Polson Institute for Global Development Seminar
A conversation with Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA

Professor Ching Kwan Lee explores the making of 'Global China' as an economic, cultural, and political phenomenon in this conversation with Jenny Goldstein (assistant professor of global development at Cornell) and Eli Friedman (associate professor and chair of international & comparative labor at Cornell)

Ching Kwan Lee is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA and author of three award-winning monographs on China: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998); Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007); and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her most recent co-edited volumes include Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019); and The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View (University of California Press, 2019).

Moderators:

Jenny Goldstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University and a core faculty member of Cornell's Southeast Asian Studies Program. She works across the areas of political ecology, critical development studies, and human geography. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics (Nebraska, 2022).Eli Friedman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative and International Labor at Cornell University. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (Cornell 2014); and The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia, forthcoming Spring 2022).

The Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Institute for Global Development supports theoretical and applied social science research. We fund projects and working groups that address issues ranging from economic inequality to discursive politics, contributing to Cornell’s leadership in global development.

Kathleen "Kat" Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on modern Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the history of science and the environment. She completed her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation on the international consolidation of botany in the Philippines was shortlisted for Best Dissertation in the Humanities by the International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2021. With Paul Michael Atienza, she is guest co-editing a special issue on STS for Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. Presently, Dr. Gutierrez is in residence at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden completing her first book manuscript.

This Gatty lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Please register here if you wish to attend via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rduioqzgpHNMTX31Z7KpbwfHg58…

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.

More information on acceptable documentation is available here: https://covid.cornell.edu/visitors/

Perspectives in Global Development Seminar Speaker: Wiwik Dharmiasi, Dala Institute and University of Hawaii Location: Emerson 135 and Zoom The traditional farming system in Bali, known as subak, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012. The subak represents water sharing practices in rice cultivation that has existed for over a thousand years. Increasing tourism development on the island, however, has threatened the existence of the subak system. Farmers face challenges in the form of land use change, reallocation of water rights, land taxation, and aging. Inscribing the subak as a World Heritage Site aimed to protect against these threats, but tourism impacts exacerbate challenges in UNESCO designated areas. This is due to a lack of mechanisms for incorporating farmer interests into management plans. This presentation describes engagement with subak farming families at the heart of the UNESCO site. Through a multigenerational photovoices initiative involving eight farming families over a period of two years, this presentation highlights key themes from local farmer perspectives. Overarching themes include: development and land use change; gender and labor; visitor management; and, generational inheritance of cultural practices. Methods of engaging local voices such as this assist in exploring pathways for developing targeted policies that better respond to local farming family concerns. About the Speaker Wiwik Dharmiasih's research focuses on Political Geography, Conflict Transformation, and Community-based Natural Resources Management. She has also worked on climate change adaptation initiatives involving local perspectives of change and supported disaster risk reduction efforts, with a special focus on issues related to water equity, youth, and women. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Hawaii. She also lectures in the Department of International Relations, Universitas Udayana and is a research associate at Dala Institute in Bali, Indonesia. She actively engages with World Heritage Watch, a network focused on protection, management, and conservation of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. She earned her B.A. in International Relations from the Universitas Pembangunan Nasional “Veteran” Yogyakarta in Indonesia, and an M.A. in Politics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. About the seminar series The Perspectives in Global Development seminars are held Wednesdays from 12:25 – 1:15 p.m. eastern time during the semester. The series will be presented in a hybrid format with some speakers on campus and others appearing via Zoom. Students, faculty and the general public are welcome to attend. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development, the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the School of Integrative Plant Science as part of courses IARD 6960, NTRES 6960, PLSCS 6960 and AEM 6960.

By Cheran

In this lecture and reading, Cheran will reflect on the important but ambiguous relationship with the sea from both personal and communal perspectives. Drawing on and reading from his various poems about the sea and other water bodies, he will chart an alternative imagination for Tamil identities.

Dr. R. Cheran is Tamil Canadian academic, poet, playwright and journalist. He is a professor at the University of Windsor in Canada. He has authored over fifteen books in Tamil, and his work has been translated into twenty languages. Several volumes of his work have been published in English translation, including The Second Sunrise (Translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom, 2010), In a Time of Burning (Translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom and Sascha Ebeling, 2013) and You Cannot Turn Away (Translated by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2011). His poems in English translation have also been published in numerous literary magazines, such as Bomb (New York), Modern Poetry in Translation, Many Mountains Moving, Exiled Ink, Mantra Review, and Talisman. His poems have been included in several anthologies, including Singing in the Dark: An Anthology of Lockdown Poems (2020), Many Roads Through Paradise: Sri Lankan Literature (edited by Shyam Selvadurai, 2014), and In Our Translated World: Global Tamil Poetry (edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2014).

Cheran was the recipient of the International Poetry Award from ONV Kurup Foundation in Dubai in 2017. He has performed is poetry at various International Writers’ festivals in the United Kingdom, Singapore, the US, Indonesia, India, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, Ramallah, West Bank, Dubai and Mexico. His plays in English language have been produced and performed in Toronto, Canada, New York, Chicago and New Jersey in the US. Singapore’s modern dance group Chowk has produced and performed a dance play based on his poems titled “The Second Sunrise”. The Second Sunrise was performed at the Singapore International dance festival, and Washington’s Kennedy Centre for the Arts.

The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, the late Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.

CCCI welcomes Tani Barlow, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University to speak on, "Instinct and Society."

When Li Zehou burst onto the scene during the 1980s ‘culture fever’ he dragged back in altered form a much earlier foundational debate over evolution and instinct theory launched in the new social theory and human science movement during the May Fourth era. Barlow's general research question now is how society got ontologized a century ago. How did proof of “society,” a materialized model, get so embedded in our explanatory frameworks that we have trouble thinking outside of it, even though we regularly confront questions it cannot resolve.

The Contemporary China Initiative this spring is directed by Arnika Fuhrmann, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University and the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema.

This semester's CCCI lecture series is connected to Asian 6623 being taught by Professor Fuhrmann called 'The City.'

CCCI spring 2022 is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Department of History, Asian Studies, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, Comparative Literature, and the Migrations Initiative.

Jini Kim Watson, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University speaks on, 'Cold War Reckonings: In the Shadow of Solzhenitsyn.' UPDATE: ONLY VIRTUAL Register for Zoom below.

How did the Cold War shape political modernity in the decolonizing world, and what do literature and literary networks reveal about such political contestations and their afterlives? In the first half of the presentation, Kim gives an overview of her new book, "Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization" (Fordham UP, 2021), which examines cultural production that emerges from, and reflects upon, the entanglement of the Cold War and decolonization in East and Southeast Asia.

In the second half, she considers several high-profile dissident writers from the region: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Kim Chi-ha, and Ninotchka Rosca. Kim argues that these figures challenge Cold War liberal, human-rights notions of the dissident Third World writer via their emphases on incomplete decolonization and bipolar economic restructuring. Such an analysis, suggests Kim, helps us parse the way Cold War exigencies reshaped notions of literary and political freedom in postcolonial Asia. 

This event is facilitated by Bonnie Chung, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.

Co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and Literatures in English Department.

CCCI welcomes Kimiko Suda, Ph.D. Post Doc researcher, National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa) speaking on, 'Ant Tribes'(Yizu) in China´s contested Urban Space: A Discourse Perspective.'

In 2009 the term "Yizu" (Ant tribe) was selected as one of the ten most popular terms in China´s social media discussions. It was coined by the economist Lian Si to provoke a discussion about the social group of migrant graduates from China´s rural areas, working and living in precarious situations in China´s biggest cities, often in so-called urban villages. The term was taken up by various actors from governmental strategists, scientists, social media influencers, TV-script writers, novelists, to critical media activists. They functionalized the figure of the "Yizu" to tell their version of the story about the "Chinese Dream“, urban transformation processes, social stratification, social mobility, new emerging collective identities, and different shades of the brightness of the future. When analyzing the different variations of the narratives about "Yizu", it all boils down to one question: how to keep your human dignity in a social context, in which an increasing economization and mediatization of almost everything shapes everyday life, and makes it impossible to create a stable, publicly respected and self-determined social identity and position.

Kimiko Suda´s talk is based on a chapter of her book "Das Phänomen Yizu“ (published in September 2021 by transcript)

The Contemporary China Initiative this spring is directed by Arnika Fuhrmann, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University and the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema.

This semester's CCCI lecture series is connected to Asian 6623 being taught by Professor Fuhrmann called 'The City.'

CCCI spring 2022 is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Department of History, Asian Studies, The Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Migrations initiative.