Please join us for a virtual talk by Charles Hallisey, Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. Professor Hallisey's research centers on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Pali language and literature, Buddhist ethics, and literature in Buddhist culture. His most recent book is Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (Harvard University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a book project entitled "Flowers on the Tree of Poetry: The Moral Economy of Literature in Buddhist Sri Lanka." This event is funded by the GPSA and generously co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Religious Studies and the South Asia Program. All are welcome to attend. Please contact Bruno at bms297@cornell.edu for any special arrangements you may require in order to attend this event.

Indonesia will be among the first nations to initiate a climate-based migration: transitioning its rapidly sinking, flood-prone capital from densely-populated Java to Borneo, one of the richest and most imperiled cultural and biodiversity hotspots on Earth. The new capital will be situated across a vast landscape where indigenous and migrant communities and corporations collectively practice subsistence, commercial, and extractive land uses and livelihoods across a shared landscape that also holds key endangered species habitat. This historic migration will spur rapid, wide-ranging, and intersecting effects on the surrounding social, economic, political, and ecological landscape.

Presenter: Wendy M. Erb, Visiting Scientist and American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5xDR-FoFTBujNzwWH1jZSg

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

Note: All abstracts are now due by October 3, 2020, at 11:59pm eastern standard time. COVID-19 and the responses to contain it have brought into sharp relief several health-related issues in Indonesia that encompass social, political, and economic concerns. The pandemic has highlighted, among other concerns, a reliance on foreign medical supplies, strained government resources, and a lack of healthcare providers in parts of the archipelago, prompting the Indonesian government to announce new efforts to bolster health security and stave off further economic decline. In response to this contemporary moment, the 20th Northeastern Conference on Indonesia, hosted by the Cornell Indonesian Association in cooperation with the Yale Indonesia Forum, will focus broadly on the state of health in Indonesia, whether in the past or in the present. We welcome abstracts from all academic disciplines. These need not be limited in subject and scope to COVID-19. With the aim of understanding how health organizes various aspects of life in Indonesia, we invite abstracts that use health as a concept creatively and broadly to discuss important issues that encompass politics, culture, economics, histories, and ecologies across Indonesia. Thematically, these might include topics such as environment and sanitation; mental and sexual health and policy; food security and nutrition; health and religion; the place of healthcare in national development; the moving of the national capital and its ecological implications; transboundary haze pollution; and more. Professor Siddharth Chandra of Michigan State University will deliver the keynote address. This year’s conference joins a series of events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell. Submission Guidelines Presentation abstracts should be submitted in English and contain no more than 450 words. Authors may submit no more than one individual and one co-authored abstract. All abstracts will be blind-reviewed by a committee of graduate students in corresponding areas of study. Please note: The body of the abstract should not include the author’s name or institutional affiliation. All abstracts are due by October 3, 2020, at 11:59pm eastern standard time, and notifications of acceptance will be sent out by October 6, 2020. All submissions can be made through our online form here: http://bit.ly/nec20submissions. Please direct any questions to neconf20@gmail.com. Presentation Guidelines Each presenter is allotted 20 minutes for their presentation, followed by a question and answer session for each panel which will be facilitated by a moderator. To promote the use of Indonesian in academic settings and for academic purposes, the Northeast Conference allows presentations to be delivered in English or Indonesian, but not both. Should you decide to present in English, your presentation should include a PowerPoint display in Indonesian (to the best of your ability). Likewise, a presentation in Indonesian should be accompanied by PowerPoint slides in English. This conference is organized by the Cornell Indonesian Association, in cooperation with the Yale Indonesian Forum, with co-sponsorship from the Cornell Southeast Asia Program.

Studying the ties and practices that bind Tamils to the districts they inhabit or visit is essential to understand not the ways Tamils use and transform space in diaspora. The territorialization of Tamil identity, that is, their spatial extension and the continuation of their socio-cultural practices, is not always immediately visible in multi-ethnic cities in which Tamils are a minority. Tamils transform those spaces where they are dominant according to their own cultural and social practices and establish venues conducive to social interactions. Furthermore, the polarization of space and the dynamics of identity networks explains the various attitudes of Tamils towards the social frequentation of certain areas. Finally, the presence and role of places of sociability, such as religious, cultural or commercial establishments, are essential to understand Tamils’ relationship with locality and thus the reasons for which these districts are recognized -or not- as “Tamil” by Tamils themselves.

With specific examples drawn from fieldworks in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Paris, this paper will show that the affirmation of Tamil identity and the constitution of Tamil ‘ethnoterritories’ in certain areas is not only the outcome of Tamil action but also the consequence of state-sponsored urban planning policies, such as eradication of slums, gentrification and heritagization of specific zones, and the frequentation of these zones by non-Tamil migrants.

Delon Madavan was the Tamil Studies Visiting Scholar at Cornell's South Asia Program in Spring 2020. He completed his PhD in Geography at Paris-Sorbonne University (France) in 2013. He has taught at the Department of Geography at Sorbonne University and also gave lectures at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. Madavan is Researcher Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India, South Asia and its Diaspora (University of Québec à Montréal, Canada) and Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India and South Asia (CNRS-EHESS, France). In his research, he examines the articulation between migration, identity and space to analyze forms of integration of the Tamil populations in several cities (Jaffna, Colombo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Paris & Montréal). Madavan is the author and co-author of several articles and books on Tamils in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and France.

Respondent:

Sharika Thiranagama is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research explores the intersection of political mobilization and domestic life, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. Her major work has been on the Sri Lankan civil war and research with two different minority ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims, exploring the ways in which militancy, political violence and large-scale displacement became folded into intergenerational transmissions of memory and ethnic identification. Most recently, in new fieldwork on Dalit communities in Kerala, South India, she examines how communist led political mobilization reconfigured older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life. She focuses on the household as the prime site of the inheritance of work, stigma and servitude as well as the possibility of reproduction, dignity and social mobility. She is the author of In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

The food industry has a long history of driving and shaping low wage labor migration regimes, and around the world agriculture is often a site for large undocumented workforces, exploitative visa arrangements, and a disproportionate share of human trafficking as compared with other industries. Agricultural labor migration schemes have long permitted overcrowded housing and dangerous working conditions, allowing employer retaliation to trigger deportation of workers who speak up about dangerous conditions. Workers and allies in Asia have turned to labor organizing, trade policy, and the United Nations to address these concerns.

Presenter: Beth Lyon, Clinical Professor and Founder, Farmworker’s Legal Assistance Clinic at Cornell Law School

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oHFvyPPjQFWzCAfW6CwEpw

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