Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Risa J. Toha, (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Wake Forest University), who will speak about national identity in Singapore.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

Prior works in ethnic politics and political economy have shown that in-group ethnic favoritism can lead to adverse political and social outcomes. Yet, in many of these available studies, ethnic identity could not be easily disentangled from other dimensions of identity, such as religion, class or nationality. Hence, the independent effect of ethnic differences on social cohesion remains unclear. In this paper, we leverage Singapore’s unique demographic composition to measure the extent to which individuals’ ethnicity, national identity, and class influence their altruism towards outgroup members. We conducted a field experiment wherein we mail misdirected envelopes to residents containing vouchers and letters cuing for intended recipients’ ethnicity, class, and nationality, and track their returns as a measure of altruism. We find little evidence of ethnic favoritism in our data. Instead, letter recipients are more likely to return misdirected letters when (i) they perceive that the intended recipients belong to a lower socioeconomic class and (ii) as their education and household income increases. Our results also show moderate effects of national solidarity cutting across ethnic boundaries, wherein Singaporean letter recipients tend to return the letters at a higher rate when the intended recipients are fellow Singaporeans, regardless of their ethnicity and class. We discuss the implications of these findings on ethnic politics, social harmony, and nation-building.

Talk by Juan Fernandez (PhD Candidate, Cornell University)

This talk examines three foundational ideas in the history and anthropology of sex and gender in Southeast Asia in the context of the colonial Philippines: the "high" status of women; the image of the man of prowess; and the concept and practice of gender pluralism.

Drawing from episodes of the ethnographic encounter between the earliest generation of American anthropological field-workers during the first decade of the 20th century and their Indigenous interlocutors, the talk aims to rethink the assumptions behind the axioms of the study of gender and sexuality in the region, as well as tracing their roots in the history of anthropology.

Speaker

Juan Fernandez is a historian of modern Southeast Asia. He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his B.A. from the University of the Philippines at Baguio. He has two forthcoming publications: one is a contribution to an edited volume on Indigenous Studies in the Philippines, and the other is an article in the journal Philippine Studies, entitled "'From Savages to Soldiers': The Igorot Body, Militarized Masculinity, and the Logic of Transformation in Dean C. Worcester's Philippine Photographs." He will be joining the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Fall 2023 first as an Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow, and subsequently as assistant professor of history in fall 2024.

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This Gatty Lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served.

Jeremy Ladd

Visiting Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Much research on democratization puts a premium on the importance of opposition political parties in bringing about democratic change, or at least being present at transitional elections to face incumbents. But the very existence of these parties is under-theorized. This article investigates the relationship between the support for opposition parties in hybrid regimes and the activity we would intuitively expect most hybrid regime incumbents to pursue in the face of a vibrant opposition: repression. Appealing to an original "big" dataset on the Cambodia National Rescue Party, this article finds that, surprisingly, the repression of opposition parties in hybrid regimes can actually lead to an increase in the attention they receive from citizens, which these parties can translate into more supporters. In other words, repressing an opposition party can actually increase its support base.

Jeremy researches opposition political parties and movements in electoral authoritarian regimes and emerging democracies. He is particularly interested in explaining why some parties and movements in these contexts are so successful while others are not. He is also interested in how both authoritarians and their opponents are adapting to the digital world. His comparative research is currently focused on Southeast Asia and Russia and the Post-Soviet region. Jeremy’s research on Southeast Asia was recently awarded a Southeast Asia Research Group Fellow award for 2022.

This Gatty lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom.

Lunch will be served.

For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Talk by David Ludden

The Rohingya survival crisis – in borderlands of Myanmar and Bangladesh -- has disappeared from the headlines, but Rohingyas remain one of the largest stateless populations in the world. Their suffering can be understood as an extreme example of the violence inflicted by national territory around the world. In South Asia, "partition" is the keyword in that violent history: it denotes the forced expulsion of people deemed foreign to the nation and the forced inclusion of people living on land claimed by nations during the demolition of British India. Rohingyas are among the latest and most brutalized victims of this imposition of national state boundaries on mobile imperial spaces during the ongoing global process of decolonization.

Get involved with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Language Resource Center to enhance your language skills!

Through resources on campus, students of all levels can improve global language skills, apply for funding to practice language abroad, and more.

Opportunities include:

Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) FellowshipRare and Distinctive (RAD) Language FellowshipForeign Language Introduction Program (FLIP)Conversation HoursLearn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Trent Walker, (Lecturer, Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University), which will focus on Buddhist Poetry in Cambodia.

This Gatty Lecture (co-sponsored by the Religious Studies Program) will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

From at least the seventeenth century, Cambodian writers have been composing vernacular Khmer poems for recitation in Buddhist rituals. Chanted with haunting, highly melismatic melodies, individual songs in this genre may take up to three hours to perform in dusk-to-dawn ceremonies of healing, remembrance, and consecration. Drawing on translations from the speaker's recent book, Until Nirvana's Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia, this talk highlights the aesthetic and affective dimensions of the four primary types of sung Buddhist poems in Cambodia: retellings of the Buddha's life, expressions of filial gratitude, meditations on the process of dying, and aspirations for future bliss. Poems across these four categories reveal how early modern authors wove intimate reflections on love and loss into a broader doctrinal and ritual framework for the end of life. The talk will also feature live demonstrations of the intricate vocal styles that have shaped the performance and reception of Khmer Buddhist verse over the past four centuries.

About the Speaker

Trent Walker specializes in Southeast Asian Buddhist music, literature, and manuscripts, and has published widely on Khmer, Lao, Pali, Thai, and Vietnamese Buddhist texts and recitation practices. He is the author of Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (Shambhala Publications, 2022) and the co-editor of Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). He earned his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the Khyentse Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok from 2018 to 2020. For links to his publications and other resources, visit www.trentwalker.org.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Sophie Chao (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology, University of Sydney).

This Gatty Lecture will take place on Zoom only. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

In 2019 anti-racism protests erupted across the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua. Organized largely by Papuan students, the protests expressed Papuans’ deep-seated frustration with their oppression under Indonesian rule since the early 1960s. In this seminar, Dr Chao will examine how Papuan demonstrators from the district of Merauke repurposed the racialized figure of the monkey—a species routinely deployed in Indonesian discourse to deprecate Papuans as primitive and backward—to support their demands for emancipation from Indonesian rule and to redeem nonhuman beings as consequential and meaningful entities in their own right.

Chao will then situate this specific example against other contexts of multispecies relationality among the Indigenous Marind communities of Merauke, West Papua, whose lives and experiences on an emergent oil palm frontier form the topic of her recent book, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022, Duke University Press). In doing so, Chao will demonstrate how the symbolic mobilization of different animals and plants by Papuan activists foregrounds the more-than-human dimensions of their struggle for social, racial, and multispecies justice—one in which humans and nonhumans sit in alternately indexical or antithetical relation to each other as contested cosmopolitical actors and world makers.

About the Speaker

Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022), which received the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award in 2021, and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022), also published by Duke University Press. Sophie previously worked for the human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their customary lands, resources, and livelihoods. For more information about Sophie’s research, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

Over 500 Cornellians have crossed the globe with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program since the 1940s. You could be the next!

The program, administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor helps you get started early to submit a successful application.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Over 500 Cornellians have crossed the globe with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program since the 1940s. You could be the next!

The program, administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor helps you get started early to submit a successful application.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.