Perspectives in Global Development: Spring 2024 Seminar Series

Abstract

Food and nutrition security is the fundamental base for future human development. Feeding more than a third of the world's population makes food security in China and India not only matter to themselves but is also a significant part of food security at a regional and global level. Among the worsening complex challenges many countries face, there have been growing concerns regarding the food security of China and India amid growing threats from climate shocks, which are the world's most populous countries and major food traders. This study examines challenges of food security posed by climate change in China and India, analyzes their current food security status and food production system, compares their relevant agrifood policies, and proposes future pathways.

About the Speaker

Dr. Ting Meng is an associate professor at the Academy of Global Food Economics and Policy (AGFEP) in the College of Economics and Management at China Agricultural University in Beijing, China. She obtained her PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Georgia and conducted postdoctoral research on environmental policy and economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are agricultural economics and environmental economics, including sustainable technology adoption, nonmarket evaluation of environmental policy, and climate change and agriculture. Her research topic at Tata-Cornell Institute, which is housed in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University is “Transforming agrifood systems for sustainable development: a comparative perspective of China and India.”

Perspectives in Global Development

The Perspectives in Global Development seminars are held Wednesdays from 12:20-1:20 p.m. eastern time during the semester. The series is presented in a hybrid format. All seminars are shown in 175 Warren Hall. Students, faculty and the general public are welcome to attend. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development, the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the School of Integrative Plant Science as part of courses GDEV 4961, AEM 4961, NTRES 4961, GDEV 6960, AEM 6960, and NTRES 6960.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

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.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

“ The Care and Feeding of Names: The Ritual Labor of Bejuni Priestesses and Cosmological Life in Autochthonous India”

Talk abstract:

Bejuni are female ritual specialists whose rites repair and regenerate ecological, social, and cosmological relationships crucial for life in the densely jungled Niyam Donger mountains of present-day Southern Odisha state in India. Often elderly and widowed, bejuni women play key roles in a cosmologically expansive process that recycles the dead back into life. During ethnographic research, I came to understand that bejuni labor is built around the ethical and material maintenance and repair of name-lines, capacious forms of personhood that move across conventional boundaries between lives and deaths and carry with them rights in swidden gardens and in persons. Their practices enact forms of social reproduction beyond sexual conjugality, situating personhood's temporalities outside biological regimes of life. Rupina, life cycle rites for name-lines, are managed by bejuni to create stability across the vagaries of life and death, and to reproduce togetherness and solidarity between living humans, ancestral kin, and spirit beings who abide throughout the landscape. Cosmological lifeworlds centered on female bejuni priestesses face displacement due to ecological demands accompanying regional mountaintop bauxite mining and its severe impacts on water supply and flow. This talk expands directions in black and indigenous feminist theory (Tuck 2009; Lorde 1984) and feminist anthropology of religion (Apffel-Marglin 1983; Mahmood 2004; Ramberg 2013) to elaborate the implications of bejuni praxis within a cosmological framework of social reproduction. Bejuni modes of cosmo-social reproduction offer a deeper reckoning of what is lost when mountains are torn down for capitalist natural resource extraction, raising critical questions about what counts as environmental justice and who are its intended beneficiaries.

Scholar Bio:

I am a sociocultural anthropologist and ethnographic fieldworker, having recently completed my Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at Cornell University (Dec ’23). As a social scientist, I am interested in forging connections between complex global issues and locally situated experiences to render macro-level issues comprehensible in human-scale terms. My research sheds light on the shrouded social and ecological implications of the green energy economy by closely examining how communities in mountainous eastern India, affected by multinational corporate aluminum mining, endeavor to regenerate their social and ecological environments amidst climate change. I am interested in drawing upon ethnographic data and multi-species, ontological, and indigenous feminist analytic frameworks to ask: 1) what counts as environmental justice and for what types of lives and bodies; and 2) how do conventional distinctions between religion and secularism unevenly distribute the impacts of climate change, often concentrating the ecological effects of elite global consumerism within autochthonous communities at the peripheries of world economies. Based on long-term immersive ethnographic research conducted in Odia and Kui/Kubi languages and supported by Fulbright-Hays, my dissertation research explores the intricate material economies and multifaceted social and environmental displacements that Jharnia (“Dongria Kondho”) interlocutors experience to accompany regional natural resource development. Entitled “Keepers of Water: Religion, Ecology, and Ethics as Materiality along a Green Energy Frontier in Tribal Odisha, India,” my dissertation is set amidst India’s geologically ancient Eastern Ghats mountains, along the rapidly expanding aluminum-bauxite natural resource frontier. There, mountainous landscapes revered by Jharnia indigenous interlocutors as their originary ancestor, a sovereign deity, and a living landscape are also coveted by mining companies for the potential natural resource wealth hidden beneath their jungled surfaces in the form of bauxite. Bauxite ore is strip-mined, refined into alumina powder, and then smelted into lightweight, strong, and flexible aluminum metals to feed the global proliferation of aluminum-dependent electric vehicles, fuel cells, military drones, inter-stellar reusable rockets, and recyclable soda-pop cans. Amidst unprecedented ecological challenges characterized by droughts, flooding, and the persistent impacts of metallic dust and water pollution, my dissertation, supported by a grant from the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, utilizes indigenous Jharnia water management practices to demonstrate that Jharnia social life, colonial categories of knowledge about religion, and the materialities of natural resources are intricately interconnected and entangled along the bauxite frontier in indigenous India.

"In September 2018, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, sister of Rushan Abbas, was abducted by Chinese authorities shortly after Rushan's speech condemning the Uyghur genocide. The documentary "In Search of My Sister" chronicles Rushan's relentless pursuit of truth and justice, spanning multiple countries. The film also exposes the CCP's harrowing crimes against humanity through the personal story of Rushan and other Uyghurs in the diaspora. "In Search of My Sister" has been screened worldwide, shedding light on these atrocities."

This screening is followed by a Q&A Session with Rushan Abbas.

About the Speaker

Rushan Abbas’s activism started in the mid-1980s as a student at Xinjiang University, co-organizing pro-democracy demonstrations in Urumchi in 1985 and 1988. Since her arrival in the United States in 1989, Ms. Abbas has been an ardent campaigner for the human rights of the Uyghur people. Ms. Abbas is the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) and became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism for Uyghurs following her sister’s detainment by the Chinese government in 2018. Ms. Abbas has spearheaded numerous campaigns, including the “One Voice One Step” movement, which culminated in a simultaneous demonstration in 14 countries and 18 cities on March 15, 2018, to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps.

Ms. Abbas frequently briefs global lawmakers and officials on the Uyghur genocide and provides testimonies at legislative bodies worldwide, such as the U.S. Congress, and other parliaments. She advocates for raising awareness and engaging in discussions on policy options to address the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party and halt the ongoing Uyghur genocide. She also serves as the Chairperson for the Advisory Board of the Axel Springer Freedom Foundation and as a board member of the Task Force on Human Trafficking within the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum.

In 2019, Ms. Abbas received the Freedom Fighter Award, and her work was recognized at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2020. Under her leadership, CFU published the 'Genocide in East Turkistan' report in July 2020, leading to the organization receiving the World Democracy Courage Tribute in 2021 and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2022.

Tickets
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Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-Host
Cornell Cinema

Film screening and Q&A with Shaunak Sen (Director)

In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep and All that Breathes) explores the connection between the kites and the brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence. All That Breathes was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Academy Award in 2023.

Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs, and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, among others) and won 6 international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018) and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen, and other journals.

The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) gives students multiple ways to engage with Southeast Asia. Affiliate with our program to be informed of all SEAP events and activities. Undergraduates who minor in Southeast Asian Studies are advised by SEAP Program Faculty advisors who collaborate with them to construct a course of study based upon their area of interest. SEAP also runs the CU in Cambodia program for students interested in international travel.

Can’t attend? Contact seap@cornell.edu.

***

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.