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The EMI Annual Conference 2024 will be held on Nov 1, at Cornell Tech, NYC. Please stay connected and register to our newsletter to keep updated about speakers, program, and registration.
The EMI Annual Conference 2024 will be held on Nov 1, at Cornell Tech, NYC. Please stay connected and register to our newsletter to keep updated about speakers, program, and registration.
With growing venture capital investments and private equity deals, India and Vietnam are positioned to become prime choices for international capital.
Cryptocurrencies have attracted much attention from the public. In the cryptocurrency space, perpetual contracts play a crucial role.
The resilience of the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, amid urbanization and plastic bans, reflects a changing landscape.
Talk by Tariq Thachil (Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)
Urban citizens in low-income democracies rarely hold elected officials accountable for toxic air. To understand why, we fielded a large citizen survey in Delhi, India, a highly polluted megacity where voters rarely prioritize air pollution at the polls. We find no evidence of conventional explanations for accountability failures: residents are aware of pollution’s adverse impacts, do not privilege development over curbing emissions, and are not fractured along class or ethnic lines on this issue. Instead, we find partisanship and sensitivity to the potential private costs of mitigation policies reduce accountability pressures. On the other hand, a simple randomized intervention (sharing indoor air quality information) that personalizes the costs of air pollution increases its electoral salience. We reveal key opportunities and constraints for mobilizing public opinion to reduce air pollution in developing democracies.
Tariq Thachi is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI), and Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent book (coauthored with Adam Auerbach), Migrants and Machine Politics, focuses on the political lives of poor migrants in Indian cities. His first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India. He received his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2009.
Day 2: Pandemic Archives: Media, Geopolitics, and Temporalities of Crisis
About this workshop:
As the world enters its fourth year living with the COVID-19 pandemic, this workshop critically examines the conceptual tools that are available to capture the shifting temporalities of this chronic crisis and its seismic impact on global geopolitics and humanistic inquiry. Departing from existing discussions about COVID-19, we focus on how the diverse media and cultural practices that flourished during the pandemic are now transforming into historical and aesthetic archives enabling re-readings of overshadowed affects, stories, and relationalities within a larger picture. With a special interest in transpacific, trans-Asian, diasporic, global, and/or other innovative frameworks of analysis, we seek to address the controversial yet indispensable role of China and Chinese-ness in constituting the global political ecology of this crisis period. Discussion topics include but are not limited to (post-)pandemic global politics and sociality, temporalities of crisis, media forms and platforms, ordinary agency, archive studies, racial violence, transnational tensions and affinities, soundscapes, ecocriticism, new sources of worlding, and ongoing changes in Chinese/Sinophone/Asian/Asian American studies.
Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.
Read about Day 1's book talk here.
Conveners:
Shiqi Lin (Asian Studies, Cornell University)
Nick Admussen (Asian Studies, Cornell University)
Participants:
Michael Berry (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA)
Jenny Chio (East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology, USC)
Christopher T. Fan (English, UC Irvine)
Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)
Lilian Kong (Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)
Yanting-Leah Li (Asian Studies, Cornell University)
Faye Fanyi Ma (Ethnomusicology, Duke University)
Carlos Rojas (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University)
Hans Yi Su (Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)
Lily Wong (Literature, American University)
Kaiyang Xu (East Asian Languages and Cultures, USC)
Shana Ye (Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto)
Day 1: Book Talk – SARS Stories: Affect and Archive of the 2003 Pandemic
Speaker: Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)
In SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows how the Chinese experiences of living with SARS can reshape global feelings toward pandemic social life and foster greater fellowship in the face of pandemics.
Belinda Kong is Professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She is a scholar of global Asian literature and culture whose research focuses on global Chinese-ness.
Day 1's book talk is part of a two-day workshop. Read about Day 2 here.
Cosponsors include the East Asia Program Graduate Student Steering Committee, EastAsia+ Initiative, Society for the Humanities, Department of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Klarman Fellowship Program.
Conveners:
Shiqi Lin (Asian Studies, Cornell University)
Nick Admussen (Asian Studies, Cornell University)
Participants:
Michael Berry (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA)
Jenny Chio (East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology, USC)
Christopher T. Fan (English, UC Irvine)
Belinda Kong (Asian Studies and English, Bowdoin College)
Lilian Kong (Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)
Yanting-Leah Li (Asian Studies, Cornell University)
Faye Fanyi Ma (Ethnomusicology, Duke University)
Carlos Rojas (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University)
Hans Yi Su (Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)
Lily Wong (Literature, American University)
Kaiyang Xu (East Asian Languages and Cultures, USC)
Shana Ye (Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto)