Bartels World Affairs Lecture In this year's Bartels lecture from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, former president of Costa Rica Carlos Alvarado Quesada shares how conservation and sustainability are crucial for preserving democracy around the world. Costa Rica is one of the most biodiverse spots on the planet, with more than one-quarter of the nation's land protected in parks and preserves. As Costa Rica's leader from 2018 to 2022, Alvarado proposed a challenge for his country and the world: to make Costa Rica a decarbonized nation by 2050. During his visit to Cornell, Alvarado explores some of the questions that guided his administration: What roles do democracy and governance play in shaping environmental policies at the local, national, and global levels? And how can we meet the basic needs of the world’s ever-growing human population—equitably and democratically—without sacrificing the health of the planet and its other inhabitants? A reception with refreshments will follow the lecture. Lecture: 6:00–7:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumReception: 7:30–8:30 p.m. | Park AtriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance. Reserve your ticket for the lecture and/or reception today! Join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell. *** How did President Alvarado's policies protect Costa Rica's environment? Read a Bartels explainer by the Lab of O's Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez. *** About Carlos Alvarado Quesada Carlos Alvarado Quesada was Costa Rica's 48th president, serving from 2018 until 2022. He was Costa Rica's youngest president in a century, taking office at age 38. Representing the Citizens' Action Party (PAC), Alvarado previously served as minister of labor and social security. Alvarado received the 2022 Planetary Leadership Award from the National Geographic Society for his commitment and action to protect the ocean. He accepted on behalf of his country the 2019 Champion of the Earth Award, the United Nations' highest environmental honor. A writer and political scientist, Alvarado is currently Professor of Practice of Diplomacy at Tufts University's Fletcher School in Massachusetts. *** About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience, this year's lecture is cosponsored by Einaudi's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. The Einaudi Center’s flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism - 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium

Beijing Panel — Thursday, March 2 (Ithaca) | Friday, March 3 (Beijing)

In-Person & Livestream Webinar

Cornell China Center | 1208 Beijing IFC Tower B

8 p.m. (Ithaca) | 9 a.m. (Beijing)
Welcome and Introduction

8:15 p.m. (Ithaca) | 9:15 a.m. (Beijing)
Keynote Address: Lu Wenyu & Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio

9:15 p.m. (Ithaca) | 10:15 a.m. (Beijing) | Panel

Speakers:
Xu Tiantian, DnA Design and Architecture
Song Yehao, SUP Atelier
Song Gang, Atelier cnS

Moderator:
Ying Hua, Director of Cornell China Center

RURAL ITERATIONS

Where the Oxford English Dictionary defines “reiteration” as an act of repetition, in architecture, to iterate and reiterate is to work in a cyclical methodology, prototyping, testing, and analyzing, to refine a product or process.

This panel looks in detail at recent works that “iterate” upon China’s rural territories. In these projects, the rural is reclaimed as a repository of architectural materials and methods, which had been gradually lost during urbanization, and re-iterated to produce new architecture that is nonetheless highly contextualized and connected to local cultural and material practices. Sometimes this reclamation is literal – repurposing material and site; and sometimes methodological; and sometimes programmatic.

Through the work of the speakers, we gain an understanding of the speed, scale, and context of China’s rural transformation, as well as how practitioners can work with local communities and craftsmen, manufacturers, government agencies, and outside experts on technology to reiterate materials and cultures practices for new architectural methods.

The symposium also has additional events in Ithaca. View the 2-day symposium overview, schedule, exhibition, and organizers.

The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium events are free and open to the public. The Beijing panel of the symposium is co-hosted and co-sponsored by the Cornell China Center. Organized by Architecture Assistant Professor Leslie Lok; coordinated by Design Teaching Fellow Hanxi Wang. Exhibition assistant Jialiang (Hunter) Huang; Augmented Reality interface support by Yichen Jia.

Join us for a dance and musical performance by Arja Saraswati Puja featuring Sanggar Seni Citta Usadhi and the New Atlantic Chamber Gamelan.

Arja Saraswati Puja tells the story of the powerful King Watugunung, who rules the Kundadwipa kingdom with Lord Brahma’s blessing. Unbeknownst to the king, his most beautiful wife, Dewi Shinta, is actually his own mother. When Dewi Shinta recognizes that she has committed a grave wrong by marrying her son, she sends him to heaven on a futile quest to locate and capture the divine goddess Nawangsasih to be her maidservant. But Dewi Nawangsasih’s husband, the great Lord Wisnu, does not wish to surrender his beloved partner, so he transforms into the mighty Rudramurti, mounts a fierce battle, and expels King Watugunung — defeated and unconscious — from the heavens. After several days, King Watugunung awakens with divine awareness and repents for his wrongdoings. Honoring this enlightenment, the Lord Brahma sends the Goddess Saraswati to light the earth with knowledge.

Ashley Aye Aye Dun will analyze Charmaine Craig’s 2017 novel Miss Burma and situate it within her current research, which studies how Burmese American literature confronts a slippage between ethnic authenticity and authoritarianism, as mediated through the body. Set during the Cold War, Miss Burma is a novelization of the life of Craig’s grandparents and mother, Louisa Benson Craig, a beauty queen of Sephardic Jewish and Karen ancestry. “Karen” broadly refers to a group of ethnic minority peoples in Burma/Myanmar who have long been persecuted by the country’s ethno-nationalist military regime. In the novel, Louisa is crowned the winner of the 1956 “Miss Burma” pageant; in later years, she becomes wanted by the military after joining a rebel political organization claiming to fight for Karen self-determination and freedom from ethnic Burman hegemony. Analyzing the novel alongside discussion of past and present events in Burmese/Myanmar history, this talk will think beyond positivist historicist readings of the novel as well as readings that tend towards perceiving the gendered, mixed-race body as a symbol of futurity with respect to a modern “Burmese” identity or subjecthood. Rather than see the novel merely as a case of woman “performing” nation or ethnic unity, this talk argues that Burmese-ness emerges in Miss Burma as a plurality of corporeal forms–“problem,” “parallel,” and “pretense”–instead of an essentialist, nationalistic truth of identity. Craig’s novel thus highlights the transnational pressures of authentic ethnic representation central to contemporary debates in both Asian American and Burma studies.

Ashley Aye Aye Dun is a PhD candidate in English at Brown University. She is currently completing her dissertation, “The Slash Between: In/authenticating Burmese American Literature,” and is also assistant editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. For years, Ashley has been involved with activist scholarship that brings attention to the persecution of minorities in Burma/Myanmar. She has helped provide intellectual spaces for the diaspora of Burma/Myanmar to explore the intricacies of their ethnic identities and how they continue to be impacted by the oppression of the Burmese/Myanmar regime. After the 2021 coup, she co-founded Baydar: a Burmese American online collective that serves as a platform for the diaspora of Burma/Myanmar to discuss political movements in the country as well as issues facing their own diasporic communities. Outside of academia, she enjoys writing fiction and is working on her first novel.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

Asian borders are often sites of division, surveillance, and militarization that usurp histories of indigenous sovereignty and fluid mobility, even as they are developed as zones of superficial connectivity. Against these spectacles, ordinary people escape and cross borders every day, often in illicit, unspectacular ways. For example, in the late 1980s, a network of transnational 'rebel' organizations facilitated the clandestine movement of Kachin children across Myanmar's borders into China and India for safekeeping. Undertaking dangerous journeys and dodging multiple security regimes, the children lived most of their lives as ‘illegal’ transnational subjects, only to return decades later to a distant war-torn 'homeland.' Building on a book project that assembles such oral histories and ethnographies of mobility across Myanmar’s borderlands, this talk explores what trans-Asia might mean when seen from the border-worlds of Asia. In doing so, it shows the production of Asian spaces and identities that do not sit comfortably within the boundaries of area studies.

In the heyday of colonialism and empire, global connections conspired to produce a singular industrial and ‘civilized’ world on the ruins of many others. But another form of connectivity facilitated the survival of worlds of an entirely different kind. One example can be found in the late 19th century, in day-to-day interactions that linked East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australasia at the non-state level. Indigenous and non-state actors turned to the ocean, where they undermined colonial forms of relating and created what I call the ‘Arafura Zone’. In this talk, I show how Asia was not just a historical backdrop for the expansion of industrial civilization but also the originator of an indigenous form of globalization.