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Thu, May 13, 2021 at 08:00am
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Thu, May 13, 2021 at 09:30am
5:30-7:00 pm IST/ 8:00-9:30 am ET
Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System Public Webinar Series, in collaboration with Lancet COVID-19 Commission India Task Force
Panelists:
- Gagandeep Kang, Professor of Microbiology, Department of Gastrointestinal Sciences, Christian Medical College
- Peter Piot, Director and Handa Professor of Global Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
- Gautam Menon, Professor of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University
- K. Sujatha Rao, Former Secretary of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India
- K Srinath Reddy, President, Public Health Foundation of India
Moderator:
Sarah Jacob, Editor/Anchor of ‘We The People’ on NDTV
Description:
The Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System is an ambitious, cross-sectoral endeavor that aims to lay out a citizens’ roadmap to achieving universal health coverage for the people of India. Our new webinar series is intended to serve as a platform for public health discourse in India, and a means for academics, practitioners and the public to engage on substantive and timely issues regarding universal health coverage in India.
The Lancet COVID-19 Commission is an interdisciplinary initiative across the health sciences, business, finance, and public policy that was launched in July 2020. It has four themes: to propose recommendations on how best to suppress the epidemic; to address the humanitarian crises arising from the pandemic; addressing the financial and economic crises resulting from the pandemic; and rebuilding an inclusive, fair, and sustainable world. The work of the Commission is supported by twelve Task Forces, in areas ranging from vaccine development, to humanitarian relief strategies, to safe workplaces, to global economic recovery. The India Task Force of the COVID-19 Commission is the only country-specific Task Force, set up in recognition of the unique challenges that India faces in the context of COVID-19.
The first webinar in the series is a joint event with the Lancet COVID-19 Commission India Task Force and will be a panel discussion about the devastating COVID-19 pandemic surge in India – focusing on the short and long-term actions that are needed to address the impact. Leading experts from the medical, scientific, and public policy community will discuss the lessons that need to be learnt and propose what the next steps should be to respond to, and improve, the situation in India. As a Citizens’ Commission, we invite the public to participate in the discussion, provide input and engage with the panelists.
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Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 04:00pm
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Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 05:30pm
Panel, Talk, Current Events, Special Event, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
PANELISTS:
Han Lu, Senior Policy Analyst, National Employment Law Project
christina ong, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh
Elena Shih, Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University
MODERATOR:
Vivian Shaw, College Fellow, Department of Sociology, Harvard University; Co-Principal Investigator, AAPI COVID-19 Project
Han Lu’s work at the National Employment Law Project focuses on how inequalities of nationhood, carceral punishment, and the workplace shape one another. Prior to his work at NELP, Han was a line defender at the Orleans Public Defenders. He is a first-generation college graduate. Prior to law school, Han worked as a defense investigator for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, the juvenile public defender in his hometown of New Orleans.
christina ong is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh studying the development of Asian America in the 1960s-1980s through an in-depth case study of New York City’s the Basement Workshop. She also serves as the Project Manager and Qualitative Committee Co-Lead for the AAPI COVID-19 Project, a multidisciplinary mixed-methods study on how COVID-19 is impacting AAPI lives in the United States. Her research interests span topics related to diaspora, racial justice, and transnational feminisms.
Vivian Shaw is a College Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and the Lead Researcher (co-PI) for the AAPI COVID-19 Project, a multi-method investigation into the impacts of the pandemic on the lives of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin with graduate portfolios in Asian American Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies. From 2018-2019, Vivian was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Center for International Relations’ Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, also at Harvard.
Elena Shih is the Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Shih’s book project, “Manufacturing Freedom: Trafficking Rescue, Rehabilitation, and the Slave Free Good” (under contract with University of California Press), is a global ethnography of the transnational social movement to combat human trafficking in China, Thailand, and the United States. Shih is an outreach organizer with Red Canary Song, a grassroots coalition of massage workers, sex workers, and allies in New York City.
Co-sponsors: Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Korea Institute, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
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Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 12:00pm
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Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 01:15pm
SPEAKER: Asif Siddiqi, Professor of History, Fordham University
The Indian state’s broken pacts with Indigenous communities, the so-called ‘scheduled tribes’ or Adivasi, resulted in massive displacements in the name of environmental, territorial, and infrastructural sovereignty, yet none have given rise to such troubling paradoxes as those implemented to build rocket launch sites. To make way for a new space center in Andhra Pradesh, in 1970, the government of India forcibly removed and resettled a large population of Yanadi people. More than fifty years later, the profound and permanent disruptions caused by this dislocation continue to reverberate in the deep social and economic precarity of the Yanadi. I recover this story as a starting point to highlight two broader intersecting frames. The first positions India’s emergent technoscientific projects in the decades after independence as reproducing certain forms of violence redolent of colonial science. The second finds echoes of such violence in infrastructural entanglements across the world in places like Algeria, Kenya, California, Kazakhstan, the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and elsewhere. I argue that the violence of displacement, dislocation, and damage, accompanied by local resistance, were not appendices to the long history of spaceflight but fundamental to it, as space activities unfolded through deeply colonial-minded practices. Moreover, I argue that such initiatives functioned squarely within the modernist aspirations of individual states, the international scientific community, and often, ordinary people, activated by the desires and promise that space exploration invoked.
Asif Siddiqi is Professor of History at Fordham University, where he works on the global history of science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Science and Technology in Asia Seminar Series is sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center and convened by Victor Seow, Assistant Professor of History of Science.
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Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 02:00pm
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Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 03:15pm
Ronak Desai, Research Associate at the Mittal Institute, will moderate a discussion between Nirupama Rao, Former Foreign Secretary of India, and Vipin Narang, Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT, as they explore how the potential outcomes of the US presidential election may impact the region of South Asia.
Moderator
- Ronak Desai, Associate, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute
Speakers
- Nirupama Rao, Former Foreign Secretary, India
- Vipin Narang, Associate Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 08:00am
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Fri, Aug 7, 2020
What does the future of internationalization in higher education look like after the global pandemic? Trends in higher education have for a long time pointed toward ever greater internationalization of student enrollments, teaching staff, curricular content, and research networks. The general consensus is that this has been for the good: young people enjoy richer learning opportunities and institutions are stronger and more diverse. Moreover, internationalization has accelerated the advancement of scholarship in every field and discipline, leading most surveys of higher education to rely on some measure of “globalization” in determining their rankings.
Today, however, the future of international higher education suddenly seems much less certain. By forcing a halt to nearly all international travel, the pandemic has interrupted the normal movement of people within and between the world’s universities, isolating us from one another in unprecedented ways. Even before the emergence of the SARS-CoV2 virus, resurgent nationalism and xenophobia around the world were already leading some to question the value of a globalized system of higher education, and of globalization more generally.
Dr. Mark C. Elliott, Vice Provost for International Affairs at Harvard University will discuss how the twin forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and politics has and will impact the future of international higher education.
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Fri, May 22, 2020 at 09:30am
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Fri, May 22, 2020 at 10:30am
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED
9:30–10:30 AM EST // 6:30–7:30 PM PKT // 7:00–8:00 PM IST // 7:30–8:30 PM BST
Venue: Virtual via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83985695617
This event will also be streamed on Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/MittalInstitute/
Moderator
- Zainab Qureshi, LEAPS Director, Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), Harvard Kennedy School
Panelists
- Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Director, Center for International Development; Sumitomo-Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development Professor of International Finance and Development, Harvard Kennedy School
- Fernando Reimers, Ford Foundation Professor of Practice in International Education; Faculty Director, International Education Policy
COVID-19 has shut down traditional education programs throughout South Asia, from primary education to higher education. This panel will discuss the unique challenges the region is facing in the education sector, such as access to technology and the potential long-term effects of distance learning. Additionally, the panelists will address two pressing questions:
- What will be the short- and long-term effects of this disruption to education?
- How are countries responding and preparing to mitigate these effects?
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Thu, May 14, 2020 at 09:00am
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Thu, May 14, 2020 at 10:30am
9:00–10:30 AM EST // 6:00–7:30 PM PKT // 6:30–8:00 PM IST // 7:00–8:30 PM BST
Venue: Virtual via Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95936810474
Speakers
- Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Lucicia Ditiu, Executive Director, Stop TB Partnership
- Purnima Menon, Senior Research Fellow, Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division, International Food Policy Research Institute
- Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director, Population Foundation of India
- Vikram Patel, Pershing Square Professor of Global Health, Harvard Medical School
Discussant
- Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Co-Founder and Chief Strategist, Partners In Health
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Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 09:00am
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Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 10:30am
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED
9:00–10:30 AM EST // 6:00–7:30 PM PKT // 6:30–8:00 PM IST // 7:00–8:30 PM BST
Virtual via Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/99118872916
Stream via YouTube Live: https://youtu.be/JgegRQEm1UY
Moderators
- Dr. Elora Chowdhury, Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston
- Dr. Durba Mitra, Assistant Professor, Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Speakers
- Taslima Akhter, Photographer and Organizer, Bangladesh Garments Sramik Shanghati
- Barrister Jyotirmoy Barua, Advocate, Supreme Court of Bangladesh
- Dr. Seuty Sabur, Associate Professor, Department of Economics and Social Sciences, BRAC University, Bangladesh
- Dr. Dina M. Siddiqi, Clinical Associate Professor, Liberal Studies, New York University
- Dr. Nafisa Tanjeem, Assistant Professor, Global Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Lesley University
The global apparel industry is currently facing an unprecedented crisis resulting from the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Major fashion retailers in the Global North are closing their stores and laying off workers. The same brands that demonstrated strong public commitment for protecting the safety and security of Bangladeshi garment workers after the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 are not hesitating to cancel or suspend orders or delay payments. Thousands of workers are currently out of work and facing a unique livelihood, as well as a health threat.
Bangladeshi local labor rights organizers are urging the garment factory owners and the Bangladesh government to stop laying off workers, pay the unpaid salary, and enact health safety protocols at the workplace. On the other hand, Bangladeshi garment factory owners and international labor rights groups are exclusively targeting the global brands and asking them to take responsibility for the workers. What is missing in the local and global COVID-19 organizing initiatives is an understanding of how focusing exclusively on either the global brands or the local Bangladeshi actors – such as the government and the factory owners – creates an unfortunate disjuncture between local and global labor organizing priorities and fails to address global capitalism’s creative ways of feminizing and racializing garment workers’ bodies and labor across the supply chain.
By bringing together labor rights organizers and critical scholars, this webinar addresses: How can we move beyond the spotlight approach of focusing on one actor of the apparel supply chain at a time? How can we engage in dialogues and organizing across borders to simultaneously hold the global retailers, governments, and factory owners accountable for ensuring workers’ safety and wellbeing? What does a transnational resistance that is mindful of the power differences between labor organizers in the Global North and the Global South look like?
