Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs Maxwell African Scholars Union presents Disaster Capitalism and Political Instability in Africa: The Case of the Perennial Conflict in the DRC  Disaster capitalism is an extreme form of capitalism by which disasters, both natural and manmade, are turned into lucrative money-making opportunities for corporate interests; and an opportunity for political elites to implement otherwise unpopular policies that serve the special interests of capital. In this public lecture, I explore this phenomenon of disaster capitalism with a focus on the conflict in the DRC. The goal is to demonstrate the corporate interests that have benefitted and continue to benefit from the crisis of instability in the Congo and the fact that disaster capitalism has become the modus operandi of capitalism in our contemporary world. Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o   Professor of International Studies   Rhodes College Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o holds a Ph.D. in Public and International Affairs from Northeastern University, Boston and a B.A. in Political Science and Linguistics and M.A. in International Relations both from the University of Nairobi, Kenya. He is Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee, where he teaches courses in comparative politics, international relations, and African politics. He has previously taught at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Nairobi, and Kenyatta University, both in Kenya. Additionally, Prof. Nasong’o has held summer fellowships at Riara University and Egerton University, both in Kenya. A political comparativist, Prof. Nasong’o’s research interest lies in the areas of democratization, identity politics, social conflict, governance, and development. He is author, editor, and co-editor of nine books, dozens of peer reviewed book chapters and articles in refereed journals. His latest publication is an edited volume, African Governance, Security and Development (Lanham: Lexington, 2021). For his prolific scholarly work, Prof. Nasong’o has been honored with the Rhodes College’s Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity, and the Ali Mazrui Award for Research and Scholarly Excellence from the University of Texas at Austin. Click here to register For more information or to request additional accommodation arrangements, please contact Havva Karakas Keles, hkarakas@syr.edu.

The Biden Administration and New Cyber Threats. Almost from its first days in office, the Biden administration has been confronted with nation states using cyber operations to pursue strategic interests. The United States has also faced a wave of disruptive ransomware attacks that have highlighted the continued shortcoming of US cyber policy. How has the cyber threat evolved, and what new directions will cyber policy take under the Biden administration? Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Register for this event at https://tinyurl.com/parccregister. Sponsored by PARCC.  For more information, contact Roxanne Tupper at rmtupper@syr.edu or at 315-443-2367.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs East Asia Program presents Composer Chen Yi and the Cultural Revolution Trauma, dislocation, loss, severed plans, and backbreaking manual labor were only some of the devastating results of the Cultural Revolution for Chinese American composer Chen Yi (b. 1953). However, the Cultural Revolution also fostered major musical influences on her compositions, especially revolutionary tunes sometimes adapted from folk music or rural songs and a variety of traits derived from Beijing Opera via the Model Works championed by Madame Mao. Evaluation and interpretation of these borrowings and markers of Chinese culture vary among scholars. What cultural meanings emerge from her particular fusion of Chinese and Western musical elements? Chen’s retrospective assessment of her experience during the Cultural Revolutionary is noteworthy for her focus on the positive benefits of her “down-to-the-countryside” experiences: Frankly, it was not until then that I found my roots, my motherland, and really appreciated the simple people on the earth and the importance of education and civilization. I learned to overcome hardship, to bear anger, fear and humiliation under the political pressure, to get close to uneducated farmers on a personal and spiritual level, and to share my feelings and thinking with them, to learn to hope, to forgive, to survive, and to live optimistically, strongly and independently, and to work hard in order to benefit more human beings in society. This event is part of Bringing East Asia to the SU Classroom Series. J. Michele Edwards   Professor Emerita of Music, Macalester College J. Michele Edwards, musicologist and conductor, is professor emerita of music, Macalester College, and holds a doctorate from the University of Iowa. Her conducting ranges from musical theater to professional orchestras and included several large choral-orchestral positions. Frequently commissioning and conducting premieres, Edwards is committed to programming compositions by women. An active scholar, Edwards contributed over 20 articles about women musicians to the Grove Dictionary of American Music and a similar number about Japanese and American musicians to New Grove Dictionary. Recent publications include “The World of Women and Beyond: Mabel Daniels and her Choral Music” in Choral Journal and “Women on the Podium” in Cambridge Companion to Conducting. Recent presentation topics include Chen Yi, Tania León, Japanese/Asian music, and Fluxus. In 2020 she and coauthor Leta Miller published a book about Chen Yi and her music with the University of Illinois Press. Edwards served on the editorial board for ACDA’s The Choral Journal (2000–17) and is an active member of the AMS. Click here to register For more information or to request additional accommodation arrangements, please contact Havva Karakas Keles, hkarakas@syr.edu.

Yusun Kim (University of Connecticut) will present “Does Coordination among Small Localities Generate Returns to Scale in Property Value Assessment? Evidence from New York State” as part of the Syracuse Webinar Series on Property Tax Administration and Design. RSVP is required for this event. For more information, please contact Laura Walsh at lcwalsh@syr.edu.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs Program on Latin America and the Caribbean and Department of Geography and the Environment present Between Flood and Drought: Environmental Racism, The Production of Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous Water Justice in South America’s Chaco This talk advances a novel approach to assessing the geographies of settler colonialism by wedding insights from Indigenous studies alongside critical physical geography. Settler colonialism is a structure of social-spatial relations centered on land dispossession and elimination of Indigenous lifeways. While geography matters to settler colonialism, few studies examine how settlers use biophysical geographies to colonize and the effects on Indigenous water access. I weave an analysis of historical missionary accounts with a political economy of contemporary cattle ranching and GIS assessment of water infrastructures to show how settler waterscape formation reworks hydro-social relations in the South American Gran Chaco. Further, the paper shows how settler waterscapes produce vulnerability along racial lines by limiting Indigenous access to water that subsequently makes regularly-occurring flood and drought events malignant, even deadly. I argue that settler colonialism is manifest in spatially distinct ways vis-à-vis different physical geographies that produces environmental racism, showing that water scarcity is socially produced. Based on long-term field research with Enxet and Sanapaná peoples in Paraguay, the paper contributes to debates on colonial natures, water justice, and Indigenous geographies by using critical physical geography to study the production of novel bio-social systems and their implications on justice. Joel E. Correia   Assistant Professor, Center for Latin American Studies   University of Florida Joel E. Correia is a human geographer whose research and teaching focus on the intersections of human rights, justice, development, and environmental change with attention to Indigenous politics in Latin America. In collaboration with community partners, his research seeks to understand how extra-local political, legal, and economic processes—like international Indigenous rights mechanisms, environmental governance schemes, and global commodity production and exchange—influence livelihoods, the praxis of rights, and socio-environmental relations at the “local” level, and vice versa. Joel draws theoretical and methodological inspiration from political ecology and STS, critical social theory, ethnography, and participatory research. His most recent field-based research projects in the Southern Cone have focused on Indigenous land rights, the implementation of Inter-American Court of Human Rights decisions, expanding agrarian frontiers, political ecologies of territorial struggles, and the politics of fair trade. Correia’s first book, Disrupting the patrón: Unsettling racial geographies in pursuit of Indigenous environmental justice, is currently in progress. To date, his research is published in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Geoforum, the Journal of Latin American Geography, Erasmus Law Review and other academic journals with several chapters in press for edited volumes by Routledge, University Press of Florida, and Edward Elgar. He also contributes to public news outlets like The Conversation and has been interviewed for works on Indigenous human rights and environmental change by NBC, Mongabay, World Politics Review, among others. His new research initiative, “Frontiers of Environmental Justice: Rupture, resource rule, and resistance” investigates social-ecological transformations taking place across South America’s Gran Chaco forest region—a site where rapid deforestation, new infrastructure projects, extractivism, and climate change are creating new challenges and opportunities for Indigenous environmental justice. After receiving his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder in August 2017, Joel completed a Postdoctoral position at the University of Arizona (2017-18). He holds an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Arizona and a BA in Geography from Humboldt State University. This talk is a part of the Geography and the Environment Colloquium Series. Click here to register For more information or to request additional accommodation arrangements, please contact Havva Karakas Keles, hkarakas@syr.edu.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs Middle Eastern Studies Program presents Persian Culture and Conversation Table  Students, faculty, and Syracuse area community members at all levels of proficiency in Persian are welcome to attend! Come join us for some good conversation in Persian in a relaxed setting. Persian Culture and Conversation Table will be led by Haleh Tabesh. Co-sponsored by: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics Click here to register For more information or to request accessibility arrangements, please contact Havva Karakas-Keles, hkarakas@syr.edu.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs Trade, Development and Political Economy present Amit Khandelwal: “Language Barriers in Multinationals and Knowledge Transfers” A distinct feature of MNCs is a three-tier organizational structure: foreign managers (FMs) supervise domestic managers (DMs) who supervise production workers. Language barriers between FMs and DMs could impede transfers of management knowledge. The authors develop a model in which DMs learn general management by communicating with FMs, but communication effort is non-contractible. These conditions generate sub-optimal communication within the MNC. If communication is complementary with language skills, the planner could raise welfare by subsidizing foreign language acquisition. The authors experimentally assess the validity of the general skills and the complementarity assumptions in Myanmar, a setting where FMs and DMs communicate in English. The first experiment examines the general skills assumption by asking prospective employers at domestic firms to rate hypothetical job candidates. They value candidates with both higher English proficiency and MNC experience, a premium driven, in part, by frequent interactions with FMs. The second experiment examines the complementarity assumption by providing English training to a random sample of DMs working at MNCs. At endline, treated DMs have higher English proficiency, communicate more frequently with their FMs, are more involved in firm management, and perform better in simulated management tasks. Organizational barriers within MNCs can thus hinder knowledge transfers and lead to an under-investment in English relative to the social optimum.   Professor Khandelwal’s research focuses on the link between international trade and economic development. He has studied how trade reforms in China and India affected participation in global markets and firms’ productivity. He has implemented randomized trials that explore the causal impacts of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology adoption in Egypt, Myanmar, and Pakistan. His most recent work has examined the U.S. trade war and its implications for the U.S. economy.  His expertise in policy issues includes international trade and industrial policy. At Columbia, he teaches courses in microeconomics, emerging markets, and has taught international seminars on the Indian, Chinese, and Myanmar economies.  Khandelwal received a doctorate in economics from Yale University and bachelor’s degrees in economics and mathematics from Northwestern University. Click here to register for this Zoom event   Any questions, please contact Juanita Horan at jmhoran@syr.edu

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs South Asia Center presents     Sovereign Atonement and the Making of Showcase Citizens Along the Borders of Bangladesh and India Drawing on the experiences of India’s former border enclave residents inside Bangladesh after their exchange in 2015, Dr. Ferdoush contends that the Bangladesh state took extraordinary measures in incorporating them as citizens. Such exceptional measures resulted in a category of citizens that cannot be fully grasped with the existing vocabulary of citizenship. He offers the idea of sovereign atonement to comprehend the extraordinary measures undertaken by the state while showcase citizens refer to an exceptionally treated group who became subjects of special attention in certain spaces during a specific time. The key to understanding such exceptional treatments and special attention lies in our readings of post-colonial territory and state-making, sovereign in/exclusion, and performative governmentality. Register Here Dr. Azmeary Ferdoush is a postdoctoral researcher in the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu, Finland. He specializes in political geography with a focus on the study of state, borders, and (non)citizenship in South Asia and, more recently, Arctic Finland. He is co-editor of Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond, that came out in 2018 from Amsterdam University Press. Dr. Ferdoush’s papers have appeared in numerous outlets, including Antipode, Political Geography, Area, Geopolitics, Geoforum, and Ethnography. Before joining Oulu, Dr. Ferdoush pursued his doctoral studies and taught as a lecturer at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa. For more information or to request accessibility arrangements, please contact Emera Bridger Wilson, elbridge@syr.edu

The Right to Repair: What are the benefits to consuming less (rapidly), or differently?  In this talk, Prof. Walliman will outline the reasoning behind this emerging aspect of the environmental movement. Also some of the initial government environmental policy frames and their link to consumer protection will be presented. Finally, he will sketch some ways in which civil society could cooperate with local government in enhancing repair, generating also some additional positive spillover effects not yet discussed by “the right to repair movement”. Sponsored by PARCC.  Register at http://tinyurl.com/parccregister For more information, contact Roxanne Tupper at rmtupper@syr.edu or at 315-443-2367.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs South Asia Center presents Caste in the United States: Overview of the Civil Rights Movement for Caste Protections Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Director of Equality Labs This talk will explore the history of caste civil rights, urgent cases, and campaigns that Equality Labs is leading around the United States. About the speaker:  Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a Dalit rights artist, technologist, and theorist. Currently, Thenmozhi is the co-Founder and Executive Director of Equality Labs, a Dalit Civil Rights organization that  uses community research, cultural and political organizing, popular education and digital security to build power to end caste apartheid, white supremacy, gender based violence, and religious intolerance. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Register here for the Zoom Event. For more information, please contact Emera Bridger Wilson, elbridge@syr.edu.

Andreas Økland (Norwegian University) will present “Capitalization of a Recurring Tax on Properties: Evidence from Local Property Tax Reforms” as part of the Syracuse Webinar Series on Property Tax Administration and Design. For more information, please contact Laura Walsh at lcwalsh@syr.edu.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs Maxwell African Scholars Union presents Spotlight On Africa: 2020 Research Grants Please join Maxwell African Scholars Union (MASU) for a panel presentation by MASU-funded graduate students on their research projects in Africa. Panelists:  Oluseyi Odunyemi Agbelusi, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology Title of Talk: British Anti-Slavery, Trade, and Nascent Colonialism on the Freetown Peninsula, Sierra Leone Bio: Oluseyi is a doctoral candidate in anthropology with a concentration in archaeology. He is a Syracuse University Graduate Fellow and a 2021-2022 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. Oluseyi is writing his dissertation entitled, British Anti-Slavery, Trade, and Nascent Colonialism on the Freetown Peninsula, Sierra Leone, which reveals the impacts of British anti-slavery policies and trade networks on household socio-economic organization at Regent, a Liberated African village on the Freetown Peninsula during the early colonial period (1808-1896). Tom Bouril, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History Title of Talk: Internationalized Bodies: The Internationalization of Kenyan Children in the 1950s Bio: Tom Bouril is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the History Department at Syracuse University. His research focuses on the contested nature of children during the colonial era in East Africa. His dissertation examines how Kenya became a “Living Laboratory” for questions about childhood and how childhood became a heavily contested sociocultural arena. Susan S. Ekoh, Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Program in Environmental Science (GPES), SUNY ESF Title of Talk: Climate Change and Coastal Megacities: Adapting through Mobility Bio: Susan is a PhD Candidate studying Environmental and Natural Resources Policy (ENRP) at SUNY ESF. Susan is passionate about environmental issues in developing countries, especially in Africa. Her dissertation explores climate migration in an urban coastal setting, with a focus on Lagos, Nigeria. The goal of this research is to produce findings that contribute to the development of appropriate policies that aid individuals and communities as they adapt to a changing climate. Susan is also currently a Climate Adaptation Fellow at the American Society for Adaptation Professionals, where she supports projects geared towards preparing receiving communities in the Great Lakes region for climate in-migration. Click here to register  For more information or to request additional accommodation arrangements, please contact Havva Karakas Keles, hkarakas@syr.edu.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs East Asia Program presents Pathways to Nuclear War with North Korea: The Risks of Catastrophe in 2017 and Today  How dangerous was the 2017 nuclear crisis with North Korea?  How did it come about?  How did the crisis end without war?  And what are the chances of reliving a crisis of that magnitude on the Korean Peninsula?  This talk, based on the book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War, will reveal the pathways to war in 2017, why summit diplomacy ultimately failed, and the prospects of it all happening again.  It will argue that while the personalized insults and caprice of the 2017 crisis made the Korean Peninsula uniquely combustible, the structure that made nuclear war possible in the first place is even more pressurized today than in 2017. Hosted by: Kristen Patel Gregg Professor of Practice in Korean and East Asian Affairs Speaker: Van Jackson Senior Lecturer in International Relations Victoria University of Wellington Van Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, where he specializes in Asia-Pacific security, the politics of US foreign policy, and the theory and practice of grand strategy. He also holds policy research appointments as a Distinguished Fellow with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada; as the Defence & Strategy Fellow with the Centre for Strategic Studies;  and as a Senior Associate Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Nonproliferation & Disarmament. He is the author of dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports, as well as two books with Cambridge University Press: On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War (2018), and Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations (2016). His third book, forthcoming with Yale University Press, is titled Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace. Van is the host of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and a regular writer for the Duck of Minerva. Register here For more information or to request accessibility arrangements, please contact Havva Karakas-Keles, hkarakas@syr.edu.

Dr. Baugher is a professor of anthropology and landscape architecture at Cornell University. She was the first City Archeologist for New York City (1980-1990) and continues to serve as an advisor to state and municipal agencies. Her teaching philosophy and research demonstrates clear commitment for the holistic incorporation of service-learning, engaged learning, and community collaborations. Working across disciplinary boundaries, her collaborate efforts aim to preserve endangered Native American, colonial, and 19th-century archaeological sites and to reveal the stories of these complex cultural landscapes. Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology If you have any questions or require accommodations, please contact JoAnn L Rhoades at jlrhoade@syr.edu  by 27 October 2021

“Pragmatic Approach to Ethical Research Collaboration with BIPOC Communities”.  Several academic professional societies have committed themselves to conducting research with Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) communities in an ethical manner. However, they do not address what that research looks like or how research can be enriched through an ethical research approach.  This presentation serves as a foundation for researchers collaborating with BIPOC communities to think about their research in a way that can empower those communities while conducting innovative research. Sponsored by PARCC.  For more information, contact Roxanne Tupper at rmtupper@syr.edu or at 315-443-2367. Register for this Zoom event at https://tinyurl.com/parccregister