This inter-disciplinary conference brings together experts on questions of climate change, agrarian transformations and labor to help us reflect on the future of work.

Overview

The future of work is hot. Literally. Unpredictable seasons, droughts, floods, warming temperatures, rising seas, and a host of other climatic factors are changing what work is, what it means, and what it does to the body. These effects are unevenly felt across geographies and forms of difference.

These effects spill out beyond the factories, fields, and construction sites scholars conventionally associate with legible acts of labor. Self-employed or “informal” workers in cities face new threats from the compounding factors of rising heat and air pollution. Ecotourism sectors have been reconfigured to make climate crisis, extinction, and other consequences of planetary change into sites for “disaster tourism” and consumption. A low-paid service industry coalesces around climate dystopia. The bodily effects of heat and work are newly burdening women, who disproportionately perform unremunerated, devalued reproductive labor in domestic spaces. Questions about the future of work in the context of climate crisis, then, are as much about techno-fixes as they are about home and family.

See the full list of speakers on the registration page.

Join the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies's Global Public Voices fellows for a roundtable discussion exploring global free speech as part of Cornell's freedom of expression theme year.

This year's fellows are seasoned media voices, ready to advocate on global free speech questions central to current events, public policy, and their international research expertise.

Freedom of Expression Faculty Fellows

Oumar Ba, Assistant Professor, GovernmentAlexandra Dufresne, Professor of the Practice, Cornell Brooks School of Public PolicySharif Hozoori, IIE-SRF Fellow and Visiting Scholar Karim-Aly Saleh Kassam, International Professor of Environmental and Indigenous StudiesThe Einaudi Center's undergraduate global scholars will present their freedom of expression capstone projects at an accompanying event at 4 p.m. in Mann 112 (CALS Zone) prior to this event.

Department of History of Art & Visual Studies Findley Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Devika Singh, (Senior Lecturer in Curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London).

This Findley Lecture will take place in Goldwin Smith Hall G22.
Reception to follow.

Abstract

The lecture will take Devika Singh’s recent book International Departures: Art in India after Independence as a starting point to discuss transnational readings of art in India. Described as a major contribution to a new, transnational history of art, this captivating and richly illustrated account presents together for the first time the work of Indian
and foreign artists active in India after independence in 1947. It engages with the many creators, critics and patrons of the postwar Indian art worlds and opens up new ways of thinking about Indian art, closely examining artworks and analysing how they were received in India and abroad. Featuring a wealth of rare and previously unpublished images, this provocative book explores how artists in India participated in global modernism during a crucial period of decolonization and nation building.

Speaker Biography

Devika Singh is Senior Lecturer in Curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She was previously Curator, International Art at Tate Modern where she was in charge of South Asian art and part of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. She curated exhibitions and collection displays at the CSMVS, Mumbai, the Dhaka Art Summit, the Dubai Design District, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge, UK) and Tate Modern. Her writing has appeared widely in exhibition catalogues, art reviews such as frieze, Art Press and MARG and in the journals Art History, Modern Asian Studies, the Journal of Art Historiography and Third Text. Her book International Departures: Art in India after Independence (Reaktion Books) was released in early 2024 in the United States.

Register to watch the final: https://emiconference.com/

Find more about competition: https://pitch.emiconference.com/

The Cornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch Competition invites student entrepreneurs and recent graduates operating startups in emerging markets to network with fellow students, speak with expert mentors and pitch their startups to investors in the emerging markets annually.

The registration for startups competing at the 2024 Cornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch Competition is NOW CLOSE. And the finalists are announced:

Coco Technologies Universidad EAFIT – Colombia
Medical booking platform to maximize collections and patient experience
KalPay Lahore University of Management Sciences – Pakistan
Convenient lending for the underbanked
AnTa ESADE Business School - Spain
E-commerce marketplace that aggregates the inventory of thousands of independent boutiques onto a single platform. Focus on Ghana and other Sub-Saharan African countries.
Pro Investing Universidad de los Andes - Colombia
Transforming Global Investing: Democratizing Access to Family Office
Investments
iOptiCrane The Hong Kong Polytechnic University – Hong
Kong
AI for Safe and Ideal Crane Layout in Construction

Find here Rules and Guidelines.

Special thanks to Mark Mobius, the sponsor of this event, and to the committee chairs: Osagie Oigiagbe, Ying Xue, and Carlos Bernos Amoros.

Talk by Kathryn Babayan (History, University of Michigan)

This talk spotlights a rant ascribed to a woman from the Bakhtiari tribal group of Lurs living in the vicinity of Isfahan in southwestern Iran. The letter is undated. It finds its way to Isfahan as a collector’s item recorded in several late seventeenth-century anthologies. The vernacular language deployed in the letter ascribed to a Bakhtiari woman uses sexual insults to publicize the infidelity of her husband. I will read this rant to project the female voice otherwise excluded from epistolary collections of seventeenth century anthologies.

Kathryn Babayan (History, University of Michigan) is a social and cultural historian of the early-modern Persianate world with a particular focus on gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Babayan is the author of two award-winning books: The City as Anthology: Urbanity and Eroticism in Early Modern Isfahan (SUP, 2021) and Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Harvard University Press, 2003). She has also co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavi Iran, with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad (I.B. Tauris, 2004), and co-edited two books Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire with Afsaneh Najmabadi (Harvard University Press, 2008), and An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion with Michael Pifer (Palgarve Macmillan, 2018).

Lunch provided, please RSVP

Cosponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, the Department of History, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the South Asia Program, and the Comparative Muslim Societies Program.

The latest in the Tata-Cornell Institute's FAN series, "Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition in South Asia: Building Health, Sustainable Food Systems" provides a snapshot of malnutrition in countries across South Asia, offering a range of policy instruments for improving nutrition outcomes across the region.

At this launch event, report author Milorad Plavsic will present the overall findings of the report. TCI Director Prabhu Pingali will lead a panel discussion on food systems in South Asia featuring Cornell faculty members:

Andrew McDonald, School of Integrative Plant ScienceArnab Basu, Dyson School of Applied Economics and ManagementRamya Ambikapathi, Department of Global DevelopmentAttendees are invited to enjoy refreshments at a post-event reception.

You can download the FAN-South Asia report from the TCI website.