Registration for this event is now closed. You can ask to be put on the waitlist be emailing SBP84@Cornell.edu

The 2023 International Studies Summer Institute (ISSI) will explore testimonies of migration. The ISSI is a professional development workshop for practicing and pre-service K–12 educators hosted annually by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, in collaboration with the South Asia Center at Syracuse University.

During this cross-curriculum conference, educators will engage in discussions, workshops, and lectures that explore and amplify personal narratives of migration. Professors, postdoctoral fellows and other scholars from Cornell University and Syracuse University will share their cutting-edge research on migrant experiences from across different regions of the world, including South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Speakers will focus on individual narratives, as well as systemic reasons for migration, such as politics, conflict, and climate change.

Sessions will also explore culturally responsive practices when working with migrant students and discussing migrant narratives. Teachers will gain tools for leading conversations and developing projects with their students about migrant experiences.

Teachers will leave the conference with concrete resources to use in their classrooms, a deeper awareness of how to enter into conversation with students about their own and others’ migration experiences, and an understanding of contemporary migrant experiences from across the world.

The 2023 ISSI will be applicable for elementary, middle, and high school educators from all subject areas. Participating teachers will have the option to complete a lesson plan for PD credit that incorporates content from the workshop, with the support and guidance of our outreach staff.

Conference Schedule:

8:45-9:00 Breakfast and check-in

9:00-9:15 Introductory Remarks by Rachel Beatty Riedl

9:15-10:20 Panel: "Ethical and culturally responsive engagement with migrant narratives"

Panelists: Farah Bakaari, Juhwan Seo, Rose Anderson

Moderator: Shannon Gleeson

10:20-10:30 Break

10:30-11:30 Workshop with Mary Jo Dudley, “Supporting Immigrant Families in Schools”

11:30-12:00 Networking and reflection activity

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-1:45 Breakout Sessions

Focus: Project-based learning around themes of migration (same sessions offered twice)

Option 1: Nicole Thuzar Tu-Maung, “Photovoice Methodology” Option 2: Maria Gimma, “Understanding the Global Phenomenon of Migration, a Project-Based Curriculum” Option 3: Nausheen Husain, “Storytelling With Data” 1:45-1:50 Break

1:50-2:35 Breakout Sessions, repetition of above options

2:35-3:00 Break / walk to Johnson Art Museum

3:00-4:00 Workshop with Carol Hockett and Maryterese Pasquale-Bowen, “How the Light Gets In: Contemporary Art and Migration”

4:00-4:20 Introduction to Einaudi Resources with Sarah Plotkin

4:20-4:30 Closing remarks with Sarah Pattison

Sponsored by: Syracuse University, Moynihan Institute for Global Affairs, South Asia Center, Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Southeast Asia Program, South Asia Program, Institute for African Development, East Asia Program, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Institute for European Studies, Migrations Initiative, TST-BOCES, U.S. Department of Education Title VI Program

How might we learn to redream dangerously again?

Join us for a two-day symposium that brings together scholars, creative writers, and activists to discuss and envisage how the theories, practices, and visions of the roles of love, identity, and land are complexly intertwined with (trans)national structured challenges.

With a commitment to "learning to redream dangerously again" during a historical moment of an unceasing remonstration of the intersectional inequality and injustice entrenched in the United States and other localities, the 2023 cohort of the Einaudi Center's Global Racial Justice graduate fellows will host the "Decolonial Love" symposium. The symposium aims to reconstruct and reimagine the multifacetedness of individuals and the complexity of their ties with the self, others, and the natural world through the lens of coloniality and decoloniality.

Hosted by the Einaudi Center as part of its inequalities, identities, and justice global research priority, and co-sponsored by Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, and the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.

Reserve your seat today!

Saturday, May 13

Registration, 12:30 p.m. EDT

Opening Remarks, 1:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m. EDT

Mohamed Abdou (Cornell University)Keynote Address, 1:15 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. EDT

Mariana Mora (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology), "Towards a politics of listening and sensorial truths, the struggle for racialized justice for the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, Mexico"Panel I - Identities, 2:45 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. EDT

Moderator: I-An "Amy" Su (Cornell University)

Alaina E. Roberts (University of Pittsburgh), "Is Black and Indigenous Reconciliation Possible?"María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltran (Rutgers University), "Redefining Black Caribbeanness: Peripheral Relationships Decentering the Colonial Family"Michele Cheng (Cornell University), "The Aftermath of Colonization and Colonialism: Musical Identities of a 1.5 Generation Taiwanese American"Amber Starks, "The Disenfranchising of Black Indigeneity from Global Indigeneity"Alivia Moore (Cornell University), "Truth Bias and Intergroup Dynamics"Film Screenings and Discussions, 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Chinasa T. Okolo (Cornell University)

1000 Gifts of Decolonial LoveEgúngún (Masquerade)Counterfeit KunkooCane/CainReception, 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. EDT

***

Sunday, May 14

Registration and Lunch, 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. EDT

Poetry Reading and Color Therapy, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Ariel Dela Cruz (Cornell University)

Billy-Ray Belcourt (University of British Columbia)Valeen JulesErica Violet LeePanel II - Solidarities of the Earth: Envisioning and Enacting Reparative Land Justice, 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Kendra Kintzi (Cornell University)

Enrique Salmón (Cal State East Bay), "We Still Need Rain Spirits: Cultivating Indigenous Land-based Relationships, Resilience, and Identity"Kristen Bos (University of Toronto), "Beads Land"shakara tyler (University of Michigan)Troy Richardson (Cornell University), "Land Labors: Smallest Gestures, Empirical Intimacies"Panel III - Decolonial Love, 2:45 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. EDT

Moderator: Karina Edouard (Cornell University)

Gina Goico (Cornell University), "Envisioning Possibilities: Naming and Archiving Memories of Love and Care from the Dominican Republic"Ariel Dela Cruz (Cornell University), "Don't You Remember?: Intergenerational Filipinx Care and Refusal"Erica Violet Lee, "Inner City Love Notes: On Street Graffit, Protest Art, and Other Signs of Blooming"Closing Remarks, 4:15 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. EDT

Mohamed Abdou (Cornell University)

Film Screening and Discussion

Join us for a simultaneous film screening across six U.S. universities, with the director and producers of the film available for Q&A. We'll be watching the film Dragon for Sale: Environmental Justice and the Illusion of "10 New Balis" Development in Indonesia.

CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research. This spring we’re providing lunch from 12:30 – 1:00, and encouraging attendees to eat together or separately – throughout the Center or in offices – based on their comfort levels. We’ll then begin presentations promptly at 1:00pm.

Jacqueline Ho (PhD Candidate, Sociology)

Title: Can Every School Be a Good School? Unranking and its implications for competitive school choice in Singapore

Abstract: In many education systems, families compete for admission to good schools, which contributes to segregation and inequality. This competition is fueled by the perception of a hierarchy of schools, which in turn is partly shaped by narrow, often quantitative measures of school quality, such as test scores and rankings. Scholarship on quantification suggests that replacing rankings with more multidimensional approaches to evaluation may reduce the perception of hierarchy. Recent efforts to adopt more holistic measures of school quality echo this logic. However, we lack empirical evidence of how applicants choose schools in the wake of such efforts at unranking. Drawing on 50 interviews, I examine how middle-class parents in Singapore choose primary schools in the context of “Every School a Good School,” a decade-long policy effort to reduce the competition for elite schools by encouraging parents to evaluate schools more holistically. I find that some parents do opt out of this competition, but not necessarily because they see that every school is good in its own unique way. Like most other parents, they continue to perceive schools as ordered along a unidimensional hierarchy, but believe it is unnecessary to compete for good schools. I argue that parents’ school choices reflect different strategies for constructing a sense of security, which they have learned through their lived experiences of anxiety in a hierarchical school system. I consider the implications of these findings for theories of how parents choose schools.

Join this year's cohort of Fellows at the Society for the Humanities for our concluding conference on the 2022-23 focal theme of Repair. The conference kicks off on Thursday, April 27, with a panel of humanities scholars, and continues all day on Friday, April 28, with several panels and two keynotes (Audra Simpson, Columbia University, and Mimi Thi Nguyen, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

Each presentation will be followed by a Q&A. Open to the public.

Schedule for Thursday, April 27: https://events.cornell.edu/event/repair_spring_fellows_conference_day_1

Schedule for Friday, April 28 (Day 2)

9:30am COFFEE & REFRESHMENTS

10:00am-11:30am PANEL 2

“A City of Vineyards: Reparative Ecologies in Times of Ruination” - Tamta Khalvashi (Society Fellow; Anthropology, Ilia State University)

“Critical Repair: Afterlives of Decolonization and the African Imagination” - Imane Terhmina (Faculty Fellow, Romance Studies, Cornell)

“Migration as Reparation? Eritrean Refugees and a Postcolonial Indebted Politics” - Carla Hung (Society Fellow; Anthropology, University of North Carolina - Asheville)

11:30am-1:00pm KEYNOTE 1

"Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow" - Audra Simpson (Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University)

Abstract: How is the past imagined to be settled? What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new start point? In this piece I consider the slice of this new-ness in recent history – 1990 to the near present in Canada. This is a time of apology, and a time in which Native people and their claims to territory are whittled to the status of claimant or subject in time with the fantasy of their disappearance from a modern and critical present. In this piece I examine how the Canadian practice of settler governance has adjusted itself in line with global trends and rights paradigms away from overt violence to what are seen as softer and kinder, caring modes of governing but governing, violently still and yet, with a language of care, upon on still stolen land. This piece asks not only in what world we imagine time to stop, but takes up the ways in which those that survived the time stoppage stand in critical relationship to dispossession and settler governance apprehend, analyze and act upon this project of affective governance. Here an oral and textual history of the notion of “reconciliation” is constructed and analyzed with recourse to Indigenous criticism of this affective and political project of repair.

1:00-2:30pm Lunch Available in the Dining Room

2:30-4:00pm PANEL 3

"The Life and Death of a Tropical Polar Bear" - Juno Parreñas (Faculty Fellow, STS and FGSS, Cornell)

"Human Pollination” - Pascal Schwaighofer (Mellon Graduate Fellow; Comparative Literature, Cornell)

"Upcycle” - Susan Stabile (Society Fellow; English, Texas A&M)

4:15-5:45pm KEYNOTE 2

“The Right To Be Beautiful“ - Mimi Thi Nguyen (Assoc. Professor & Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Abstract: What is the promise of beauty for habituation in disastrous situations where a life that can be lived is hard to hold? Part humanitarian intervention and part performance, the 2009 Miss Landmine Cambodia pageant follows from a not uncommon faith that beauty is both a humanitarian problem and also its solution. From the sprawling international complex that funds and conducts prosthetic manufacturing, rehabilitation and vocational training, infrastructural development and cultural programming, through to the aesthetic and moral discourses of rights, capacities, humanitarianism and humanity, all must be in place for this pageant to promise beauty. I focus narrowly on the pageant’s maxim, everyone has the right to be beautiful, in the time and space of rights claims that unfold tactically under a quasi-authoritarian regime, through a humanitarian campaign for the social recognition of the war damaged. The right to be beautiful attests to the degree to which rights almost exclusively model claims to the subject of freedom. Such claims follow from the constellation of modern powers that presume to adjudicate humanity, in which the human is the effect of rights, animated by the law, and through which those who have been abandoned or outcast through the law’s absence or suspension can be redeemed. That beauty also operates as a measure of humanity and its others dares us to consider beauty alongside other rights on whose behalf we intervene against what terrors might follow in their absence.