Our world is in dire need of repair. From collapsing infrastructures and ecological devastation to fraying democratic institutions and longue durée effects of colonial violence, the language of repair has become ubiquitous to our understanding of continuity and change. Particularly in South Asia—where accelerating crises of neoliberal capitalism intersect with totalizing forms of political power—projects of repair are everywhere. Scholars writing about repair have invited us to consider repair as an ongoing work by which infrastructures are “earned and re-earned” (Jackson 2015) through everyday care, maintenance, and intervention, while they accrete in formations comprising multiple temporalities, histories, and political rationalities (Anand 2015). Infrastructures, by their nature of incompleteness and uneven accretions of social–material relations, constantly call forth projects of maintenance and repair. But what does it mean to repair? Who repairs, under what conditions, and to what ends?

We invite proposals from students at Cornell University, Syracuse University, and University of Rochester for a one-day graduate workshop, organized by the Cornell South Asia Program, to think with repair as an analytic that cuts across social science and humanistic inquiry. We approach repair not simply as a technical solution to breakdown, but as a material and discursive practice deeply embedded in political economy, historical accountability, and struggles over democracy and equality. Thinking expansively, this workshop aims to understand repair as operating across multiple scales and registers. Repair speaks to material concerns—roads, embankments, housing, energy systems, ecosystems—but also to discursive and institutional domains such as postcolonial reckoning and reparation. Repair may signal continuity and stabilization, reproducing existing arrangements under the guise of maintenance. At other moments, it may open possibilities for rupture or refusal. Attending to repair foregrounds the labor, affect, and politics involved in keeping things going, asking when repair may foreground or foreclose certain kinds of prefigurative politics. The workshop aims to create an interdisciplinary space for collective thinking and feedback, welcoming work at all stages—from early conceptual explorations to advanced drafts. Beyond the single-day event, we hope this gathering will foster an ongoing conversation about how repair, as both practice and analytic, can help us critically apprehend contemporary crises and imagine more just futures in and beyond South Asia.

Symposium Schedule

9:00-9:05 Welcome

Sarah Besky (Global Labor and Work, Cornell University)

9:05-10:45 Panel 1: Labor, Environment, and the Politics of (Re)Production

Fruit King, Super Fast: The Politics and Labor of Perishability in Himachal's Apple Economy

Parijat Jha (Anthropology, Cornell University)

Hydromodernity at Her Expense: Gendered Labor and the Politics of Environmental Decline at Manchar Lake

Sarah Hussain (History, Tufts University)

Making Place, Making Livelihood: Ethnic Enclaves as Resistance

Zanaya Hussain (Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University)

Strengthening Food Transfers for Maternal Health and Nutrition: Evidence from Rural India

Sumedha Minocha (Applied Economics & Management, Cornell University)

Chair/Discussant: Ashawari Chaudhuri (Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University)

11:00-12:15 Panel 2: State Repair: Technology, Law, and Governance

“Maintenance is our middle name”: Computer Repair Expertise and the Indian State, 1975-91

Jai Vipra (Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University)

“Broken Laws” - India’s Reckoning and Repair of Colonial-Era Legal Statutes

Mohona Ganguly (Public Administration, Syracuse University)

Repairing Indian Education System: Can AI Help in this Process?

Deepak Dennison (Information Science, Cornell University)

Chair/Discussant: Sarah Thompson (Government, Cornell University)

1:15-2:30 Panel 3: Memory, Space, and the Politics of Restoration

Mythological Repair: Babri Demolition, Sacred Labor, and the Architecture of Hindutva

Sara Ather (Architecture, Cornell University)

Tiptoeing Histories: Recuperating the Bagh as a Bagh

Yakin Kinger (Architecture, Cornell University)

Repairing the Colonial Archive: Francis Buchanan-Hamilton’s Botanical Illustrations and the Making of Imperial Knowledge in Nepal

Praagya Khand (Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University)

Chair/Discussant: Ayesha Matthan (History of Art, Cornell University)

This symposium is supported by a grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor.

Film directed by Kannan Arunasalam

Young activists lead Sri Lanka’s 2022 uprising, toppling an authoritarian president — but can fragile hope survive in a country built on forgetting?

Republic of Amnesia (2025) follows the rise and fall of Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (“The Struggle”) — the youth-led protest movement that forced authoritarian president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country in 2022. At its heart are young activists like Melani, Buwanaka and Jeana, who organise marches, face arrest, and confront a political system built to endure. As they challenge a powerful dynasty, their struggle raises a deeper question: can fragile hope survive in a country built on forgetting? As the spirit of the Aragalaya ripples across Asia, inspiring youth movements from Bangladesh to Indonesia, the film looks beyond the moment itself. It asks what remains and what is lost when a movement fades, and suggests that the struggle for democracy lies not only in institutions or leaders, but in the stories a society chooses to preserve.

Filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam and South Asia Program Senior Manager Daniel Bass will join for a conversation and Q&A after the screening.

Kannan Arunasalam is a British-Sri Lankan filmmaker working across documentary film and moving-image installation. His work explores memory, political resistance, and the legacies of conflict and colonialism. His installation The Tent (2019) was presented in a solo exhibition at Yorkshire Contemporary. His documentary Sri Lanka’s Rebel Wife (2021) was shortlisted for Best Documentary at the DIG Investigative Film Awards. He recently completed two feature documentaries: Republic of Amnesia (2025, UK/Sri Lanka), examining Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya protest movement, and Possible Landscapes (2025, US/Trinidad & Tobago), which premiered at the BlackStar Film Festival and explores intergenerational environmental experience.

In Sinhala, Tamil and English with English subtitles. More at republicofamnesia.film.

Come and explore international research from students at the Einaudi Center for International Studies. Our undergraduate Global Scholars will present posters on their international aid projects.

Global Scholars Showcase

Global Scholars will present a showcase of their capstone projects providing public commentary and perspectives on international aid.

Undergraduate global scholars consider the multiple perspectives that shape the global landscape of international aid and the communities impacted. They have partnered with Einaudi Center practitioner in residence Paul Kaiser and faculty mentor Ed Mabaya—expert researchers and practitioners on international development—to design their projects. Applications for the next cohort will open in fall 2026.

***

The Einaudi Spring Showcase is hosted by the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Department of History of Art & Visual Studies Findley Lecture Series.

Join us for a talk by Murad Khan Mumtaz, (Associate Professor, Williams College).

This Findley Lecture will take place in the AD White House's Guerlac Room.

Abstract

Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for Hindustan’s Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. By combining an art historical survey with an analysis of primary Indo-Persian literature, this talk shows how figurative painting was intimately linked to a unique Indo-Muslim religious expression that had a wide circulation across South Asia.

Biography

Murad Khan Mumtaz is an associate professor in the Art Department at Williams College. He examines historical intersections of art, literature and religious expression in South Asia, with a primary focus on Indo-Muslim patronage. By combining art history with textual analysis, his recent book, Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting (Brill, 2023), examines the cultural contexts within which these Islamicate images of devotion were made and viewed. Murad is also an artist trained in traditional Hindustani painting techniques which he teaches at Williams. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally.

European History Colloquium - Atina Grossmann, Distinguished Professor of History, The Cooper Union
Between “Orient” and European Catastrophe: Jewish Refugees from National Socialism in Iran and India 1935-1948.

Atina Grossmann is Distinguished Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City where she teaches courses on modern Europe, Fascism and National Socialism, the Holocaust, refugees and migration in global context as well as gender and sexuality studies. Relevant publications include: The Surviving Remnant: Documents on Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany 1945-1950 (with A.Kramen, A Patt, T. Lewinsky, 2024); chapter on “Aftermath” (with K. Bohus) in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (2015); Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus 2020), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick 2017), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007/09, German edition Wallstein 2012). as well as “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” (in Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt, 2023). In 2022-23 she was the Ina Levine Invitational Senior Scholar in Residence at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM. Her current research focuses on” Jewish Refugees from National Socialism in Iran and India: Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship.

International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell) in partnership with the Language Resource Center.

Register on CampusGroups to receive a reminder. Registration is not required.

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

In this year’s Bartels lecture, Ambassador Samantha Power examines the causes and consequences of dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While reductions in United States foreign assistance have inflicted harm on millions of people, the principal beneficiaries of the cuts, Power contends, are the People’s Republic of China and other governments that prefer to operate without scrutiny or accountability.

Join us as Power outlines a strategy for revitalizing a broad bipartisan coalition to support foreign assistance. To succeed in building resilient aid structures, politicians and stakeholders will need to demonstrate the effectiveness of aid programs to the public. U.S. resources should be used as leverage to secure new commitments from partner countries and mobilize additional investments from allied governments, the private sector, philanthropy, and members of the diaspora.

***

Speaker

Ambassador Samantha Power served in the Biden-Harris administration as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the world’s premier international development agency. She was the 28th U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama-Biden administration. Her first book, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

***

About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.