AMIAS General Meeting - Nov 4, 2022

The border is one of the most urgent issues of our times. We tend to think of a border as a static line, but recent bordering techniques have broken away from the map, as governments have developed legal tools to limit the rights of migrants before and after they enter a country’s territory. The consequent detachment of state power from any fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border, an adjustable legal construct untethered in space. This transformation upsets our assumptions about waning sovereignty, while also revealing the limits of the populist push toward border-fortification.  At the same time, it presents a tremendous opportunity to rethink states’ responsibilities to migrants in a world where borders, like people, have the capacity to move.

Ayelet Shachar (FRSC) is the R.F. Harney Chair in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is Professor of Law, Political Science and Global Affairs. Previously, she was a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Shachar has published extensively on citizenship theory, immigration law, cultural diversity and women’s rights, new border regimes and global inequality, as well as the marketization of citizenship. She is an award winning author and the recipient of national and international research excellence awards, including, most recently, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize

The present moment has been named a return of eras once treated as historical, such as the Cold War and fascism. A search for alternative solidarity against such a putative return is also made around past events, as seen in the recent attention to the history of the Bandung period and its Third World Project of the 1950s to 1970s.  I juxtapose this politics of time with an inquiry into the North-South and other spatial mappings of power and struggle over global migration. 

Hyun Ok Park is a professor of sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of two books on capitalism and migration, “Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria” and “The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea.” She is completing a book on crisis and disaster.

Today over 1% of the world's population is forcibly displaced due to persecution, environmental degradation, and other violence rooted in colonial pasts and exploitative presents. Meanwhile the world's wealthiest countries and coveted destinations expend inordinate resources to fortify their borders against those who attempt to partake in their security and wealth, casting them as irregular and undocumented rule breakers.  Against this border impermeability, people on the move are forced to make their own incredible sacrifices -- emotional, physical, and financial. Centering these clashing expenditures, I ask what are the costs of borders?

Heba Gowayed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University.  Her research, which is global and comparative, examines how low-income people traverse social services, immigration laws, and their associated bureaucracies, while grappling with gender and racial inequalities. 

The accelerated market of care has resulted in the increased dependency of families on migrant women’s labor. Yet this increased demand has not created a free market of care but instead an unfree market. Across the globe, countries that rely on migrant care workers have created an unfree labor regime of legal infantilization that render them dependents of the employer that sponsors their visa. Countries infantilize migrant care workers by legally binding them to one employer as a live-in worker with little flexibility to change employers. My talk provides a global overview of the legal infantilization of migrant care workers, describes how this legal status renders them vulnerable to forced labor and human trafficking, and addresses efforts by countries to reduce these vulnerabilities.

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Florence Everline Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. In 2022-2023, she is a Visiting Professor in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Department of Sociology at Princeton. She is currently writing a book The Trafficker Next Door on the management of domestic workers for Norton.

Natural hazards including seismic events and climate change are taking on an increasing degree of importance. Major demographic shifts to locations surrounding the Pacific Ocean have taken place as populations sought greater access to coastal regions. However, this also corresponds to the so-called Ring of Fire produced by plate tectonics and associated with 70% of Earth’s major earthquakes as well as volcanic events and tsunamis. Other population movements have further exposed humans to earthquake hazards from other fault systems. While we have been developing an appreciation for the role of climate in the emergence and disappearance of major population centers, the perils occasioned by global warming and climate change present challenges to all coastal population centers due to the enhanced role of hurricanes, storm surges, and sea-level rise which will become especially prominent later this century. 

William I. Newman is professor in the Departments of Earth, Planetary, & Space Sciences; Physics & Astronomy; and Mathematics at UCLA.  He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Natural Sciences (theoretical astrophysics) from 1978-80 and again, while on sabbatical from UCLA, in 2018-19 as a fellow of the IBM Einstein Foundation. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and performed research during a half a year in the USSR addressing earthquake modeling. He has held appointments as the Stanislaw Ulam Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as the Yuval Ne’eman Lecturer in Geophysics, Planetary, and Space Physics at Tel Aviv University. His primary research focus currently uses methods derived from computational and applied mathematics in applications to relativistic plasmas and planetary atmospheres as well as natural hazards relating to earthquakes and to climate. He has published graduate textbooks with Cambridge University Press (Continuum Mechanics in the Earth Sciences) and Princeton University Press (Mathematical Methods in Geophysics and Space Physics) and more than 100 research papers. Currently, he is the Chair of the American Physical Society Topical Group on the Physics of Climate.

We reflect on the intersection of immigration policy and enriching the discipline of mathematics from the perspective of the experiences of students, faculty, and administration at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.  We offer some thoughts on possible AMIAS initiatives emerging from this reflection.

Terrence Richard Blackman is a Number Theorist. He is an associate professor of mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. He is a former Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT and a former Visitor to The School of Mathematics at The Institute for Advanced Study.  Dr. Blackman has previously served as Chair of the Mathematics Department and Dean of the School of Science, Health, and Technology at Medgar Evers College, where he has worked for almost thirty years. Dr. Blackman has also served as an Assistant Professor in The Department of Education Research Policy and Practice at the Morgridge College of Education at The University of Denver. He graduated from Brooklyn College, CUNY, and the City University of New York Graduate School. Dr. Blackman is a member of the American Mathematical Society(AMS). He served on the Society’s Committee on Science Policy and is a member of the Society’s Committee on Education Policy. Dr. Blackman is also a member of The Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and he serves as a member of the Association’s Council on Prizes and Awards. He is a member of the Executive Board of The National Association of Mathematicians (NAM). He serves as Vice-Chair of the Executive Council of The National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Sciences

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Sixth Summary Statement issued last year demonstrated that anthropogenic influences, primarily fossil fuel burning since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has altered the nature of our atmosphere. While its carbon dioxide content remained unchanged for more than 10 million years, it has risen by 50% in the last century due to the large-scale burning of coal and petroleum as well as their derivatives. We will review what we have learned and the potential impacts upon sustainability in the coming decades. We will need to take major steps not only in eliminating fossil fuel burning but in extracting the excess anthropogenic carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to restore its presence to pre-industrial revolution values. 

William I. Newman is professor in the Departments of Earth, Planetary, & Space Sciences; Physics & Astronomy; and Mathematics at UCLA. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Natural Sciences (theoretical astrophysics) from 1978-80 and again, while on sabbatical from UCLA, in 2018-19 as a fellow of the IBM Einstein Foundation. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and performed research during a half a year in the USSR addressing earthquake modeling. He has held appointments as the Stanislaw Ulam Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as the Yuval Ne’eman Lecturer in Geophysics, Planetary, and Space Physics at Tel Aviv University. His primary research focus currently uses methods derived from computational and applied mathematics in applications to relativistic plasmas and planetary atmospheres as well asnatural hazards relating to earthquakes and to climate. He has published graduate textbooks with Cambridge University Press (Continuum Mechanics in the Earth Sciences) and Princeton University Press (Mathematical Methods in Geophysics and Space Physics) and more than 100 research papers. Currently, he is the Chair of the American Physical Society Topical Group on the Physics of Climate.

The planet is warming – this is the easy part. Climate change is unique to geographical regions – this is the hard part. The change in freshwater supply is of particular importance, especially in semi-arid regions with large populations and/or agricultural activity. There are thermodynamic (evaporation, humidity, precipitation) and dynamic (large-scale winds, storms) effects on water transport. All of these change simultaneously in complex ways that are hard to predict. The paleoclimate record opens a window into very different regional climate states that actually existed at a time in Earth's history.  I will offer the semi-arid American SW as an example: From the great paleolakes of the ice ages to the megadroughts of the last 8,000 years, real-world examples in the climate record give glimpses into the possible range of climates to expect in a warming future. 

Jonathan Mitchell is a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UCLA. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in Astrophysics in 2007, and spent two years as a member at the Institute for Advanced Study before joining the UCLA faculty in 2009. He has broad interests in the atmospheres, oceans and climates of Earth and other planets.

In this talk, I will be briefly discussing the objectives of a research network I co-direct at Oxford in order to contribute to the wider panel theme of "environmental change and sustainability". This network draws upon my recent book, which centers the climate crisis in its account of changing human-nonhuman relations in India. From this micro-study, a wider question has been opened out on how the intensifying global climate crisis calls for a radical re-evaluation of academic methodologies, conceptions and agendas. So far, the sciences have led the way in understanding and publicizing the growing crisis, but have not succeeded in bringing about the necessary urgent and wide-ranging societal transformation that we need. For this work, it is essential that the expertise, knowledge, imagination and values of Humanities and Social Sciences are made central to public and policy conversations around how to respond and adapt to the climate emergency. In the case of many disciplines, this requires a rethinking of fundamental aspects of our fields, our teaching, and our forms of public engagement.

Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, as well as Fellow of Wolfson college at the University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of two books, Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press 2021). Over 2022-23 Nayanika is in resident at the IAS working on a new project that considers the methodological challenges opened up by the climate crisis to the discipline of anthropology.

From the flooding along one river, in one city, across one watershed, how do we understand broader regional and global concerns around climate change? The problem of cities and environments takes on different forms depending on point of view, framework of understanding, and scale of investigation. In this talk I trace the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes in one of my fieldwork sites, Jakarta, Indonesia, across conflicting ideas and narratives, and link them to emerging ideas about climate change responses around the world and critical concerns of justice. Building on research explored in my book Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press 2021), I focus on what it means to see and understand big global issues from specific local places.

Kian Goh is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She researches the relationships between urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization. Dr. Goh’s recent research investigated the spatial politics of urban climate change responses, with fieldwork sites in cities in North America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. In 2022-23 she is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, exploring the implications of the global climate justice movement for more equitable and sustainable cities. Dr. Goh received a PhD in Urban and Environmental Planning from MIT, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. She is the author of Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice, published by the MIT Press in 2021.  Prof. Goh is one of our AMIAS-sponsored Members this year at the IAS.

Chronic hunger and infections stunt the physical and mental growth of 149 million (22 percent) of the world's children under 5 years old. Current cereal production provides all the calories needed to feed 11-14 billion people. The world now has 8 billion people. Only 43% of cereals grown go into human mouths. Most grain feeds animals and machines for those who can afford them. Including adults and children, one person in ten is chronically hungry worldwide. The hunger of very poor people has no effect on grain prices in world markets. But for all developing countries, average income per person is 5-7% lower than it would be if current workers who were stunted in childhood had been adequately fed, according to an estimate by two World Bank economists. The 5-7% figures do not count the millions of stunted children who die before they become workers. Childhood stunting lowers years of schooling, cognitive skills, and height, reducing adult economic productivity of the survivors. Applying ten tested nutrition interventions over ten years to 34 countries with 90% of the world's stunted children would yield economic benefits 5 or 6 times the economic costs. 

Joel E. Cohen, mathematical biologist, is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations at the Rockefeller University, with appointments at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He was Director’s Visitor at the IAS during the 1970’s. His 1995 book, How Many People Can the Earth Support?, won the first Nordberg Award "for excellence in writing in the population sciences" from the Population Council, New York. In 1998, Prof. Cohen was co-winner of the Fred L. Soper Prize of the Pan American Health Organization for work on Chagas' disease. In 2015, he received the Golden Goose Award "for federally supported basic research with unanticipated benefits for society, the economy, and health." He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

The challenges of climate change are anxious making, particularly to conscientious people living in the countries creating the greatest impact. People who care know that part of the solution begins at home, where steps are taken toward a better way of living, gathering data, and creating a template for others to adopt.  In this presentation, I forefront the efforts of the first members of IAS who also worked the land, carving paths out of the wooded floodplain, thereby leaving the legacy of today’s tranquil wooded walks.  I urge that steps be taken now to create a Sustainability Committee of AMIAS members working in collaboration with the broader IAS community, thus continuing the theme established from the earliest days of IAS as a remarkable “home for scholars.”   I outline practical steps through which our IAS community can embrace zero waste practice including composting and kitchen gardening.

Barbara Paca has, for over 30 years, run a successful private practice in sustainable landscape architectural design in the US, Europe, and the Caribbean.  She has a professional degree in landscape architecture and a PhD in the history of art.  In 2018 she was recognized by Her Majesty the Queen with an Order of the British Empire.  She is Research Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Maryland at College Park.