Veteran's Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Portraits

November 10, 5:15-7:15 PM

Location: Soule Branch Library 101 Springfield Road, Syracuse 

In honor of Veterans Day, please join us on November 10th from 5:15pm-6:00pm at Soule Branch Library, for a reception for an exhibit of composite portraits of members of the Syracuse Veterans' Writing Group, created by local photographer and Vietnam Veteran Robert Hawley and daughter Elizabeth of Hawley Studios. Feel free to walk through the exhibit (located in the adult section of the library), learn more about the Veterans’ Writing Group, and enjoy some free refreshments. This event is suitable for all ages.

From 6:00pm-7:15pm, the Syracuse Veterans’ Writing group and Onondaga Veterans Poetry Workshop will offer a reading of their original poetry and prose (in the 2nd floor meeting room). Come out and honor Veterans Day by listening to veterans’ stories and perspectives on their military service, going to war, and coming home. This event is free and open to the public but is suitable only for ages 15 and up. 

The art exhibit will also be on display from October 31, 2026 – November 24, 2026 during library hours.

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Languages of This Place: Challenges and Opportunities

Time: Nov. 7, 2026, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Location: Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center, 310 Triphammer Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850 

RSVP by Oct. 22, 2026 to lingdept@cornell.edu

CNY Humanities Corridor Event

The workshop builds on a series of events (Language, Memory, Future, November 5-6) celebrating the richness of languages of America focusing primarily on the histories and futures of two longstanding communities in Upstate New York, the Deaf community and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, especially the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ. The workshop engages these communities and other language communities in our region, addressing issues of language rights, language survival, connections between language and culture, and implicit pressure of language technology toward homogenization, away from local knowledge. The workshop is organized around presentations, panel discussions, and general discussion, including onsite meals and coffee breaks to foster extensive informal interaction over the course of the day. Language, Memory, Future is framed as a celebration, but all of these issues are complex in light of issues of minoritized language rights, pressures causing language shift and risk of language loss.

Featured Guests

Tawny Holmes-Hlibok, Gallaudet, DC

Corinna Hill, RIT, Rochester NY

Sara General & Amber Skye, Six Nations Polytech, Brantford, ON, Canada

Ranjit Singh, Data & Society Research Institute, NY, NY

Daniel Kaufman, CUNY Graduate Center & Queens College, Endangered Languages Alliance

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Investigating Inequality: A Workshop with P. Sainath

Time: November 09, 2026, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m. EST

Location: Newhouse 3, Newhouse I3 Center

Inequality is a burning issue everywhere, but how does successful reporting on inequality happen? In this workshop, award-winning Indian journalist P. Sainath brings his 40 years of experience to bear on an open discussion of reporting inequality focused on a basic question: how does a reporter get people to talk about inequality?

Sainath will draw on his experiences at The Hindu—a major English-language daily founded in 1878 and one of India's newspapers of record—to help shape a wide-ranging conversation around investigation. In the process, Sainath will draw upon his seminal journalism that brought national and international attention to farmer suicides in India during the 1990s and 20002, how The Hindu dealt with reporting agitations and protests of poor and marginalized communities while he was its rural affairs editor, and how his platform The People's Archive of Rural India strives to produce stories through the voices and lived experience of everyday people, including on climate change.

The workshop will be followed by a South Asian lunch buffet.

Palagummi Sainath is an Indian journalist who focuses on inequality, deprivation and poverty, particularly in rural India. He is the recipient of over 75 national and global awards for journalism. A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for India’s largest newspapers.

More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides—over 400,000 in two decades since 1995—on the national agenda. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture and more. PARI has won 106 journalism awards and honors. Sainath is now the A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Newhouse School's Code^Shift Collaboratory and Magazine, News and Digital Journalism Program.

P. Sainath | The Profound Divergence Between Media and Journalism

Time: November 09, 2026, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. EST

Location: Eggers Hall, 220

In the era of corporate consolidation—what we might call “Corporate Raj”—media and journalism are two distinct, often antagonistic entities locked in a loveless marriage. Media are rent-seeking, profit-making corporations that cannot be expected to live up to liberal shibboleths such as freedom of the press. Journalism, in contrast, is what reporters do for a living—or at least used to before recent technologies gave rise to self-questioning around not just what it is reporters should be doing, but why and for whom. Yet journalism still needs “the media” as a platform and media still need journalism to, as Lord Thomson of Fleet (past owner of The Times, London) once said, “fill the spaces between the ads” while fulfilling their commercial interests and those of the governments that media corporations are beholden to.

In this talk, award-winning journalist P. Sainath draws upon his long career in India to explore media and journalism’s loveless marriage. Sainath argues that corporate consolidation and ownership of media—now a pressing reality almost everywhere—has a tremendous effect on society across issues of law, social justice and economic exploitation. With particular reference to more contemporary issues around COVID-19 coverage, the Gen Z protests and the rise of AI, the talk explores how structural and social inequality is reflected in and reinforced by today’s media in India and beyond.

Palagummi Sainath is an Indian journalist who focuses on inequality, deprivation and poverty, particularly in rural India. He is the recipient of over 75 national and global awards for journalism. A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for India’s largest newspapers.

More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides—over 400,000 in two decades since 1995—on the national agenda. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture and more. PARI has won 106 journalism awards and honors. Sainath is now the A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Newhouse School's Code^Shift Collaboratory and Magazine, News and Digital Journalism Program.

Fighting for Native America: The Southeast American Indian Response to the American Revolution (Virtual)

November 12, 2026 | 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST

The American Revolution was not simply a conflict between Britain and the American colonies. Indigenous nations throughout North America faced difficult decisions about whether to support the British, the Americans, pursue their own diplomatic interests, or defend their sovereignty independent of both powers. These choices reflected distinct political goals, cultural priorities, and strategies for survival.

This webinar explores the varied responses of Southeastern Indigenous nations during the Revolutionary era, highlighting leaders and communities whose experiences are often overlooked in traditional narratives of the Revolution. Through these histories, participants will gain a broader understanding of Native sovereignty, diplomacy, and political decision-making during a transformative period in American history. Educators will leave with approaches for helping students examine the Revolution from multiple perspectives and incorporate Indigenous voices into their study of the nation’s founding.

Instructor: Nancy Chavis, Museum Director and Curator, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Humanities Crossroads: Dialogues for the Future

Time: Nov. 13, 2026, 8:30 a.m. - 6:15 p.m.

Location: Strasser Legacy Room, 220 Eggers

We are living through profound change, as social, political, cultural, ecological, and technological forces converge to reshape our lives and our shared world. At this crossroads, the humanities are essential to how we understand where we are, determine what matters, and imagine where we might go next. The Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences invites our community to come together to explore what the humanities can do, and become, at this consequential moment.

Crossroads are places of encounter and transition, but also decision points, where we bring different histories, experiences, and ways of knowing into relation and consider the futures we want to build. To that end, the College is convening a day of dialogues and keynotes to center the humanities as a public good; highlight how collaboration sparks innovation; explore humanities infrastructures to support shared thriving; and examine the importance of community-engaged work.

Syracuse University experts join leading regional and national scholars to explore innovative next steps as we create a generative future for humanities research, teaching, and public engagement. This day of dialogues offers a springboard for continued exploration in Spring 2027, with engagements around shared readings and exchanges. Faculty, staff, students and community members all have a stake in this work — and all are welcome. We hope to see you there!

Register here -- not required, though it will help us plan.

CART transcription will be provided.

See the full program at this link

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Just Pedagogies: Why Migration is a Feminist Issue

Workshop for educators on migration struggles, community activism, and the classroom.

Time: Saturday, November 14, 2026 at 10AM to 1 PM

Location: Syracuse Professional Development Center, 1005 W. Fayette St. Syracuse, NY 13204

Migration is not a single-issue struggle. It cuts across labor, race, sexuality, disability, empire, and the nation-state, and its stakes are deeply gendered. This two-part workshop brings together experienced migration practitioners from Syracuse's local organizing communities with educators grappling with how to teach these realities in the classroom.

Part I: Learning from Migrant Justice Practitioners

This session will center the current realities of migration struggles, community-based activism, and the collective stakes of migration, led by practitioners doing this work on the ground.

• Fabiola Ortiz (Workers' Center CNY)
• Kayla Kelechian (Director, New York Immigration Coalition)
• Felicia Castricone (Program Officer, Refugee Services Catholic Charities of Onondaga County Northside CYO)

Part II: Feminist Pedagogies for Migrant Justice

Teachers will share strategies, questions, and challenges in taking up migration in their own classrooms, and the group will collectively consider why teaching migration is a feminist issue, how migration intersects with multiple sites of struggle, and What culturally responsive pedagogy on migrant justice looks like. The workshop asks what it would mean to teach — and organize — toward more just pedagogies of migration with the goal of developing teaching toolkits that can be distributed and shared widely by teachers across K12-University communities.

Organized by the Feminist Futures Lab and the Feminist Pedagogies Collective at Syracuse University in partnership with high school teachers in the city of Syracuse. The workshop is funded, in part, by a grant from the Engaged Humanities Network, the Humanities Center, and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.

Polio and Public Memory (Virtual)

November 19, 2026

7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST

Polio has been around for hundreds of years as an endemic ailment, but by the middle of the twentieth century it was the most feared disease threatening children in the United States. Although widespread vaccination dramatically reduced its impact after 1955, the cultural history of polio—and the ways Americans remembered and later forgot the disease—offers important insights into public health, citizenship, and collective memory.

This webinar introduces educators to the cultural history of epidemic polio by examining the stories, assumptions, and public narratives that shaped Americans’ understanding of the disease. Participants will explore how literature, film, and other cultural texts—including works by James Baldwin and Mary Poppins—can help students investigate questions about disability, race, public health, and epidemic memory. Educators will gain strategies for connecting historical case studies to contemporary conversations about public health and civic responsibility.

Instructor: Claire Seiler (NHC Fellow, 2025–26), Dickinson College