Hosted by Cornell’s Emerging Markets Institute, the Emerging Markets Webinar Series is a monthly initiative that highlights key concepts and ideas occurring in emerging markets. The theme for 2021 is “Building Bridges and Encouraging Dialogue,” with online sessions profiling four emerging markets: Africa, Latin America, India, and China. The goal of the webinar series is to engage and educate the community about emerging trends worldwide, aided by a panel of economic development experts on each region.

The first session in the series showcases Africa, as four panelists discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by this exciting emerging market.

Sarayaku’s Kichwa communities were central to Ecuador’s first National Indigenous Uprising in 1990 and are at the forefront of indigenous rights mobilization. Come listen to four leaders from Sarayaku's indigenous communities and learn more about indigenous cosmologies & human rights frameworks. Come listen to four leaders from Sarayaku's indigenous communities (Abigail Gualinga, Mario Santi, Yaku Viteri, and Fausto Santi) and learn more about indigenous cosmologies & human rights frameworks.

Registration required: https://bit.ly/3anacht

Co-Sponsors: American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS), Latin American Studies Program, funded in part by its UISFL grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education, CUSLAR (Committee on U.S. Latin American Relations), and the Cornell Law School

For more informaton and a beautiful film check this out: https://amazonwatch.org/work/sarayaku

The research seminar series is an initiative of the Emerging Markets Theme of the Cornell S.C. Johnson College of Business, which focuses on engaging students and faculty in discourse over the role of emerging markets in an increasingly connected world.

Every month, we will host a speaker to expand our understanding of emerging economies through research and diverse perspectives. Join us in welcoming Johanna Mair on March 2 at 12pm ET.

Johanna Mair is Professor of Organization, Strategy and Leadership at the Hertie School. Her research focuses on how novel organisational and institutional arrangements generate economic and social development. Mair is also the Distinguished Fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Academic Editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Co-Director of the Global Innovation for Impact Lab.

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Feature documentary follows Multi Grammy Award winners Arturo O’Farrill and Kabir Sehgal, as they prepare to record a live album at the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The project is inspired by the annual Fandango Fronterizo Festival, which unites people on both sides of the Tijuana-San Diego border. This festival features son jarocho, a 300-year-old folk music tradition. Before recording, festival organizer, Jorge Francisco Castillo, takes O’Farrill and Sehgal on a tour of Veracruz, Mexico, where this musical mixture of indigenous, Spanish, and African traditions originated. As they travel, they meet legendary son jarocho musicians such as Patricio Hidalgo, Fernando Guadarrama, Ramón Gutiérrez, Wendy Cao Romero, Tacho Utrera, Andrés Vega, Martha Vega, Yaratczé Hidalgo Sandoval — and recruit many of these artists for the upcoming festival. Their travels cumulate with the annual celebration, promoting peace and celebrating unity. From executive producers, Quincy Jones, Andrew Young, Carlos Santana, the film introduces the beautiful music of the region through intimate interviews and captivating concert footage. Directed by Varda Bar-Kar.

Website for film, with images: http://fandangowall.com/film/

Co-Sponsored by: Latin American Studies Program, Latina/o Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell Cinema, and the Migrations Initiative

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Professor 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 her 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.

Emily Celeste Vazquez Enriquez holds a licenciatura in Hispanic literature from the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Mexico, an M.A. in Spanish with specialization in Latin American literature from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University. Focused on the fields of border and migration studies, in her research she analyzes the social and discursive intersections between speculation and environment. Particularly, she is interested in studying speculative border fiction depicting the built and natural environments of the Guatemala-Mexico and Mexico-U.S. borderlands.

Co-Sponsored by: Latin American Studies Program, Latina/o Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell Cinema, and the Migrations Initiative

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Oscar A. Pérez is an assistant professor of Spanish language and Hispanic studies at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. He holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a master’s in the history of science and scientific communication from the University of Valencia, Spain. His research focuses on science, technology, and the environment in Hispanic literature and film. His work has appeared in critical volumes and various academic journals, including Hispania, Hispanic Issues Online, Imagofagia, Ibérica, and Film International. He is currently working on two book projects. The first one examines the relationship between authoritarianism and medicine in the Spanish-speaking world. The second one looks at contemporary narratives of disease in rural environments.

Co-Sponsored by: Latin American Studies Program, Latina/o Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell Cinema, and the Migrations Initiative

Exorbitant Dust: Manuel Ramos Otero’s Queer and Colonial Matters

REGISTER FOR WEBINAR
March 31
4:30PM

Christina León is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University. Her work centers on hemispheric American literature with a focus on Latinx, Caribbean, and diasporic studies, in addition to feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. She is currently completing her first monograph, Radiant Opacity: Textured Aesthetics of Queer Latinidad. She is also co-editor of a special issue of Women and Performance entitled “Lingering in Latinidad: Theory, Aesthetics, and Performance in Latina/o Studies.” Her articles and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in ASAP/Journal, Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, GLQ, Sargasso: a Journal of Caribbean Language, Literature & Culture, Small Axe, and Post-45.

This event is sponsored by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Studies

Pedagogical concerns of curiosity, minoritarian difference, and ethics in teaching

Cornell Graduate Student Workshop with Christina León
Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University

REGISTER to join conversation
March 31
12:30PM

Christina has published a piece merging her theoretical interest in opacity with pedagogical concerns of curiosity, minoritarian difference, and ethics in teaching which can be found (open access) HERE.

Christina León is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University. Her work centers on hemispheric American literature with a focus on Latinx, Caribbean, and diasporic studies, in addition to feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. She is currently completing her first monograph, Radiant Opacity: Textured Aesthetics of Queer Latinidad. She is also co-editor of a special issue of Women and Performance entitled “Lingering in Latinidad: Theory, Aesthetics, and Performance in Latina/o Studies.” Her articles and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in ASAP/Journal, Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, GLQ, Sargasso: a Journal of Caribbean Language, Literature & Culture, Small Axe, and Post-45.

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Georgina J. Whittingham (B.A. Queens College, M.A. Stanford University, Ph.D. Rutgers University) is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the State University of New York at Oswego. She is the author of the book Gilberto Owen y la crisis del lenguage poético (Gilberto Owen and the Crisis of Poetic Language) published by Mexico's Autonomous State University Press and has published book chapters and articles on Hispanic theatre, poetry and narrative in texts issued by academic publishing houses and journals such as Iberoamericana/ Vervuert/Verlag, KARPA, Latin American Theatre Review, Romance Language Annual, Texto Crítico, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, and Studies in Modern and Classical Languages. Her recent research centers on image and text in contemporary Mexican Literature.

Co-Sponsored by: Latin American Studies Program, Latina/o Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell Cinema, and the Migrations Initiative

Spanish colonial accounts of the former Inka Empire chart a vast political landscape of diverse ethnic polities that were differentiated by language, dress, and custom. The ethno-territorial maps derived from these accounts have significantly shaped how archaeologists describe and classify stylistic variation in cultural practices. Specifically, archaeologists have come to view cranial modification, the intentional reshaping of the head during infancy, as a quintessentially ethnic emblem that marked one “kind of people” as distinct from another. This approach unwittingly adopts a view from the outside and above—outside because it makes an exotic practice legible through the Western concept of ethnicity; above because it reinscribes categories of difference historically politicized by the state. Shifting the focus from ethnic symbol to embodied subject, my research attempts an archaeological reconstruction of cranial modification as it was experienced by those who practiced it. Through a richly contextualized case study integrating historical documentation, archaeological evidence, and biocultural data from human skeletal remains, I show how head shaping practices intersected gender, kinship, and status identities and contributed to emerging social inequalities in the era before Inka imperial expansion (1000 – 1450 CE). Such diversity in lived experience is masked by ethno-territorial models that present the ethnic group as a homogenous unit. In their place, indigenous Andean understandings of personhood provide a better account of how social difference operated on the ground and became naturalized in the body.

Matthew Velasco is an anthropological bioarchaeologist who studies ancient populations of the Peruvian Andes through the analysis of their skeletal remains. His research explores the emergence of novel ethnic identities and cultural traditions during the era preceding and encompassing Inka imperial expansion in the 15th century. To explore how these dynamic social transformations impacted the lived experience of the body and its treatment at death, he analyzes and interprets indicators of social identity, biological relatedness, diet, and health status written on the human skeleton.

His teaching spans the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, covering topics such as mortuary practice, human skeletal anatomy, forensic anthropology, and human evolution. He is currently developing undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on bioarchaeology, the archaeology of death and dying, and the embodiment of inequality.