Are you interested in the intersection of mental health and culture, global health, and community engagement? Do you want to gain field research skills and learn about indigenous communities in South India’s beautiful and fragile Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve? If so, the Cornell-Keystone Nilgiris Field Learning Program might be for you!

Talk by Rohit Lamba (Economics, Cornell University)

India has a remarkable digital infrastructure, a burgeoning demographic dividend, a stable democracy, a high-performing high-tech services sector, a learned and arguably well-meaning elite, and a phenomenally successful diaspora. There is also rising interest in the West to diversify economic supply chains away from China. Many omens suggest it may just be India's time to break upwards from a low-middle-income country to the high-middle-income category. Two key constraints may hold this march back. First, India's structural transformation has been unusual in having broadly skipped low-skilled manufacturing as a dominant contributor to total output and employment, like Korea and China. Will this be a feature or a bug in the coming decades? Second, India's state architecture continues to be stubbornly centralized at all levels of funds, functions, and functionaries. Will the ensuing compromise in public provision of basic health and education prove irreversible? In sum, can India overcome these challenges to become rich before it becomes old? Professor Lamba will examine this issue and discuss his new book Breaking the Mold: India's Untraveled Path to Prosperity (2024).

Rohit Lamba is an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. He has previously held academic positions at Penn State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University Abu Dhabi. He did his PhD in economics at Princeton University. He was also an economist at the Office of the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. Rohit's research focuses on economic theory and economic development. He is the co-author (with Raghuram Rajan) of a recent book Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity, published by Princeton University Press internationally and by Penguin Random House in India.

Talk by Abdul Haque Chang (Social Sciences, Institute of Business Administration, Karachi)

This talk shows how in Sindh, the state of environmental exception has become the norm for governance (as in Agamben's formulation regarding the suspension of law). Specifically, this state of exception refers to a situation where necessity takes precedence over the law, resulting in a gap in the legal system. As a result, a zone of indistinction exists where environmental exception has become Pakistan's governance paradigm in Sindh. Through ethnographic experiences from the Indus Delta, coastal areas of Sindh, urban housing projects, and the land acquisition of Indigenous inhabitants by housing tycoons, this study illustrates how ecological martyrdom is occurring in Sindh due to environmental exception. This study demonstrates how the debates surrounding man-made and nature-based climate change should be located within the broader context of state governance policies in Pakistan, particularly regarding their effects on Sindh. The discussion highlights how the experiences and histories of local communities, along with the processes of urban development in Karachi and Sindh, have impacted specific populations in the pursuit of creating a utopian urban infrastructure that benefits other populations in Pakistan.

Abdul Haque Chang is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) in Karachi, Pakistan. His ethnographic research focuses on religion, Sufism, music, and environmental anthropology in Sindh, Pakistan, and Java, Indonesia. He is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the concept of "environmental exception" in Sindh, specifically regarding the practice of sacrifice in the context of environmental degradation. Chang has conducted ethnographic research on Sufi music in Sindh, particularly on Shah Jo Raag, a Sufi musical tradition. He studies Javanese Sufism in Indonesia through his project "Jathilan: Performativity and the (Re)Production of Javanese Sacrality." This project highlights how Javanese performance art challenges gender norms and serves as a form of cultural resistance.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register here. Can't attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

The Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Awards fund international fieldwork to help Cornell students complete their dissertations. Through a generous gift from Amit Bhatia, this funding opportunity annually supports at least six PhD students who have passed the A exam. Recipients hold the title of Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Scholars. All disciplines and research topics are welcome. The award provides $10,000 to be used by the end of the sixth PhD year for international travel, living expenses, and research expenses. Applications are due March 7, 2025.

The Einaudi Dissertation Proposal Development Program supports 12 students over the course of a year to participate in seminars, workshops, and mentoring sessions and receive up to $5,000 for summer research. Applicants’ research projects must focus on global issues, but the proposed research setting may be international or domestic. In addition to six weeks of summer research, the program includes community-building and mentoring events. Applications are due by March 2, 2025.

Register here. Can't attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Talk by Zehra Hashmi (History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania)

This talk examines how and why Pakistan’s national biometric-based identification regime came to use an individual’s blood relations to construct and track uniquely identified individuals. Through the concept of datafied kinship, it proposes that the uses of kin networks in Pakistan’s identity database, as information, can reconfigure our understanding of contemporary identification practices at large: individual identity is generated and tracked through relatedness, not unique bodily characteristics, or biometrics alone. To demonstrate this, it first examines how the database design works to construct identity through kin, and specifically how it excludes individuals on the basis of their kin through technological categories such as that of the “family intruder.” Second, it shows how this mode of individual identification differs and departs from the longstanding classificatory schemas that were so foundational to taxonomizing identity along the lines of caste, tribe, and religion in South Asia. It traces this diverging logic—between classification and individuation—to the emergence of individuating technologies in 1970s Pakistan, in the aftermath of the civil war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and during the escalating Cold War in the region. In so doing, it illustrates how the political stakes of Pakistan’s identification regime lie not only in its new possibilities for surveillance, a function of its individuating and tracking technology, or its classificatory refusal, but also in their interconnections.

Zehra Hashmi is an assistant professor in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an anthropologist and historian who works on identification technologies in South Asia. Her research explores the everyday workings of securitization and surveillance in Pakistan through the intersection of identification, migration, kinship, and postcolonial and colonial governance. She received her PhD from the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan.

Talk by Ghazal Asif (Anthropology, Lahore University of Management Science)

For the past decade, the press in Pakistan has remained rife with stories of the kidnapping, forcible conversion to Islam, and marriages of young Hindu women at the hands of Muslim men. Women’s rights and minority advocacy groups have demanded a state-led response, but two attempts at legislation have already failed. In courts, legal redress requires a clear, visible difference between forcible abduction and what is termed “free will” elopement. However, these matters are complicated further when the very nature of Hindu women’s desires appears indeterminate. Accusations that young Hindu women have been seduced (warghalana) into conversion by Muslim men compete with claims that such women leave their natal homes upon becoming irrepressibly attracted to Islam and the Prophet. Drawing on an archive of conversions, elopements, and love affairs that I have been collecting since 2014, in this talk I problematize reductive binaries that focus only on the presence or absence of “free will”, to ask how hierarchies of il/licit desire feed into the public question of just who can claim control of young Hindu women’s bodies in Pakistan. I argue that the seeming unknowability of women’s desires underscores the entangled sexual and religious stakes at the heart of these events.

Ghazal Asif Farrukhi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at LUMS, Lahore. In 2024-25, she is a fellow at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Ghazal is currently completing a book manuscript provisionally titled Hindu Intimacies Amidst Pakistan’s Muslim State, which focuses on how Hindu women navigate ritual, devotional, and social boundaries while constituting the interface for the state-led reform of religiously minoritized communities. She also writes on the politics of caste emancipation in Pakistan. Her research has been published in American Ethnologist, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Talk by Renny Thomas (Sociology & Social Anthropology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal)

My book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (2021), explored ethnographically, the various ways in which Indian scientists lived their religious and scientific lives. In this lecture, I attempt to examine conversations and debates from the early days of space science in India by examining how different Indian stakeholders responded to the new developments in understanding the cosmos and how they imagined space and space science. The ISRO, or the Indian Space Research Organization is one of the largest and generously funded techno-scientific projects in post-colonial India with many successes, ups and downs. The intention of this lecture is not to discuss the case of ISRO. Instead, the lecture examines the early days of ‘space science’; the small history of a big scientific project in modern India. Based on archival sources, I look at how the cosmos and space were discussed in the parliamentary debates and the curiosity it generated among various actors in the early 1960s. The lecture analyzes the nature of those debates to see how space science was imagined religiously and how categories from religion were employed to describe the nature of space, cosmos, and space science.

Renny Thomas is currently the Taki Visiting Global Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University (NYU-Gallatin), New York (2024-2025) and an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. He has been a Charles Wallace Fellow in Social Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK (2017-2018), and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Cultural History at Friedrich-Schiller University-Jena, Germany (2022-2023). He is the author of Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations (Routledge, 2022), Religion and Technology: Power, the Sacred, and the Digital (forthcoming), and Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (forthcoming).