Join us on Zoom throughout the fall for LRC Happy Hour. Every third Tuesday of the month. We'd love to hear how it’s going! All of it.

Bring your (language instruction) stories whether they be good, bad, amazing, or unusual. It takes all kinds of stories to make a Happy Hour great!Bring your own coffee, tea, or mystery beverage.While we can't serve lunch, the LRC will provide fun, jokes, and laughs free of charge.Also, we just want to see your smiling faces, because we miss you.

More details and link posted on our website: https://lrc.cornell.edu/online-hybrid#live-help-sessions

Chinese migrants and travelers have been traveling to the countries of the Southern Oceans (the "Nanyang", in Chinese) for at least two millennia, and probably longer. We have only scattered records of their passing for the first thousand years of these voyages, but then the documents start to get better, and we can outline the passage of enormous numbers of people, migrating to new lives in the "South Seas". This talk will trace those histories, looking at the warp and weft of Chinese migrations over two thousand years.

Presenter: Eric Tagliacozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_P0QsYVT3RS2-4xxeNH9txA

Part of the series "Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multi-Species Examination"

As schools around the United States think about how to best teach English language learners and parents explore a growing number of language immersion programs for their children, it is clear that the language of instruction and positive educational outcomes are inextricably linked. The same is true in South Asia. On September 29 at 4:30PM we will host Professors Christina Davis (Western Illinois University) and Chaise LaDousa (Hamilton College) for a virtual conversation on issues of language and education in South Asia.

Just like in the United States, many languages are spoken in the nations of South Asia. And just like in the United States, differences between languages spoken at home and at school can become a burden for some students and contribute to their problems in school. However, school systems rarely consider the ways that students themselves reflect on these dynamics.

We draw on interviews conducted at a prestigious institute of higher education in India to show how students relate language to their home life, transition to school, and future career ambitions. Students talk about links between language and social identity through the concept of “mother tongue” – literally, the tongue of one’s mother to whom one has an absolute bond. They note that the languages they speak at home rarely correspond to the standardized language varieties found in school materials. Higher education offers students unique challenges as it exposes them to environments where they must exhibit varieties with which they are not entirely comfortable. We focus on the dynamics of linguistic alienation in our interviews. By alienation, we mean the profoundly unsettled quality that emerges from students’ reflections on the place of languages in their lives.

By taking seriously students’ own reflections on language and identity, teachers and administrators might better understand what challenges their students face as they seek educational opportunities.

The Nilgiris Field Learning Center (NFLC) is a transdisciplinary joint program of the Keystone Foundation, India, and Cornell, now in its ninth year. Undergraduates from across the university and young people from the Adivasi communities that Keystone works with, live, study, and conduct community-based research each spring in Kotagiri, India. There are other ongoing collaborations, which will be briefly described by three Cornell faculty who are involved. However, everything ended abruptly with the pandemic, whose effects are amplified in the regions where NFLC research teams are located. The second half of the presentation will focus on the effects that the pandemic has had on the Keystone Foundation’s work, as well as on the NFLC in Kotagiri. We will discuss next steps to take as the pandemic is brought under control.

List of Panelists:

Neema Kudva is Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning, Associate Dean of the Faculty, and Kouse Professor and Dean at Becker House, a living-learning residential community, at Cornell University. Her research focuses on small cities and their regions, and on institutional structures for equitable planning and development, primarily in South Asia.

Andrew C. Willford is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. His current research focuses upon mental health, psychiatry, neurology, and religious healing traditions in North America and India. He has previously worked on the politics of language, religion, identity, and belonging in Bangalore, and on forms of Tamil and Hindu displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia.

Steven A. Wolf is Associate Professor of Natural Resources at Cornell University. He teaches and conducts research on environmental governance with a specific focus on efforts to secure public goods from private landscapes. While most projects address socioecological dynamics in industrialized societies of Europe and USA, he has current projects in India and China.

Pratim Roy is Founder and Director of Keystone Foundation. He was instrumental in setting up the Keystone Foundation with a vision of clarity and focus on eco-development initiatives.

Anita Varghese is Director at Keystone Foundation, and leads the Biodiversity Programmes. She holds a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Hawaii.

While the colonial and contemporary agrarian economy of Bengal’s Himalayan foothills is most often associated with the tea plantations of Darjeeling and the Dooars, the small farms of nearby Kalimpong were also a key space in which colonial agents and missionaries worked to “settle” the mountainous terrain. Focused on Kalimpong, this paper traces the trajectory of one technology of settlement, agricultural extension, from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. It highlights colonial agricultural extension’s racialized and gendered politics, as well as its implication in a long-term biopolitical project that merged material (i.e. food) provision with social reproduction (i.e. childrearing, kin-making).

Agricultural extension created a patchwork of relatively biodiverse small farms in Kalimpong that historical and contemporary accounts describe as a “green belt:” a socio-ecological opposite and a definitive outside to the plantation monocultures that dominate the hills. Despite this sense of deep contrast, this article describes how extension work aimed at the productive and reproductive labor of Nepali, Bhutia, and Lepcha small farmers in Kalimpong was essential to the architecture of the plantation economy. Through a combination of missionary agricultural education, state cadastral surveying, forest conservation, and seed distribution, extension work in outsides like Kalimpong absorbed the plantation’s biological and moral excesses while replenishing its deficits.

Sarah Besky is Associate Professor in the Departments of International & Comparative Labor & Labor Relations, Law, & History in the ILR School at Cornell. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020), as well as the co-editor of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019). Her new research explores the intersections of agronomy, Tibetology, colonial governance, and small-scale farming in the Himalayan region of Kalimpong, West Bengal.

The annual International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore our virtual fair on September 8 and find out about international majors and minors, language study, fellowships, internships, study abroad, exchanges, service learning, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell), and Cornell's Language Resource Center. The Fair will be held as a virtual event via Zoom, with each virtual table set up as a Zoom meeting. Register now to receive an e-mail containing links/access information for all virtual tables. During the event, you will be able to come and go from each table at any point (to join a new table, close out of your current table and then click the link for the table you wish to join).

If you are not able to join the event synchronously, the confirmation e-mail will also contain contact information for all participating units. Video clips and other resources will be available after the fair.

International Fair participating units and schedule