Part of Cornell’s yearlong exploration of freedom of expression, this event from Global Cornell brings together the campus community to discuss how Cornell can protect academic freedom while collaborating with institutions and scholars in places with different political realities and views on free speech.

Allan Goodman, chief executive officer of the Institute of International Education, joins Vice Provost for International Affairs Wendy Wolford to discuss:

How can universities like Cornell provide a safe haven for scholars whose right to free expression is threatened?How can universities act to promote scholarship, free expression, and global collaboration?Cornell has worked with the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) for over a decade to provide yearlong fellowships for displaced academics and human rights defenders. IIE also supports the Humphrey Fellows Program in the Department of Global Development and Fulbright fellowships for undergraduate students from across the university.

Goodman and Wolford will be joined by these panelists:

Sharif Hozoori (Afghanistan) | IIE-SRF fellow in the Einaudi Center’s South Asia ProgramPeidong Sun (China) | Einaudi Center’s East Asia Program and Associate Professor of History, A&SAzat Gündoğan (Turkey) | Florida State University, former IIE-SRF fellow in the Einaudi Center’s Institute for European Studies***

If you can't attend in person, register for a Zoom link to join the livestream here.

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About Allan Goodman

IIE’s CEO Allan E. Goodman is a Council on Foreign Relations member and serves on the selection committees for the Rhodes and Schwarzman Scholars and the Yidan Prize. He also serves on the Council for Higher Education Accreditation International Quality Group advisory council and the Education Above All Foundation board of trustees. Goodman has a PhD in government from Harvard, MPA from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and BS from Northwestern University.

About the Institute of International Education

For more than 100 years, the Institute of International Education has promoted the exchange of scholars and researchers and rescued scholars, students, and artists from persecution, displacement, and crises. IIE conducts research on international academic mobility and administers the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Program.

Supporting Scholars Under Threat

Learn more about how Global Cornell supports Scholars Under Threat.

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

Join us for a talk by Lotte Hoek, (Professor of Cultural Anthropology, University of Edinburgh).

This Pulse of Art History talk will take place in Goldwin Smith Hall G22 and is co-sponsored by the South Asia Program.

Abstract

The creation of Pakistan frequently left newly appointed bureaucrats grappling with a territory and population that was not immediately self-evident to them. In this fluid and often violent situation, the cinema was considered a key means by which all sorts of boundaries might be consolidated. Tasked with publicising the new state, Pakistani bureaucrats at the Ministry of Information had at their disposal a colonial inheritance of a decaying public information infrastructure, complete with iconic ‘publicity vans’ carrying celluloid reels. They also had the keen support of the United States Information Agency. All actors in this publicity drive were continually vexed, however, by the watery conditions of Bengal. The publicity van would never do in this deltaic landscape, where distinctions between sea and river, island and sandbank, dissolved in the silty waters. In this paper I trace the boats and floating screens invented by the East Pakistani state alongside the plentiful river films they produced to theorise the possibilities of an amphibian cinema, an infrastructure for public information appropriate to deltaic peripheries and their waterborne communities. Working with materials from the Bangladesh National Archive and NARA, the paper contributes directly to the current discussions in South Asian film studies about the ways in which film audiences defied the hardening of national and communal borders at the moment of the consolidation of nation-states in the region (Dadi 2022; Siddique 2022; Alonso 2023) and is inspired by the intersecting concerns of cinema and ecology there (Khan 2015, 2022; Mukherjee 2020; Ghosh 2021).

Speaker Biography

Lotte Hoek is a media anthropologist whose research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is one of the editors of the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. She is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Bina Agarwal teaches part-time as a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester, UK. She lives mainly in India where her research projects are predominantly based. She continues to be affiliated with the Institute of Economic Growth at Delhi University, where she was earlier Director and Professor of Economics. Educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Delhi, she has held distinguished teaching and research positions at many universities, including Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Minnesota (as the Winton Chair), and the New York University School of Law. She was Harvard's first Daniel Ingalls Visiting Professor and later a Research Fellow at the Ash Institute, Kennedy School of Government. She has also been a fellow of Radcliffe's Bunting Institute at Harvard.

Talk by Mabel Denzin Gergan

Covered with dense forests, seismically active, landslide-prone, and receiving the bulk of monsoonal rains, the Indian Himalayan Region has long been characterized as a “difficult landscape” with an “inhospitable terrain” in both colonial British and Indian state discourse. More recently, in reports from state and international development institutions like the IPCC, akin to charismatic, endangered megafauna, the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region occupies a central place within apocalyptic forecasts of a ruinous future wherein climatic and geological volatility are set to destabilize regional ecology and geopolitical security. In this talk, I place these discourses of vulnerability and crisis in the Himalayan region within broader, universal framings of Euro-Western epistemologies, dominant climate change frameworks, and Hindutva (Hindu nationalism). Drawing on empirical and theoretical discussions from my research on hydropower and the Lepcha Indigenous anti-dam movement in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, I show how interrogating race, caste, and environmental determinism might help us better understand the great geographic and racial unevenness of anthropogenic climate change in the Indian context. I argue that such an interrogation requires we develop fluency in regional particularities, what geographer Tariq Jazeel (2011: 88) refers to as decolonial orientation, one that is attentive to “indeterminate categories, events, and experiences” that are not “immediately comprehensible by the violent normalization of a universal claiming to speak for the particular.” In the last half of the talk, I center the experiences of the region’s Indigenous and tribal communities and ask how these groups imagine and speak of their homelands, past, and the future to come.

Mabel Denzin Gergan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. She has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research is based in the Indian Himalayan region. It examines its relationship with ‘mainland’ India, characterized on the one hand by state-led development and climate change interventions and, on the other, through the movement of racialized bodies from the borderland to India’s urban heartland. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race with special interests in political ecology, environmental humanities, and decolonial theorizing.

Please join us for the 2023 Alice Cook-Lois Gray Distinguished Lecture. Our honored speaker is Amrita Basu, Amherst College's Domenic J. Paino 1955 Professor of Political Science, and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies. This year's lecture will be held in 423 King-Shaw Hall, ILR Conference Center, and live on Zoom.

Amrita Basu

We hear many stories about Muslim women’s subservience as a result of victimization by Muslim men. Less common are stories of Muslim women’s resistance, as a result of exclusionary state policies. This talk, on Muslim women in Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, in 2019, tells a story about how marginalization can inspire demands for inclusive, secular, democratic citizenship rights.

This lecture is co-sponsored by: Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Center for the Study of Inequality, Cornell Center for the Social Sciences, Cornell Population Center, Brooks School of Public Policy and the South Asia Program.

This October 28th, Asha Cornell is hosting the world’s first and premier South Asian a cappella group, Penn Masala, for a benefit concert, nearly 10 years after their first Cornell performance (also hosted by Asha!)

Hailing from the University of Pennsylvania, and known for its viral fusions of Western music and classic Bollywood hits, the group has gained nearly 125,000 Instagram followers, 146,000 Facebook followers, and 30 million YouTube views since its founding in 1996. In 2009, Penn Masala performed for President Barack Obama as part of the White House Diwali Celebration. In 2015, Masala performed as the only collegiate a cappella group in the award-winning movie—and soundtrack—Pitch Perfect Two. After returning from their India-wide tour earlier this year, they also performed for President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In addition to our main group, we will also feature guest performances from Cornell student organizations! Join us for an evening of music, dance, and fun!

Asha Cornell will donate all proceeds from the concert to our partner schools in India, to fund the education of children from impoverished and underprivileged communities. If you are able, we are grateful for additional donations to our cause. Your contributions will go directly to fund teachers' salaries, textbooks, specialized equipment for children with disabilities, schoolhouse rebuilding following natural disasters, and more. You can choose to donate along with your ticket purchase, or on Asha Cornell's website at https://cornell.ashanet.org/