Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

The United States helped create the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of independent countries. Now the Trump administration is setting the tone for superpowers with imperial ambitions by waging economic war against democratic allies, violating long-standing treaties, and holding out the possibility of using military force.

What do these unprecedented actions mean for the rest of the world? How are states and peoples in different regions responding? And what may happen if tensions continue to escalate?

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Featured Faculty

Agnieszka Nimark (PACS) | Affiliated ScholarMagnus Fiskesjö (EAP, PACS, SEAP) | AnthropologyAlexandra Blackman (SWANA) | GovernmentSeema Golestaneh (SWANA) | Near Eastern StudiesIrina Troconis (LACS) | Romance StudiesKenneth Roberts (LACS) | GovernmentPeter Katzenstein (IES, PACS) | Government

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Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!

Gatty Lecture Series

Anti-authoritarian Counter-Cartographies of Solidarity with Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in the Philippines

Join us for a talk by Arnisson Ortega, Associate Professor from the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at Rockefeller 374, Asian Studies Lounge. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in the Philippines have long endured systemic violence, making the country one of the most dangerous places for HRDs. In solidarity with HRDs in Negros Island—a key hotspot targeted by the state —me and my colleagues in the Philippines initiated a participatory mapping project grounded in HRD geonarratives: spatially anchored accounts of resistance, trauma, and survival. Working with activists, artists, and grassroots organizations, we launched a series of storytelling and sketchmapping activities, and co-created artmaps to visualize sites of struggle, care, and state repression. These maps served as tools for social media advocacy, political mobilization, and cultivating care practices. What have emerged from these initiatives are counter-cartographies of resistance and solidarity that expose the spatial logics of authoritarian violence. Through geonarrative storytelling and sketchmapping, we expose the spatial configurations of authoritarian violence that HRDs face. We traced the necropolitical spaces where HRDs confront psychological and physical violence—from surveillance and red-tagging to arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings—within everyday spaces such as homes, workplaces, hospitals, commercial centers, and rural farmlands. These geonarratives reveal how state and non-state actors systematically constrict safe spaces for HRDs, embedding violence into the micro-geographies of everyday life. Despite these conditions, HRDs and their communities have cultivated practices of care, resilience, and collective survival to sustain their advocacy work. The maps we generated amplified the plight of HRDs, supported public-facing campaigns, and fostered broader awareness of HRD vulnerability and resistance. By centering their geonarratives, we advance a justice-oriented geographic praxis that foregrounds solidarity and creative collaboration.

About the Speaker
Arnisson Ortega is a human geographer committed to community-engaged work that advances social justice. Arnisson’s research spans the spatial politics of urbanization, transnational migration, and uneven geographies of accumulation and dispossession. Much of Arnisson’s work focuses on the Philippines, Arnisson’s homeland, where Arnisson uses decolonial, community-engaged, and mixed-method approaches—particularly mapping and storytelling—as tools for resistance and world-making. Arnisson’s current projects examine decolonial cartographies, migrant-driven urban change in post-industrial cities, and the spatial politics of urban development in former U.S. military estates in the Philippines.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Courtney Wittekind, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Why has speculation become a dominant way of engaging with the future in moments of profound political uncertainty? This talk takes up this question through Myanmar’s proposed 20,000-acre “New Yangon City,” launched during the country’s democratic transition of 2011-2021. Drawing on ethnographic research in peri-urban Yangon, I show how farmers living in the shadow of this urban project turned to speculation when democratic and developmental promises repeatedly faltered. I argue that this vernacular speculation was less about profit than about acting on uncertainty amid compounding crises. Over time, speculative practices reshaped political participation and shifted collective demands toward individualized wagers structured by unequal access to land, capital, and time. Extending my analysis into Myanmar’s post-coup moment, I conclude by highlighting speculation as a defining feature of political life across Southeast Asia today.

About the Speaker
Courtney Wittekind is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, where she researches uneven urban development, speculative investment, and digital technologies. She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice, from Harvard University in 2022. From 2022 to 2024, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University with the Program in Agrarian Studies and the Council on Southeast Asia Studies. Her publications include articles in leading journals such as Cultural Anthropology and Antipode, as well as her forthcoming book, City of Speculation: Unsettled Futures in UrbanMyanmar (Stanford University Press).

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Taomo Zhou, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Motherhood—one of the most important and yet mundane social institutions—is central to our understanding of the latter half of the twentieth century. This talk focuses on a left-wing Indonesian activist in the Afro-Asian movements, Francisca Casparina Fanggidaej (1925–2013), a mother of seven who endured decades of forced separation from her family. Based on a close reading of Fanggidaej’s diaries, personal letters, and oral history interviews with her family and friends, I discuss the politics of maternal absence in Indonesia and China—two leading countries in the Afro-Asian movements. I explore how these two countries shaped the public and self-perceptions of non-residential mothers through their welfare provisions and reproductive policies; and how a transnational figure like Fanggidaej navigated motherhood within frameworks of revolutionary anticolonialism in Indonesia, state socialism in China, and the global rise of capitalist neoliberalism, which ultimately displaced the Third World internationalist vision once championed by both nations. I argue that the fall of Third World internationalism signaled not only a missed opportunity to reconfigure global geopolitics, but also a lost chance to redefine motherhood—not as the individualized enterprise of the birth mother alone but as a communal effort involving an assemblage of caretakers regardless of kinship or gender.

About the Speaker
Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies and Dean’s Chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Her first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Taomo is currently working on her second book project tentatively entitled “Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China’s First Special Economic Zone,” which is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. She is also researching on motherhood during the Cold War.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Liang Wu, Postdoctoral Associate at SEAP/Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at Rockefeller 374, Asian Studies Lounge. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
What and where is “Maritime Southeast Asia”? In this Gatty Lecture, maritime scholar Dr. Liang Wu presents a case study of Filipino among other Southeast Asian seafarers working in the international shipping industry across the global oceans, thus expanding the conventional definition of “Maritime Southeast Asia” – the archipelagic region of Southeast Asian countries situated between Indian and Pacific Oceans.

At this moment, hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians are circumnavigating the world as they work on ocean-going merchant vessels of contemporary shipping, delivering 90% of international trade and sustaining economies and societies around the globe. The majority of the world’s 2 million seafarers come from the Global South regions of Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, alongside China and India. Due to their long contracts and cyclical employment, most of these Southeast Asian workers spend their lives on the high seas beyond national jurisdictions, under flag-of-convenience states such as Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, and within the foreign territories of port states – all beyond the definitional region of “Maritime Southeast Asia”.

Through learning about the lifeworlds and lifeways of Southeast Asian seafarers, Dr. Wu will discuss in this Gatty Lecture a range of critical topics from containerization to postcolonialism, familism, the social infrastructures of maritime ministries, and also industrial- environmental externalities. In tracing the far-reaching and uneven conditions and ramifications of such maritime metageography of sea trade, Dr. Wu’s work shifts analytical attention from regional seas, ports, and littoral societies to transoceanic labor, nodes, and networks; it advances a labor-centered and mobility-political approach to study the “maritime Southeast Asian” aspects of the global archipelago – one constituted not only by circulation and connectivity, but also by routinized absence, spatial confinement, juridical ambiguity, social invisibility, and integral accidents.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 global pandemic and as supply chain disruptions continue to erupt, Dr. Wu’s redefinition carries urgent implications for how we conceptualize maritime regions, essential labor, and the social foundations of global logistics and human condition.

About the Speaker
Dr. Liang Wu is a SEAP Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Science & Technology Studies and the interdepartmental consortium Cornell Oceans. Dr. Wu started studying the international shipping and seafaring industry in 2006, and has carried out research at ports in Asia and the U.S., onboard, and online. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His interdisciplinary maritime work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Center for Engaged Scholarship, and Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies among other funding agencies. Overall, Dr. Wu is an engaged scholar who examines the intersection of maritime economy, blue humanities, social oceanography, and marine policy. He is a former Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College enhancing ocean literacy and ocean engagement in Maine, and a Marine Policy and Science Communication Knauss Fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. Wu also belongs to various national and international working groups and professional associations such as Waterfront Alliance, Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, United Nations Ocean Decade Global Stakeholder Forum, Climate Change Interest Group (CCIG) of the American Anthropological Association, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Gatty Lecture Series

Developing an Innovative Mobile Phone Tool for Monitoring Marine Biodiversity and Human Nutrition in Timor-Leste

Join us for a talk by Lydia O'Meara, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Across the Indo-Pacific Coral Triangle, one of the world’s most biodiverse yet threatened regions, climate change and human pressures are reshaping both marine ecosystems and the coastal communities that rely on them for livelihoods and nutrition. Yet, integrated and timely data on ocean and human health remain scarce, especially in remote, low-resource settings. This lecture presents the early stages of a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability study developing a low-cost mobile phone–based tool to track aquatic food consumption as an integrated monitoring indicator of marine biodiversity and food security at high frequency amidst a changing climate in Timor-Leste.
Using Interactive Voice Response technology on basic mobile phones, the project will pilot high-frequency participant-recorded dietary monitoring with women in small-scale fishing households, a nutritionally vulnerable and sentinel population for tracking community food security. By recording the diversity of aquatic foods eaten throughout the year, the study will explore how seasonal and environmental fluctuations shape access to nutrient-rich aquatic foods, whilst also providing insights into changes in marine biodiversity. This lecture will focus on the co-design, feasibility, and refinement of innovative integrated mobile phone monitoring tools suited to contexts where conventional surveys are constrained by severe weather, low literacy, and limited infrastructure. Timor-Leste serves as a case study for how inclusive, low-cost technologies can sustain nutrition and biodiversity data flows amid climate variability, informing future research and policy at the ocean–human health interface across SE Asia.

About the Speaker
Originally from Australia, Lydia O’Meara is an international nutritionist passionate about sustainable food systems for nutrition. Lydia is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, working in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health. She is also an Emerging Leader Representative for the WHO World Health Summit in the Asia-Pacific. Her three-year Cornell fellowship focuses on developing and validating a novel mobile phone–based tool for high-frequency monitoring of diets among low-literate women in remote, resource-limited settings, with current fieldwork in Timor-Leste. With over seven years’ experience, Lydia has worked with organizations including UN Nutrition, the FAO, and WorldFish on food security and nutrition research across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Her current work centers on aquatic foods for nutrition and the design of sustainable, equitable food systems in the context of climate change and anthropogenic pressures. Her research has been published in high-impact international journals, including the Lancet Planetary Health, Global Food Security, and PNAS. When she’s not working, Lydia enjoys exploring local foods and cultures.

Gatty Lecture Series Join us for a talk by Patrick Daly, Staff Scientist, Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
In 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives, causing massive loss of life and billions of dollars of damage, displacing hundreds of thousands of households, and triggering one of the largest international post-disaster reconstruction efforts in history. It is arguable that the loss of life was so high because few were prepared for a tsunami of that magnitude, as there were then no known historical or geological evidence for paleotsunami in the region. This talk brings together evidence from almost two decades of historical and geo-archaeological research that I have participated in after the 2004 event in Aceh, Indonesia to build a detailed paleo-tsunami history. I discuss how we combined archaeological landscape survey across over 40km of coastal areas surrounding the city of Banda Aceh, with stratigraphic, sedimentological, micro-fossil, and geochronological analysis of deposits uncovered within a cave on the Sumatran coast to conclusively show that the 2004 event was only the most recent in a long history of massive, destructive tsunami that have hit areas inundated by the 2004 tsunami. I end my talk by situating our results within other paleo-tsunami studies conducted around the region to propose an over 7,000 year timeline of major tsunami occurrence in the eastern Indian Ocean.

About the Speaker
Patrick Daly is a Staff Scientist for Sustainability and Resilience in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He completed a PhD. at the University of Oxford in environmental archaeology in 2003, and held post-doctoral and research appointments at Cambridge University and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. He founded the Risk and Society research cluster at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, where he worked as a Principle Investigator until 2024. Employing a combination of anthropological and environmental archaeological methods, his research focuses upon human responses to changing environmental conditions and long-term recovery from large-scale disasters. He has spent the past two decades conducting research on historical hazards across southern Asia and community level recovery following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He is currently working on a monograph on post-disaster reconstruction: The Aftermath of Aid: Capacity Building, Development and Sustainability in Post-tsunami Aceh.