Migrations: A World on the Move

In our final episode of the season, we talk to guests Philip Gleissner, Harry Eli Kashdan, and Reem Kassis about their book of essays and recipes called Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis, Essays and Recipes. Philip and Harry are editors of the book, which features immigrant restaurateurs, chefs, scholars, food writers, and activists. Although this book has its origins in the pandemic, the relevance and impact of the stories within go far beyond it.

• Philip Gleissner
• Harry Eli Kashdan
• Reem Kassis
• Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis, Essays and Recipes
• The COVID Food Archive

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E. Tendayi Achiume is a professor of law at UCLA. Her research focuses on international migration, refugee displacement, and especially the role of international law in shaping the way that borders work. Today’s episode covers a broad scope of Achiume’s work, including colonialism, human rights, and migration. This episode is a podcast mashup with Ufahamu Africa, a podcast on life and politics on the African continent, and Eleanor is joined by the show's co-host, Rachel Beatty Riedl, for the interview.

• E. Tendayi Achiume
• Racial Borders by E. Tendayi Achiume
• Migration as Decolonization by E. Tendayi Achiume
• Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, E. Tendayi Achiume - Ecological crisis, climate justice and racial justice

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In a visit to Novellara, Italy, last summer, our host Eleanor Paynter and guest host Elena Bellina learned about the community of Sikh Indians who began migrating to the area in the 1980s. The Sikhs are one of more than 50 different immigrant communities among the town's residents, but they've played an important role in shaping the region. As you'll hear in this episode, the story of this community is one about the search for stability, building and sustaining a sense of home in a new place, and the crossing of cultures.

Our guests are Iqbal Singh, vice president of the town's gurdwara, Elena Carletti, the mayor of Novellara, and Barbara Bertolani, a sociologist studying Sikh communities in Italy.

• Elena Carletti
• Barbara Bertolani
• Gurdwara Singh Sabha in NovellaraNovellara, Italy"Attending Houses of Worship as Homes Out of the Home" by Barbara Bertolani and Sara Bonfanti
• Novellara photo project by Jai Toor
• Movement to have Sikhism Formally Recognized by the Italian State (in Italian)
• Coverage of the 2023 Nagar Kirtan Celebrations (in Italian)

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Our guest today is Momar Ndiaye, assistant professor of dance at Ohio State University (OSU) and a celebrated choreographer. Momar’s work in African dance and contemporary dance is internationally recognized, and he’s toured across the U.S. and abroad. In our conversation, we view migration through the lens of dance and recognize it as an embodied experience. To interview Momar, Eleanor is joined by Amy Shuman, professor emerita at OSU. Her formative work in narrative studies includes books, articles, and collaborations on human rights and political asylum. Momar, Amy, and Eleanor talk broadly about human rights and migration in postcolonial contexts, ideas of how human rights operate and fail, and what that has to do with the crossing of borders.

• Momar Ndiaye
• Amy Shuman
• Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum edited by Bridget M. Haas and Amy Shuman
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• West and Central Africa - Precarious Migration Routes to Europe - West African Atlantic Route
• "Frontex Planning Operations in Senegal and Mauritania, Claims NGO"

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This summer, hosts Eleanor Paynter and Elena Bellina visited the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale in Italy, an archive of stories and writing ranging from diaries to handwritten notes on loose slips of paper. Eleanor and Elena spoke with the director of the archive, Natalia Cangi, and researcher Giorgia Alù for this episode about the migrant stories present in the archive. 

Thanks to Isabella Corletto for her translation and voice acting for this episode.

Links

• Giorgia Alù
• Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale
• Piccolo Museo del Diaro (Little Museum of Diaries)
• DiMMi Project
• Opening Australia’s Multilingual Archive project
• 2021 DiMMi Award Presentation
• 2022 DiMMi Award Presentation

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This season, we're thinking about crossing, not only the physical crossing of national borders, but various forms of encounter and exchange that happen because of those migrations. Several episodes this season will look closely at crossing in the context of Italy, exploring how language and culture cross borders, how the focus on historical migrations helps us understand the present, and more. For these episodes, host Eleanor Paynter partners with colleague and guest host Elena Bellina, adjunct professor of Italian at New York University. 

Today's conversation is with multilingual writers Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and Amara Lakhous, whose work has been shaped by their own crossings.

• Amara Lakhous
• "How Somali Women Are Breaking Tradition to Write Novels" in BBC News
• "Reimagining Italy through Black Women's Eyes"
• Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
• "Bambi" by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
• Le Stazioni della Luna by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
• La danza dell'orice (Words for Portraits) by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
• Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet by Amara Lakhous
• The Night Bird by Amara Lakhous
• Interview of Amara Lakhous in Full Stop

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In this episode, we share a conversation with Dr. Lamis Abdelaaty and Dr. Rebecca Hamlin about refugee status in policy and in discourse, and more broadly about the categories and labels we use to talk about migration. We talked to Lamis and Rebecca last fall on Cornell’s campus after an event where they presented from their new books.

With this episode, we’re rounding out our season on waiting. Thank you for listening as we have reflected on experiences of limbo from the U.S.-Mexico border, to the Underground Railroad, to Palestinian camps, to Tibetan exile here in Ithaca, NY. Limbo and questions of time haunt nearly every conversation about border crossing and asylum. You’ll hear some of that nuance in our conversation today.

• Lamis Abdelaaty
• Rebecca Hamlin
• Refuge, Refusal, Rights: A Conversation with Lamis Abdelaaty and Rebecca Hamlin in fall 2021
• Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move by Rebecca Hamlin
• Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees by Lamis Abdelaaty
• Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2 (2022) edited with an introduction by Lamis Abdelaaty and Rebecca Hamlin

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How has a Tibetan community come to call Ithaca, New York home? Cornell student Daniel Bernstein produces this special episode in search of an answer. After learning that the North American branch of the Dalai Lama's personal monastery is in Ithaca, Bernstein took a deep dive into the history of Tibet that includes conversations with members of the Tibetan community in Ithaca, a visit to the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, and an interview with Cornell professor Allen Carlson.

Thank you to the Ithaca Tibetan community for sharing their stories. And thank you to Daniel Bernstein for producing this episode with help from journalist Molly O'Toole in her fall 2021 class, "American Dream: Journalism, Politics, and Identity in U.S. Immigration Policy."

Daniel Bernstein '23 is a government major in Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences, pursuing minors in history and Latin American studies. He has worked in journalism ever since becoming a founding editor of Colonial Elementary School's Colonial Times in the fourth grade, and today he serves as a columnist and senior editor for the Cornell Daily Sun. He hopes to continue telling meaningful stories about people, policy, and ideas throughout his career.

• Allen Carlson, associate professor of government at Cornell University
• Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies
• Waiting at the Border podcast episode featuring journalist Molly O'Toole
• Tibetan Association of Ithaca celebrates Tibet Day in 2015
• Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick
• Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero by Stephan Dalty
• International Campaign for Tibet

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"The camp is time and time is the camp," reads poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh in our latest episode. Waiting for the Future is both a conversation and a poetry reading, featuring not only Yousif and his work but migration scholars Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Shahram Khosravi. The conversation is guided by four of Yousif's poems from his book Writing the Camp and we talk about themes of time, memory, and the camp.

• Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
• Shahram Khosravi
• Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
• Refugee HostsSouthern-Led Responses to DisplacementRefuge in a Moving World: Refugee and Migrant Journeys across Disciplines edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
• "Introduction: Recentering the South in Studies of Migration" in Migration and Society by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
• "Refugees’ Pandemic Responses in a Palestinian Camp in Lebanon" by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Yousif Qasmiyeh
• Writing the Camp by Yousif Qasmiyeh
• "Writing the Camp, Writing the Camp Archive: The Case of Baddawi Refugee Camp in Lebanon" by Yousif Qasmiyeh
• Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration edited by Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, Shahram Khosravi

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