Perspectives in Global Development Seminar
Speaker: V. Ram Ramanathan, Distinguished Research Professor of climate sustainability at the University of California at San Diego; Cornell Climate Solutions Scholar, Cornell University
Location: Emerson 135 and Zoom
Registration: https://bit.ly/Perspectives_Ram

Climate Change has already reached unprecedented levels with record breaking weather extremes. Over the last two decades when the mean warming was around 0.9 C, about 606000 people perished and 4.1 billion displaced due to weather extremes. In about eight to eleven years, global warming will cross the dangerous threshold of 1.5 C warming. As we recover from the COVID crisis by 2025, the evidence for the oncoming 1.5 C warming will be prevalent worldwide. I will show, how due to two way human-natural systems interactions, there is very little that society can do to avoid crossing the threshold of 1.5 C.

The world's poorest three billion, whose contributions to the global warming emissions is about 5% or less, are likely to suffer the worst consequences of the more than 50% amplification of the warming within a decade. I will explore, with mathematical models and practical field studies in rural areas of India, the actions the rest of society can take in response to this huge ethical dilemma and build resilience among the poorest three billion. In so doing, it is remarkable that the wealthiest one billion can also bend the warming curve well below 2 C within the next 25 years.

About the speaker

Ramanathan is Distinguished Research Professor of climate sustainability at the University of California at San Diego and Cornell Climate Solutions Scholar, Cornell University. He discovered the greenhouse effect of chlorofulorocarbons and other heat trapping pollutants gases. His findings on Non-CO2 global warming pollutants have led to several successful climate mitigation actions worldwide. He is the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Blue Planet Prize and the 2018 Tang Prize. He was Listed as Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2014 and named 2013 Champion of the Earth Laureate for the Science and Innovation category, by the United Nations Environment Program. He served as the science advisor for Pope Francis' Holy See delegation to the UN's 2015 Paris climate summit. He leads University of California's Bending the Curve: Climate solutions education protocol, taught at many campuses around the world. He is elected to the Pontifical Academy of Science (council member); Royal Swedish Academy of Science, the US National Academy of Science and the World Academy of Sciences.

About the seminar series

The Perspectives in Global Development seminars are held Wednesdays from 12:25 – 1:15 p.m. eastern time during the semester. The series will be presented in a hybrid format with some speakers on campus and others appearing via Zoom. 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 IARD 6960, NTRES 6960, PLSCS 6960 and AEM 6960.

Join us virtually this spring 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, but are probably most useful to those at an intermediate level or above. Open to the public. Join Hindi Conversation Hour on Zoom!

By Bharat Patankar

Bharat Patankar is an intellectual-activist based in India. A recent New York Times obituary of his life-partner Gail Omvedt, noted that Patankar has led Shramik Mukti Dal (toilers' liberation league), "an organization credited with launching some of the largest organized mass movements against injustices experienced by workers in rural India." He comes from an intergenerational heritage which links the nineteenth-century visions of Savitribai Phule and Karl Marx; with those of the 1940s Prati Sarkar parallel government as well as B.R. Ambedkar; to the new social movements facing the 1970s Emergency; to the contentions of 21st-century India. As people today face a regime of intensified communal, brahmanist and patriarchal exploitation — Patankar works to build alternatives at the intersection of economic, political as well as cultural fronts. Patankar will reflect on his decades leading farmer-labor movements in land and water struggles, over development and climate concerns—while forging dreams of a radically transformed economy and ecology. And he will speak to the theory and practice of leftist and liberation work—forging solidarity across caste, gender, religion and class struggles, towards emancipation for all.

Bharat Patankar is an activist-intellectual based in India. Patankar has led mass-based social movements for decades, particularly through Shramik Mukti Dal (toilers' liberation league). SMD has organized farmers and laborers across Maharashtra, India’s second-most populous state with a population of over one-hundred million. He is one of the architects of a prevailing framework for equitable water distribution. He has organized drought-affected villages and dam-displaced communities, towards alternative development models with respect to dams and irrigation. These movements link working-class livelihood needs with feminist, anticommunal and anticaste (Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi) solidarity commitments. Patankar's articles have appeared in journals such as Race & Class, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Critical Asian Studies, and Economic & Political Weekly. His books include For Human Liberation, The Songs of Tukoba (with Gail Omvedt), and Sakhi: Poems.

By Cheran

In this lecture and reading, Cheran will reflect on the important but ambiguous relationship with the sea from both personal and communal perspectives. Drawing on and reading from his various poems about the sea and other water bodies, he will chart an alternative imagination for Tamil identities.

Dr. R. Cheran is Tamil Canadian academic, poet, playwright and journalist. He is a professor at the University of Windsor in Canada. He has authored over fifteen books in Tamil, and his work has been translated into twenty languages. Several volumes of his work have been published in English translation, including The Second Sunrise (Translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom, 2010), In a Time of Burning (Translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom and Sascha Ebeling, 2013) and You Cannot Turn Away (Translated by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2011). His poems in English translation have also been published in numerous literary magazines, such as Bomb (New York), Modern Poetry in Translation, Many Mountains Moving, Exiled Ink, Mantra Review, and Talisman. His poems have been included in several anthologies, including Singing in the Dark: An Anthology of Lockdown Poems (2020), Many Roads Through Paradise: Sri Lankan Literature (edited by Shyam Selvadurai, 2014), and In Our Translated World: Global Tamil Poetry (edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2014).

Cheran was the recipient of the International Poetry Award from ONV Kurup Foundation in Dubai in 2017. He has performed is poetry at various International Writers’ festivals in the United Kingdom, Singapore, the US, Indonesia, India, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, Ramallah, West Bank, Dubai and Mexico. His plays in English language have been produced and performed in Toronto, Canada, New York, Chicago and New Jersey in the US. Singapore’s modern dance group Chowk has produced and performed a dance play based on his poems titled “The Second Sunrise”. The Second Sunrise was performed at the Singapore International dance festival, and Washington’s Kennedy Centre for the Arts.

The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, the late Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has strained the world's healthcare systems and compounded challenges for governments and NGOs dealing with global waves of forced and voluntary migration. These movements of peoples across borders have magnified pressing issues ranging from social and economic inequalities and global climate change to civil war and political unrest. In the United States and worldwide, how can we promote the best public health outcomes while working to protect human rights, manage resources, and address inequality?

With a focus on the intersection of mobility, human rights, and public health, the Einaudi Center's Lund Critical Debate this year brings together one of the world's leading public health policymakers at the World Health Organization with a United States Senator and Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who led the Senate's efforts to study the consequences of global forced migration. The event will examine the geopolitical dimensions, the epidemiological aspects, and the humanitarian issues of this critical topic. The debate will illuminate key issues surrounding public health, migration, and racial and social justice at stake globally and nationally.

We welcome questions during the event. Registration is required.

Panelists

Dr. Zsuzsanna Jakab serves as Deputy Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations agency dedicated to promoting public health and responsible for responding to health emergencies. Prior to her current appointment, Dr. Jakab has held several high-profile national and international public health policy positions: as WHO Regional Director for the European Region (2010-2019); as Founding Director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (2005-2010); and as State Secretary at the Hungarian Ministry of Health, Social, and Family Affairs (2002-2005), where she managed the country’s preparations for European Union accession in the area of public health.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). The son of Cuban immigrants, Sen. Menendez has represented the state of New Jersey in the United States Senate since 2006. As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has established himself as a foreign policy leader, seeking to do globally what he has done in New Jersey—supporting the most vulnerable in our society and lending a voice to those least able to speak for themselves. In June 2020, under his leadership, the committee published the report, "Global Forced Migration: The Political Crisis of Our Time." He helped pass the Senate's COVID relief packages and other healthcare legislation as well as playing a key role in shaping immigration reform bills. Prior to his position in the Senate, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993-2006.

Moderator

Dr. Gunisha Kaur is an assistant professor of anesthesiology who specializes in human rights research. Dr. Kaur serves as the Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab, a Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, and a Faculty Fellow at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, where she co-leads the migrations research team. Dr. Kaur’s research interests focus on advancing the health of displaced populations such as migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. She has used her extensive training and research in neuroscience as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through scientific methodology. Her research is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health. A foremost leader in scientific investigations into migrant health, Dr. Kaur was selected as a member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society and as a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned her B.S. from Cornell University in 2006, M.D. from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2010, and her M.A. in medical anthropology from Harvard University in 2015.

About the Debate
This year's Lund Critical Debate is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and co-sponsored by Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge and in partnership with the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs, with production assistance from eCornell. Established in 2008, Einaudi's Lund Critical Debate Series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs ’57.

Talk by Anna Stirr

Gokul Joshi (1930-1961) was a radical progressive poet and singer who was born in poverty and lived an itinerant life in Nepal and India in the 1940s and 50s, performing his songs and poetry and organizing workers and peasants against their exploiters wherever he went. He was an exceptionally talented exponent of the tradition of extemporaneous poetry and song in folk poetic meters, which at the time was strongly associated with the lower classes and disparaged by elites. Those elites who were beginning to broaden their outlook, like the poet Laxmiprasad Devkota, recognized in Joshi a talent rivalling their own, and many tried to get him into national politics. Yet Joshi had no patience for intellectual society, employment, political institutions, or the householder life, and preferred direct political action and the life of the road. Because of his ascetic-like lifestyle, his rejection of institutions, and the suppression of his works by his rivals, the details of his life are somewhat of a mystery and his works have been hard to find for decades. This has allowed a mythology to grow up around the figure of Gokul Joshi: the “true people’s singer,” a modernist ascetic dedicating his life to improving the lot of the people through poetry and song. In this presentation I look at how stories of Gokul Joshi’s life have influenced the careers of subsequent radical progressive performers, and how the idea of the “true people’s singer” has developed, in light of masculine traditions of Hindu asceticism, communist New Man theory, and changing political-economic conditions in Nepal. I address how the idea of the “true people’s singer” may have contributed to a constrained recognition of performers whose contributions did not fit that mold. I argue that Gokul Joshi may have created the role of the folk-style people’s singer in the drama of Nepali progressive politics, but that others now have the opportunity to expand it to newer ways of being revolutionary.

Dr. Stirr is Associate Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Anna’s research focuses on South Asia, particularly on Nepal and the Himalayan region. She is currently working on two projects that deal with love, intimacy, and politics in Nepal. The first looks at improvised dohori question-answer songs as culturally intimate, gendered expressions of ideas of nation and heritage, within a cycle of migration and media circulation that spans the globe. The second chronicles the history of Nepal’s politically oppositional “progressive song” from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on ideas of love, development, and communist thought as interrelated ways of imagining a better future. Articles from these projects have appeared in various journals and edited volumes. Anna also maintains an active research interest in the relationship between music, religion, politics and public culture in South Asia and the Himalayas. Along with teaching and researching about music, Anna is also active as a performer. After a bachelor’s degree in western classical flute performance, she has studied Hindustani classical bansuri flute with Steve Gorn and Jeevan Ale, and has learned the folk style of bansuri performance through musical interaction with many Nepali performers during her fieldwork. As a singer, she has studied the Hindustani classical tradition with Prabhu Raj Dhakal in Nepal and Ustad Mehboob Nadeem in London, and she learned Nepali folk and dohori song as she learned the flute styles, in the informal oral tradition. Her formal instruction in Nepali folk music has been with Khadga Bahadur Budha Magar on the madal drum, and she believes that knowledge of percussion provides a firm foundation for a broader grasp of any musical style. She is working on compiling and translating the Nepali folk music teaching materials created by her teachers as well as the late musicologist Subi Shah.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports college graduates conducting research or teaching in any field in more than 150 countries. Applications are due in the fall; students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year.

United States citizens in any field of study are eligible.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/fulbright-us-student-program

The migration studies minor is a university-wide, interdisciplinary undergraduate minor that prepares students to understand the historical and contemporary contexts and factors that drive international migration and shape migrant experiences around the globe. This minor draws on the rich course offerings found across the humanities and social sciences at Cornell, and is designed to draw students outside of their major fields and to extend their knowledge beyond a single country.

Contact: migration-minor@einaudi.cornell.edu,