News & Events

Dec 5, 2022: “Number and Non-Conceptual Identity in the Andean World: The Case of the Quechua -ntin/-nintin," by Vanessa Gubbins, LACS Seminar Series at Stimson Hall

This talk discusses identity formation in the Andean world through a study of the Quechua suffix -ntin/ -nintin. It also raises the suffix’s broader philosophical and political ramifications for questions of unity, collectivity, and the relationship between part and whole.

Vanessa Gubbins is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell.

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Nov 29, 2022: "The Territory" Film presented by Cornell Cinema, LACS, and AIIS at Cornell Cinema

The feature documentary debut of director Alex Pritz (“My Dear Kyrgyzstan”), THE TERRITORY follows the vital, inspiring fight of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people of Brazil to defend their land from non-Indigenous farmers intent on colonizing their protected territory in the Amazon rainforest. Co-produced by the Uru-eu-wau-wau community, the film draws on intimate access to both the Indigenous perspective and the farmers who want their land to chronicle a conflict that has profound implications for the survival of a people and the planet.

Partially shot by the Uru-eu-wau-wau people and filmed over the course of several years, THE TERRITORY offers an authentic portrait of an Indigenous community’s daily life and struggles. With its breathtaking cinematography showcasing the dramatic landscape and richly textured sound design, the film brings audiences deep into the precious ecosystem they are fighting to protect.

Since the Uru-eu-wau-wau were first contacted by the Brazilian government in 1981, their territory has become an island of green rainforest surrounded by denuded farms and ranches — the results of four decades of unchecked deforestation. The community has faced environmentally destructive and often violent incursions into their sovereign territory by nonnatives seeking to exploit the land. Illegal logging and land clearing incursions have become more frequent and more brazen over the years.

Inside Uru-eu-wau-wau territory, there are fewer than 200 people, including elders and children, to defend nearly 7,000 square miles of rainforest. On the edges of the protected lands, a network of farmers organizes to stake their claims through official channels, while individual land-grabbers begin clear-cutting swaths of rainforest for themselves. With the community’s survival at stake, Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau and Neidinha Bandeira — a young Indigenous leader and his female mentor — must find new ways to protect the rainforest from encroaching invaders. But rather than rely on others to tell their story, the Uru-eu-wau-wau take control of the narrative and create their own news media team to bring the world the truth.

More on the film at:

https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-territory

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Nov 28, 2022: The Open and the Closed Prison: The Shifting Horizon of Carceral Reform in India at Uris Hall

Talk by Trishna Senapaty

This talk explores the conceptual and socio-spatial landscape of the open prison in India. Open prisons are institutions intended to facilitate prisoner rehabilitation by permitting them to live in small dwellings with their families and earn livelihoods outside their boundary walls. I discuss how ‘openness’ is conceived of in policy reports and prison reform documents and illustrate the multiple ways in which it is imagined and materialized through everyday practices. Drawing from over a year of ethnographic fieldwork in and around India’s largest open prison, I reflect on discourse on security and public safety, tools of prison-based advocacy, and the everyday life of open prison inmates as they navigate their relationships with their families, open prison staff, and the city at large. Engaging with feminist and abolitionist accounts of futurity, I weave together institutional histories with prisoner’s own narratives of imprisonment, to argue that that the experimental landscape of India’s largest open prison illuminates unanticipated and important modes of political agency, governance, and institution building.

Trishna Senapaty is an SSRC IDRF fellow and a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at Cornell University. Her interests at the intersection of feminist and carceral studies are informed by her experiences working as an educator and volunteer in prisons in India and the US. Her research focuses on prisons and custodial institutions in India, transformative politics and spaces, and anti-carceral socio-legal formations.

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