Afghan refugees have long comprised the largest or second-largest group of refugees in the world, and the number of Afghans seeking safety outside Afghanistan increased dramatically even before the U.S. government's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Betsy Fisher, Director of Strategy at International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), will discuss why U.S. immigration programs and international refugee protection systems failed to achieve their goals, and policy solutions to improve them.

The event will be hosted by Professor Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer.

The event will occur virtually via Zoom. You can register for the event at this link: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dxaGG1BvS3eEQUGAjUBD9Q

Betsy Fisher is the Director of Strategy at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). She coordinates IRAP’s efforts to screen potential clients, represent refugees in UNHCR proceedings, and provide self-help materials to refugees and displaced people. She previously served as IRAP’s policy director, Jordan staff attorney and intake coordinator based in Amman, Jordan. Betsy has published op-eds and academic articles about statelessness and refugee resettlement in publications like the New York Times and the Michigan Law Review.

Betsy is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and Denison University.

How do peace processes really work and how can progress be measured? Madhav Joshi explains this emerging research agenda at an upcoming seminar with the Reppy Institute.

Madhav Joshi is research professor and associate director of the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He oversees the data coding on the implementation of peace agreements worldwide for the PAM project and leads the research initiatives on peace agreement design, implementation, and post-implementation political and economic developments. His research and teaching focus on civil wars, mediation, post-civil war democratization and democratic survival, peace duration and peacebuilding, quality peace, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal.

This seminar is part of a series organized by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) and the Gender and Security Sector (GSS) Lab. Download the Fall 2021 Seminar Series schedule here.

Participants will be given a link to the article at registration or they may access it here. To enrich the conversation, please read in advance of the seminar.

Please join Cornell's Society for Buddhist Studies, for a talk by Prof. Laura Guerrero (Philosophy, William & Mary).

In a recent article Kris McDaniel has suggested that a fruitful way to understand the Abhidharma distinction between conventional reality and ultimate reality is as a distinction between two modes of being: a degenerate mode and a fundamental mode, respectively. On McDaniel’s ontological pluralist view both conventional and ultimate entities are real, but they are real in different ways. McDaniel’s proposal, and his exchange with Andrew Brenner about it, raises once again the question of whether or not conventional entities are real. Abhidharma texts generally are clear that conventional entities exist conventionally and that we can conventionally say true things about them, but what it means to call an entity, or a truth about it, conventional is unclear. Is calling something conventionally real a polite way to say of something unreal that it is useful? Or is calling something conventionally real, like McDaniel suggests, a way of indicating the particular degenerate mode of being that a real entity has? In this paper Prof. Guerrero will explore the possibility that Ābhidharmikas were ontological pluralists by examining some debates between Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika Abhidharma Buddhists about what exists.

This talk is funded by the GPSA-FC and open to all interested. The Buddhist Studies Seminar series is presently co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. For accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu

Just after the turn of the new millennium, in 2003, the newly created state of Uttarakhand in India’s central Himalayas declared its ambition to become fully organic in all aspects of agricultural production. But what does it mean to become organic in a region where many people claim agriculture has always been “organic by default”? Tracing the social and bureaucratic life of organic quality as it is produced in Uttarakhand, this talk decenters commonly held understandings that hold up organic as a property of land and its produce. I show instead how organic may be more fully understood as a quality that is historically and socially produced and assembled within relationships forged between farmers, state authorities, private corporations, and new agrarian intermediaries, and that affirms, even as it seeks to rework, enduring distinctions between nature and agriculture in India.

Shaila Seshia Galvin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. She conducts research at the intersection of environmental, political, and economic anthropology. Her recently published book, Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya (Yale University Press, 2021), emerges from long-term research interests in processes of agrarian change. Her upcoming research will examine intersections of agriculture and bioeconomies, as well as the proliferation of audit technologies and accounting methodologies as tools of environmental management and governance through a new project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, “Accounting for Nature: Agriculture and Mitigation in the Era of Global Climate Change.” Her work has been published in American Ethnologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Journal of Asian Studies, and World Development, among others.

This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Global Development.

Plantation Archaeology and South Asian Indenture in Mauritius

In this talk I present the archaeology of a sugar estate on Mauritius, an island in the southwest Indian Ocean, as a new case study of plantation archaeology. More broadly, this work defines global labor systems and shifting environmental relationships as intertwined colonial legacies.

Though well established in the Atlantic, historical archaeology is still a growing field in East Africa and the Indian Ocean, a region known for long-lasting trade and exchange networks. While Mauritius had no human inhabitants prior to the 1600s, over time the island was settled by traders and formerly enslaved people from Africa, indentured South and East Asians, and colonizers from Britain, France, and the Netherlands. My research at the Bras d’Eau archaeological site, a nineteenth-century sugar plantation, is a geographical expansion of plantation archaeology and a rare look at the archaeology of South Asian indentured laborers who replaced enslaved workers on sugar estates after abolition (post-1838). The domestic landscape and house assemblages are a window into the daily lives of indentured immigrants and the ways in which they related to local environments and climates. Lastly, I will discuss the enduring legacy of colonialism and coercive labor migrations on the island, and the significance of Bras d’Eau as an ecological and cultural heritage site for Mauritians today.

Julia Jong Haines, Ph.D. is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Comparative Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.