Artistic freedom is a fundamental democratic right.

Creative expression, from poetry to street art, theater, and literature, is often at the vanguard of political resistance and change, and so artists are some of the first to be silenced. In this panel, speakers discuss their own experiences as artists in…

To be a good woman? Caste, respectability and violence in South India and postwar Sri Lanka

This talk will focus on gendered lives in the midst of profound transformation. "It is hard to be a good woman", one of the older women I worked with in Kerala told me. She was an agricultural laborer from a…

Sharif Hozoori, IIE-SRF fellow and visiting scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' South Asia Program will discuss his research about the failure of liberal democracy in Afghanistan due to the ruling elite's overt ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism has been present throughout…

Talk by Adeem Suhail (Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College)

This talk is based on ethnographic explorations of the broken worlds the denizens of contemporary Karachi, Pakistan, inhabit. It examines the period between two catastrophic floods in 2020 and 2022. By observing the efforts of the Wasted to…

Perspectives in Global Development: Fall 2023 Seminar Series

Abstract

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change creates differential vulnerabilities, experiences, responses, and coping mechanisms across the world. Climate coloniality clarifies how to understand this in more…

Talk by Amrita Kurian (Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania)

This paper uses a historical and ethnographic approach to analyze how the ideal of the “progressive farmer” percolates into the literature and processes that help establish the latest standards in Indian Flue-Cured…

This conference aims to bring together Afghan scholars and Afghanistan experts, primarily the next generation, to engage in discussions about the future of Afghanistan by analyzing past failures.

Afghanistan has faced conflict, crisis, instability, and civil war for the past half-century. In each period,…

The annual International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International…

Talk by Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard (English Language and Literature, University of Chicago)

“Is the ‘Coolie Woman’ A Banker?” revisits the figure of the “coolie woman” during Indian indenture in the British West Indies. Histories of indentured Indian women have focused on the experience of recruitment, labor…

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…

The often-fraught pathways of human migration come alive through art. From storytelling to innovative sculpture, theater, cartoons, and painting, students, faculty, and artists supported by the Migrations Global Grand Challenge will tell their stories and showcase their art.

Anindita Banerjee, associate…

The keynote of the day:

"Biophilia Now: Time for Imagining Alternatives to Techno- and Bio-Orientalism" by Rachel Lee, Professor of English, Gender Studies, and the Institute of Society and Genetics, UCLA.

Are you attending in person? If so, you must rsvp here. Space is limited.

We…

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…

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…

Talk by Curt Gambetta (Architecture, Cornell University)

Beginning in the late 1940s, scientists, building professionals, and technocrats embraced cement-stabilized mud (also known as “soil-cement”) as an easy-to-use, economical alternative to pukka concrete and fired brick house construction in India. But…

The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. This talk, based on a newly published book Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City,…

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…

“Priming the Canon: Ananda Coomaraswamy and Sri Lankan Art”

There has been much discussion about how to understand Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) as an influential voice in art history. This talks considers the place of Sri Lanka in his intellectual process, and therefore in the underlying energies of…

Lund Critical Debate

Democracies worldwide—even many wealthy democracies long considered safely consolidated—are at risk today. Governments, policymakers, and voters face new conflicts over democratic institutions, checks and balances, which citizens can compete for office or deserve representation, and what…

Talk by Anushay Malik (History, Simon Fraser University)

Before 1947, the working classes in the province of Punjab imagined themselves as part of a world much bigger than the one they would find themselves in after Punjab was partitioned to carve out the new states of India and Pakistan. This time (in the…

As in years prior, this conference provides an opportunity for graduate students to critically engage with the particularities of Sri Lanka and its diasporas; particularities often sacrificed to make our work speak clearly to non-specialist audiences. While we acknowledge the many benefits of such generalized…

Scholars, artists, and organizers who understand the violence of displacement deeply and intimately narrate and theorize how borders, militarized imperialisms, and their colonial genealogies shape people’s lives and foreclose right to both home and refuge. Featuring presentations, performances, films, installations…

Reading by V. V. Ganeshananthan (Novelist)

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate…

To the Academy is a multimedia performance work inspired by Kafka’s short story, A Report for an Academy, and the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, The Natyashastra. The piece weaves a tale about an ape couple rehearsing a music hall show for a group of scholars. As the apes grapple with how to entertain…

A Keynote Event for Displaced. Detained. Undeterred: A Critical/Creative Symposium

Thursday, April 20, 2023, Physical Sciences Building 401

4.30 Opening Remarks
Saida Hodžić (Cornell University)

4.45 KEYNOTE DIALOGUE

In this keynote, speakers Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Yến Lê…

The South Asian Imaginary: Exploring the region through image-making practices

A lecture by Rahaab Allana, curator and publisher at Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi, to introduce the foundation's latest reader, Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia, co-published with…

Talk by Amina Yaqin (Associate Professor in World Literatures and Publishing, University of Exeter)

In this talk, I look back at the literary history of feminism in Urdu poetry through the voices of selected twentieth-century women poets. The aim is not to establish a canon of feminist poetry but to trace…

Talk by Kamila Shamsie (Novelist)

Kamila Shamsie will read from her new novel Best of Friends. The novel required Shamsie to return in her imagination to her 15-year-old self who lived through a pivotal moment in Pakistan’s history (the death of the dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, followed by the election of a 35-year…

Please join us for a virtual lecture by Petra Kieffer-Pülz (Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz).

Between 1803 and 1813 five ordination lineages were introduced from Burma to Sri Lanka that formed the Amarapuranikāya. In 1851 a dispute concerning the legal validity of the monastic boundary (sīmā) of…

States often fortify their borders against militant threats. How do these efforts shape civilian welfare and perceptions in borderland communities? Professor Christopher Blair conceptualizes border fortification as a legibility-building endeavor. By bolstering state reach in areas of weak historical penetration,…