As in years prior, this conference, cosponsored by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, provides an opportunity for graduate students to critically engage with the particularities of Sri Lanka and its diasporas; particularities often sacrificed to make our work speak clearly to non-specialist audiences. While we acknowledge the many benefits of such generalized engagement, we also recognize a keen need to build community around a shared sense of context. If there is something unique about the field of Sri Lankan Studies, then gathering in a common space to discuss the specificities of a local context offers opportunities to consider not only how this material contributes to the academic conversations in which it tends to be subsumed, but also how conventions of rigor, generosity, and accountability might best be achieved amongst scholars most intimately familiar with the conditions of producing this material. This conference will feature papers from within Sri Lanka; papers that engage with contemporary Sri Lankan scholarship, recognizing that the study of Sri Lanka within Sri Lanka often finds nuances lost in generalized or comparative disciplines around the globe; and reflections on the ways in which our institutional locations determine our approach to the study of Sri Lanka.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

9:00-9:15 am Welcome

Anne Blackburn (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

9:15-10:30 am Panel 1

“These drifting Somalis”: Migration and Identity Formation in the Talaimannar-Djibouti circuit, 1919–1946

Ifadha Sifar (History, Columbia University)

Tangible and Intangible Freedom: Manumission and Emancipation in the late 18th and early 19th century Colombo

Sanayi Marcelline (History, University of Leiden)

Discussant: Durba Ghosh (History, Cornell University)

10:45 am-12:00 pm Panel 2

On Absences and Presences: A Speculative Reading of Disappearance under Liberal Modernity

Themal Ellawala ( Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago)

Hustling Through A Pandemic: The Implications of COVID-19 on Sex Work in Urban Sri Lanka

F. Zahrah Rizwan (Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Ohio State University)

Discussant: Lucinda E. G. Ramberg (Anthropology, Cornell University)

1:30-2:00 pm Resources for Sri Lankan Studies

Daniel Bass (South Asia Program, Cornell University)

2:00-3:15 pm Panel 3

The Black Legend in/of Ceylon: Kaffrinha, Créolité, and Imperial Difference between the 19th Century and the Present

Praveen Tilakaratne (Comparative Literature, Cornell University)

What Remains? Genealogy, Language, and the Politics of Un/belonging

Deborah Philip (Anthropology, City University of New York)

Discussant: Hadia Akhtar Khan (Future of Work, Cornell University)

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "Book Talk: Seeing China’s Belt and Road."

Speaker: Rachel Silvey, Professor, Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto

Description: Launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's signature trillion-dollar global policy. Based on infrastructure development assistance and financing, the BRI quickly set in motion a possible restructuring of the global economy and indeed the world order. In Seeing China's Belt and Road, Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey assemble leading field researchers to consider the BRI from different "downstream" contexts, ranging from Central and Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa. By uncovering perspectives on the BRI from Chinese authorities, local businesses, state bureaucrats, expatriated migrants, ordinary citizens, and environmental activists, Seeing China's Belt and Road shows the BRI's dynamic, multidimensional character as it manifests in specific sites. A timely analysis of the BRI, this book moves beyond polarized debates about China's rise and offers a grounded assessment of the dynamic complexity of changes to the world order.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

One of the key challenges stemming from climate change will be climate displacement, as sudden and gradual events disrupt livelihoods and force millions to leave their homes. Despite the existing scholarship’s focus on cross-border movement, the majority of climate displaced people will move internally instead of or before seeking refuge outside their nation’s borders. What obligations do states owe to their citizens when those states have historically not been emitters but have still failed to protect domestic populations from displacement related to environmental disasters and climate change impacts? Through exploring the disaster management framework in Colombia and conducting a case study of the town of Gramalote, this talk discusses the obligations that states like Colombia owe to their internally displaced populations in the context of climate change. Given the inexorability and foreseeability of climate displacement, this talk argues that states have an obligation to recognize climate displacement, plan ahead to protect their populations’ rights, and implement best practices under international human rights law throughout relocation and resettlement processes. Irrespective of the driver of displacement, displaced individuals should not be subject to a bifurcated regime of protection that treats displacement due to civil disruption, violence, or armed conflict distinctly from displacement in the context of climate change and environmental disasters.

About the Speaker
Camila Bustos is an Assistant Professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Before joining Haub Law, Professor Bustos was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College and a Clinical Supervisor in human rights practice at the University Network for Human Rights. She also served as a term law clerk to Justice Steven D. Ecker of the Connecticut Supreme Court and as a consultant with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).

Professor Bustos graduated from Yale Law School, where she received the Francis Wayland Prize and was a Switzer Foundation Fellow and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. She worked at the Center for Climate Integrity, the Climate Litigation Network, and EarthRights International during law school. Professor Bustos also co-founded Law Students for Climate Accountability, a national law student-led movement pushing the legal industry to phase out fossil fuel representation and support a just, livable future. Prior to law school, she worked as a human rights researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) in Colombia.

Professor Bustos’s research and scholarship focus on human rights law, environmental law, legal ethics, and climate change law.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-sponsor
Migrations Program
Cornell Law School
Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability