used to explain electoral outcomes and government responsiveness in the United States. However, we still know little about policy mood outside the US and a few Western European countries. Understanding the relationship between policy and electoral preferences outside the pool of advanced democracies is crucial as voters outside that particular context are often depicted as outcome-oriented. This paper extends the study of opinion dynamics by estimating Uruguayans' policy mood between 1993 and 2019, using 79 different questions administrated 297 times. In doing so, we first show that Uruguay's policy mood is largely thermostatic, responding to changes in government, suggesting that movements in aggregate policy preferences are relevant in an other-wise outcome-oriented region as Latin America. Second, we provide strong evidence in favor of the distinctiveness of operational and symbolic preferences in a new and previously unexplored context. Overall, the article contributes to the scarce literature on aggregated public opinion measures of policy preferences, ideology and political preferences in Latin America and shows the relevance to measure preferences in public opinion studies.

"Critical Thinking in World Language Teaching"
Mariame Sy
Director of the African Language Program and Lecturer of Wolof and Pulaar, Columbia University

Critical thinking, an essential element across academic fields, has been at the heart of education for decades. While research on language education and critical thinking remains somewhat timid, it continues to gain ground among academic communities. Available studies strongly suggest that pedagogical practices that wed world language teaching and critical thinking can facilitate language acquisition and enhance general proficiency. Despite this progress in the research field, there is nonetheless a general reluctance to integrate critical thinking in language teaching practices (Li, 2011; Pica, 2000) because, arguably, its integration presents more challenges for language educators than for teachers in other fields (Lin, Preston, Kharrufa, & Kong, 2016). However, while this statement may be true for teachers of major languages, teachers of the so-called less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) might be more inclined to take on these challenges. As decision-makers of their courses, teachers of LCTLs have opportunities to create innovative practices by engaging in three types of decisions: educational outcomes (what learners can do), content (what should be/is taught), and manner (how the goals of teaching language are achieved).
While recognizing the many challenges – including historical marginalization and inadequate institutional support – in this presentation I aim to shed light on the importance of integrating critical thinking in the language teaching and to explore models and ways of designing materials that can facilitate the integration of critical thinking in the African language classroom. While examples are provided from African languages classrooms, the principles and ideas are applicable to all languages.

Bio: Dr. Mariame Sy is a Lecturer in African Languages and the Director of the African Language Program in the Department of Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. She began teaching Wolof in 2001 in the Linguistics Department at UCLA and has since taught Wolof and Pulaar at several institutions, including the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute (SCALI) and The Colorado Project study abroad program in Senegal. She also teaches French in the African Languages Flagship Initiative summer program. Her publications include academic articles on the morpho-phonology and syntax of Wolof and she has two upcoming elementary-level textbooks in Wolof and Pulaar (with Africa World Press and the National African Language Resource Center).
She is also a co-developer of a Wolof video course and has designed a flipped classroom for beginning Introductory Wolof to provide students with supplemental technology-based opportunities to enhance proficiency in key areas of difficulty by practicing outside the classroom setting. Her current work focuses on developing a curriculum based on performance assessments and what learners should understand, know, and be able to do.
She is the current President of the African Language Teachers Association (ALTA) and the Vice President of the Senegambian Studies Group.

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.

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center and the Institute for African Development at Cornell University.

Join the Institute for African Development for our conversation hour in Tumbuka on 10/5! Learn about traditional and cultural norms in Malawi as well as greetings, basic vocabulary and phrases in Tumbuka! (No previous knowledge of Tumbuka or African languages necessary!)

Summary: Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of ‘alterity’, a term for absolute difference, has influenced a number of scholars who have recently come to be grouped under the label of ‘decolonial’ thinking, such as Enrique Dussel and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. In this talk, I argue that Édouard Glissant’s framing of an ethical relation as emerging from ‘contacts’ with others, defending the ‘opacity’ of others, and ultimately standing in solidarity with others, is more fruitful for decolonial and other Left political pursuits than Levinas’s framing of an ‘encounter’ with a single Other, whose difference is understood in terms of ‘alterity’, and who is ultimately served through reverence. By suggesting a politics through his language of a ‘right to opacity’, Glissant provides actors a path forward.

Bio: Benjamin P. Davis is Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the University of Toronto, Centre for Ethics. Influenced by how thinkers such as Claudia Jones and Édouard Glissant leveraged rights claims to demand fair labor standards, preserve distinct cultural practices, and call for the self-determination of colonies, his work investigates the potential of human rights to challenge enduring inequities rooted in colonial projects.

Artist, poet, and musician José Montoya (1932–2013) was a leading figure of the Chicano movement, producing iconic works in many genres, cofounding the art collective Royal Chicano Air Force, and helping to organize for the United Farm Workers, while also teaching at California State University, Sacramento, and establishing the Barrio Art Program there.

In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks book talk, Ella Maria Diaz, associate professor of Latina/o Studies and Literatures in English, will discuss her recently published book on the life and work of this prominent artist, educator, and activist: José Montoya (Volume 12 of the A Ver Series, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2020). Utilizing oral histories, archival, and digital humanities research, Diaz examines Montoya’s long and diverse career while proposing a new model for the study of Latina/o/x artists who transcend boundaries between art, education, and activism. José Montoya is also a visual delight, richly illustrated with reproductions of Montoya’s art from his collections at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at UC Santa Barbara and other institutional collections.

A live Q&A will follow the talk. The audience is encouraged to submit their questions in the chat.

In this talk, we will present an orthographic and lexical analysis of three of the first printed documents in Papiamentu, a Portuguese-based Creole spoken in Curaçao: Prefecto Apostolico di Curacao na Cristian di su mision and Catecismo Corticu, both by M. J. Niewindt (1833, 1837, respectively), and Kamiena di Kroes, by J. J. Putman (1850). Our goal is to show that, even though two contemporary Dutch missionaries wrote them, the texts display significant variations, suggesting a quest for an orthographic standard in Papiamentu's earliest stages.

However, these orthographic standards were divergent. On the one hand, Niewdindt's Prefecto Apostolico and Catecismo contain a Hispanicized etymological orthography. On the other hand, Putman's Kamiena shows some influence from Dutch orthography. Consequently, we defend that both writers tried to establish unique orthographic systems for Papiamentu, forming the basis for the models that would end up as the official standardization of the language at the end of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, using a more Hispanicized orthography or one influenced by Dutch reflects its author's world view on Curaçao and the Netherlands as a political unit. At the same time, these two missionaries were able to propose innovations regarding methodology, objectives, recipients and pedagogical strategies that affected profoundly that society. To analyze the convergent and divergent characteristics of the Niewindt and Putman orthographies, we concentrate on the formal relationships between the graphemes in the texts. Our second objective is to study the lexicon of these documents and evaluate the degree of Iberian or Dutch influence on Papiamentu. From the socio-historical viewpoint, in the context of the nineteenth century Curaçao, Niewindt and Putman were living under an increasing influence from The Netherlands, as the influence from Iberia was fading away whilst Curaçao was also becoming more relevant to the Dutch state. However, Curaçao's society remained divided, marked by the scourge of slavery. It should be understood that within the segregated system in Curaçao in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Jews and the Calvinists neither obliged nor permitted slaves to follow any Jewish or Calvinist rites. Therefore, the Catholic religion practised by slaves was closely linked to their language, Papiamentu (Lampe 2002: 110-3). Thus, we consider that the lexicon of the three texts in Papiamentu is principally Iberian, with an irrelevant number of items of Dutch origin. Hence, the influence of Catholicism on Curaçao was also a linguistic one.

Zoom link: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_k5ce9mxUS1uw2S5puZSfRg

References

Lampe, Armando. 2001. Mission or submission? Moravian and catholic missionaries in the Dutch Caribbean during the 19th century. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

Niewindt, M. J. 1833 [2001]. Prefecto Apostolico di Curacao na Cristian di su mision. Fac-simile edition. Bloemendaal/Curaçao: Fundashon pa Planifikashon di Idioma/Stichting Libri Antilliani.

Niewindt, M. J. 1837 [2001]. Catecismo corticu pa uso di catolicanan di Curaçao, pa M.J. Niewindt. Curaçao. Fac-simile edition. Curaçao/Bloemendaal: Fundashon pa Planifikashon di Idioma/Stichting Libri Antilliani.

Putman, Jacobus Josephus. 1850 [2001]. Kamiena di kroes: ku historia, meditasjon i orasjon kortiekoe, pa J. J. Putman. Fac-simile edition. Bloemendaal: Stichting Libri Antilliani.