The time of global pandemic presented many obstacles for communities engaged with Southeast Asia to stay connected and thrive. At the same time, the limitations upon meeting in person or conducting fieldwork inspired new ways to forge dialogues, shake old conventions, and embrace creative, often technological, change. As graduate students, we witnessed a boom of new and revamped platforms that emerged to connect those separated geographically by COVID-19 and enable academic, social, and professional relations. On the other hand, physical limitations within our communities have produced severe economic and personal fractures that have not yet been remediated. These patterns of Links and Fractures have long existed before COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, arising out of historical processes of colonization and decolonization, religion, commodity and cultural exchanges, migration, language, information technology, economic expansion, social unrest, political upheaval, and more. Within these patterns are both opportunities and losses for a wide range of diverse Southeast Asian communities, creating “new normals” before the “new normal” instigated by COVID-19.

The Graduate Student Conference will be held March 19-21, 2021 online, catering to the opportunity to bring together participants and attendees from all over the world, and powered by SEAP web-platforms. PhD and Master students will present their research united by this common theme across all academic disciplines, presenting their work on how these Links and Fractures have shaped communities in Southeast Asia as part of a panel with faculty discussants. Over this immersive three-day period, the sharing of related research with Cornell SEAP faculty, academics and fellow peers within the graduate community will be facilitated.

- Keynote by Prof. Juno Salazar Parreñas (STS/FGSS), "Fracture or Linked? Southeast Asia after Area Studies Died"

- Full listing of Speakers and Abstracts

- Overview and registration links for each panel: Conference Schedule

Quick panel registration links:

SEA and the Indian Ocean: flows of ideas, goods, and labourState-making and resistancePolitics and gender in religion: entangled text and imageMemory: in poetics, battles, and campsEducating modernity, teaching nationalismMigrated Culture: politics of diaspora across generations This conference is organized by the Southeast Asia Graduate Student Committee

Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan will lead a workshop titled "Radicalizing Her". The workshop will focus on the topics on topics of feminist theory, identity, gender, power, and violence.

Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan is the Founder and Director of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative, a global initiative examining the impact of rape on women's political identities, and a Visiting Research Professor at the Colin Powell Center for Global and Civic Leadership at City College New York. She is currently the founder and director a new program under this initiative, Beyond Identity: A Gendered-Platform for Scholar Activists. She is also currently a Senior Scholar the Center for Political Conflict, Gender, and People's Rights at the University of California, Berkeley and the creator of the Female Fighter Series at Guernica Magazine.

She has recently been a senior advisor on political voice for the ADB/UN Women Benchmark Paper on SDG's in the Asia-Pacific region; a Gender Expert for the United Nations Human Development Report on Afghanistan; and a policy consultant and analyst for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the International Crisis Group, researching and analyzing gender inclusion in peace-building and women’s insecurities in Sri Lanka. She was formerly the Director of South Asia Programs and UN Representative for Operation USA. Dr. Gowrinathan received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles titled "Why Women Rebel: Understanding Female Fighters in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam" which received the Jean and Irving Stone Award for Innovation in Gender Studies. She provides expert analysis for CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and the BBC, and has published in Harper's Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Guernica Magazine, and Al Jazeera English, among others. Her work, and writings, can be found at www.deviarchy.com.

Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today’s youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. Tutoring companies were already growing rapidly before Covid-19, and remote learning has accelerated this trend. While often associated with Asian Americans, this has expanded widely. The result is not only a threat to public education but also has implications for childhood and academic inequality. Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews with teachers, tutors, principals, children, and parents, Pawan Dhingra explains how the motivations for “hyper education” extend beyond that of so-called “tiger parents” committed to education and, in addition, involve parents’ moral concerns, including anti-blackness. Teachers resent this trend but their efforts to tamp down will not work. Meaningful changes will require re-envisioning what we want public education to be.

Pawan Dhingra is Professor of American Studies and Faculty Equity and Inclusion Officer at Amherst College. He is Former Curator at the Smithsonian Institution for Beyond Bollywood. An award-winning author and teacher, his most recent book is Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough. His bylines include The New York Times, CNN, and elsewhere, and his work has been profiled in The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The Guardian, and other venues.

He is also the author of the multiple award-winning Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream, and the award-winning Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities . He is the co-author of widely-used Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, with its second edition forthcoming. Dhingra earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University.

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Most farming communities in Pakistan are comprised of small landholders with limited access to literacy, emergency assets, climate change information and linkages with disaster relief services. Agricultural output is often insufficient for family sustainance, so men leave villages for extra work and women carry on double burdens of househould and agricultural work. When Covid-19 struck sharply, the government of Pakistan imposed a total lockdown from March to August, 2020 that resulted in unprecedented challenges for farming communities. This seminar will highlight how these challenges were handled with innovative adaptations and propose longer term strategies needed to address the on-going challenges of life with Covid-19.

About the presenter

SAMEENA NAZIR is the founder and president of PODA, a women’s rights organization that works for the promotion and protection of human rights in rural Pakistan. As a Gender and Development Specialist, she designs programs that empower rural communities to articulate issues and amplify voices through advocacy for economic, social and civil rights. Under her leadership, PODA has developed a network of 3000 Pakistani women that works locally and has shared its knowledge and strength collectively at the annual Rural Women Leadership Conference in Islamabad since 2008. Sameena has also worked in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Ghana, Morocco, Nicaragua and Yemen. In 2005, she directed a comparative study on “Citizenship and Justice: Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa”(available at Amazon). Her current work contributes to the realization of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through projects on organic agriculture and sustainable livelihoods that can protect our climate, water and support biodiversity. Sameena Nazir has an MPS in International Agriculture and Rural Development from Cornell University, USA and degrees in English Language and Law from Punjab University, Pakistan.

About the seminar series

The "Perspectives in International Development Seminar 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. For additional questions, contact course teaching assistant Khusel Avirmed at ta346@cornell.edu.

The Migrations Forum is an interdisciplinary works-in-progress series for Cornell migrations scholars, bringing together graduate students and faculty across disciplines to share ongoing research.

At this session, Natasha Raheja (Anthropology) will share a rough cut of the new ethnographic film A Gregarious Species: What do bugs and borders have to do with each other? In 2019, thousands of gregarious desert locust swarms flew across the India-Pakistan border and ravaged the fields of farmers. In the same year, Indian government officials described migrants as termites and infiltrators at right-wing political rallies across the country. Farmers started to wonder if locusts were bioweapons from hostile countries to destroy crops. Scientists met at the India-Pakistan border to discuss how to manage this "transboundary pest". This experimental, found-footage video, "A Gregarious Species", contemplates borders, migration, and human-animal relations through a dizzying assembly of mobile phone videos of locusts, scientific webinars, and nationalist political rallies.

Rahul Gandhi, member of India’s Parliament and former president of the Indian National Congress, will join Kaushik Basu, Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, for an open conversation on democracy, development, and life in politics, India, and the world. Q&A with Cornell students and faculty will follow.

Rahul Gandhi has been a member of the Lok Sabha (India’s lower house of Parliament) since 2004. He currently represents the constituency of Wayanad, Kerala. In 2007, he was named general secretary of the Indian National Congress in charge of the party's youth and student organizations. In January 2013, he assumed office as vice president of the Indian National Congress. He was the president of the Indian National Congress from December 2017 to July 2019.

Rahul Gandhi is the great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. He attended St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; Harvard University; and Rollins College. He has an M. Phil. in development studies from Trinity College, Cambridge University.

Kaushik Basu is professor of economics and the Carl Marks Professor of International Studies. From 2012 to 2016 he was chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank. Educated at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and the London School of Economics, Basu has published extensively in development economics, game theory, and industrial organization. His most recent book The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics was published by Princeton University Press in 2018.

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Before COVID-19, several African economies were fast growing, with high levels of Foreign Direct investment. Much like the rest of the world, African economies were hit hard by the pandemic due to the global slowdown, fall in commodity prices and lock down measures to control the spread of the virus. While economic recovery is projected, the situation is still dire for African countries, especially as vaccination plans are still unclear. However, this crisis presents some opportunities. Africa today needs a structural transformation. Challenges to structural transformation include: (i) the high cost of logistics, (ii) industrial discipline and low labour productivity, and (iii) enabling environment by local governments for private sector to thrive. The promising potential of agro-processing is particularly pertinent in the context of shorter and resilient value chains as agri-food companies are becoming increasingly involved in raw material procurement. The African Development Bank is supporting major food firms to not only source raw produce from Africa but to process their products on the continent thereby creating employment opportunities. This seminar explores the role of private sector actors in accelerating Africa’s agriculture transformation.

About the presenter

Atsuko Toda is the Director of the Agriculture Finance & Rural Development department of the African Development Bank (AfDB). She joined the Bank in 2016. Before joining the AfDB she worked with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); initially working in several countries in South and East Asia including Bangladesh, Nepal, Laos and Vietnam. She did field work in Nepal from 2000-2004, with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and later returned to IFAD as Country Manager for Vietnam and Laos and developed projects in rural communities focused on food security and market access. She moved to Africa in 2012 as IFAD’s Country Manager for Nigeria, managing portfolio of investments in rural development building partnerships with private sector food processing to provide market access to farmers. Atsuko holds a Bachelor Degree in Sociology from the Doshisha University of Kyoto, Japan; a Diploma in Developmental Studies from Cambridge University, Cambridge, United Kingdom; and a Master Degree in Public Administration, with specialization in rural finance, from the International Christian University (ICU), Tokyo, Japan.

About the seminar series

The "Perspectives in International Development Seminar 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. For additional questions, contact course teaching assistant Khusel Avirmed at ta346@cornell.edu.

Laura Stone '90 is Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia, overseeing U.S. policy towards and relations with India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, and Bhutan. She will discuss her wide-ranging career in the U.S. Foreign Service, as well as her perspective on diplomatic statecraft in the 21st century.

Previously, Ms. Stone served as Director of the India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, and Bhutan Affairs Office, Special Advisor to the Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, and was Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia from 2017 to 2019. She has worked as the Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs; Director of the Economic Policy Office in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs; and Economic Counselor in Hanoi, Vietnam. She served three tours in Beijing as well as tours in Bangkok, Tokyo, the Public Affairs Bureau, the Pentagon Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Ms. Stone joined the Department of State in 1991 and is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Minister Counselor.

Ms. Stone has an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Cornell University.

This event is co-sponsored by the South Asia Center at Syracuse University.