ICGC Colloquium Series

International travel has become ever more challenging for a wide variety of reasons, and the University has many resources to assist travelers. Whether you're traveling for an international conference, research, or other University-related purposes, the International Health, Safety, and Compliance team has resources to help with your trip preparation, mitigating risks, or managing an emergency. This session will cover University requirements for travel, how those requirements function to support your safety and wellbeing, and more recent developments in the world of travel that may impact your experience. This is not a session on the basics of how to pack and what to bring, but instead will outline University resources and recommendations that will help you from departure through the process of re-entry to the United States. Significant time will be allotted for Q&A. 

On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of the nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul—where the author worked as an undertaker— this talk explores migrants’ end-of-life dilemmas, illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.

Dr. Anant Maringanti shares insights drawn from over a decade of practice as an engaged scholar in Hyderabad, India through Hyderabad Urban Lab. The presentation is structured as a conversation to highlight the threads connecting work at two different institutional locations - Hyderabad Urban Lab in the global south and ICGC in the global north.

My research is a journey into the heart of feminist methodologies and ethics in the pursuit of alternative justice addressing state and social violence against migrants. At the core of my inquiry lies an exploration of the methodological and ethical intricacies that shape transnational and translocal practices of accountability, focusing on public hearings, specifically on witness preparation and safety, and the transformative impact of these hearings on broader social justice movements. In this work I trace these principles through the lens of the 2015 Women’s Court—an emblematic regional model for justice in a time when impunity for war crimes and grave human rights violations in post-Yugoslav spaces still looms large. This work is a pedagogical offering, a guide in-the-making to those who co-travel alongside me in the creation of the Transbalkan Tribunal for Justice—an emerging force inspired by local, decolonial, and transnational feminist praxis, striving to build a future of migration and social justice.

Climate change is accelerating glacier retreat in the tropical Andes. However, the impacts of these rapid changes on ecosystem assembly remain largely understudied, particularly concerning a key pioneer group in this process—lichens and mosses—which are often overlooked in ecological research.

Lichens and mosses are slow-growing organisms known for their crucial role in soil formation, a fundamental step in the formation of new ecosystems. However, in some tropical regions, we have observed that their growth response is not keeping pace with the accelerated colonization by vascular plants. As a result, lichens and mosses may be competitively displaced from the successional system, with unknown consequences for ecosystem services.

In this talk, we will explore the effects of climate change in the Northern Andes, the role of lichens and mosses in primary succession, and the gaps in our scientific understanding of their contributions to ecosystem assembly. Finally, I will share my experiences as a tropical ecologist witnessing climate change firsthand and how my interactions with local communities have shaped my perspective on this global challenge.

As faculty in an Indian university, we have to contend with the broader agenda of socioeconomic development no matter which discipline we are located in. While fields such as economics, sociology, and political science have long been intertwined with development studies, psychology has remained relatively disconnected from these critical discourses. Conversely, development studies has engaged less with the psychological dimensions of human experiences of structural violence, inequality, and social change.

This talk proposes a critical psychology approach as a means of bridging this disciplinary gap. Critical psychology, as a marginal subfield, challenges mainstream psychological practices that often individualize mental illness (the mind) without considering broader systemic contexts (the market). It also critiques cultural framings of healing (meaning) that draw uncritically on non-Western religious traditions. Instead, critical psychology offers structural analyses of complex socio-psychological phenomena—such as the global rise of religious/personality cults, narcissism, and authoritarianism as well as mass shootings in the US—by situating them within neoliberal logics rather than reducing them to individual pathologies.

This presentation traces intellectual resources of critical psychology to Indian scholars like Ashis Nandy, Anup Dhar, and Sudhir Kakkar, as well as global critical voices such as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Michelle Fine, Nikolas Rose and Felix Guattari, and calls for an urgent dialogue between psychology and development studies, advocating for a justice-oriented approach to global mental health and sociopolitical change more broadly.

This presentation examines the intersection of organized crime and gender-based violence (GBV) through the case of Jessica Martínez, a Black transfemme lesbian activist murdered in Ambato, Ecuador in 2022. Her killing, emblematic of broader patterns of violence against women, trans, and gender-expansive individuals, highlights how organized criminal networks enforce social control through gendered violence while operating within state-criminal entanglements that sustain impunity. By analyzing the structural conditions that enable violence against marginalized communities, this presentation situates Martínez’s murder within Ecuador’s evolving criminal landscape, where organized crime operates as a system of governance, shaping who is protected, who is targeted, and whose lives are rendered disposable. It explores how criminal organizations exploit patriarchal norms, using violence as a means of territorial and social control, and how state actors—through corruption, militarization, and neglect—enable the persistence of GBV. The case of Martínez illustrates the gendered dimensions of organized crime, demonstrating how violence against women, trans, and gender-expansive individuals is both a byproduct and a deliberate strategy of criminal governance. By framing violence as governance, this presentation highlights the limitations of state responses, the failures of securitization policies, and the urgent need for feminist resistance strategies to challenge the intertwined forces of organized crime, state power, and gendered violence.

We are all too aware of the looming environmental and social crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, land-use change, and pollution.  It can be challenging to maintain hope, both personally and professionally in the face of the many threats to the planet.  In this talk I will review highlights from my 30-year career working in tropical ecosystems. Our projects include work to document rooting depths of different plant life forms, and modeling and field studies of secondary forest succession.  These studies illustrate the roots of ecological understanding; in essence, how tropical dry forests are put together—but they do not amount to much if they are unconnected from other fields or potential applications.  I will then discuss how we can build interdisciplinary bridges that connect different fields of inquiry and practice.  We are living in challenging but exciting times, and forging a new, collaborative science and practice of conservation, restoration, and ecology is one way to cultivate care for our planet.

Mountains exhibit the highest levels of biodiversity on Earth, capture vast amounts of freshwater, and stock large amounts of carbon. Many of these features are enhanced in mountains located in the tropics. Tropical mountain regions are undergoing significant transformations due to current global environmental change, including land-cover, land-use, and climate change. Analyses of forest change in the tropics however, focus primarily on lowland tropical forests, overlooking the unique dynamics that occur in montane systems, which are greatly shaped by topography. Understanding the trends and patterns of forest change in tropical mountains is crucial for protecting these ecosystems. In this talk I will share my ongoing research on the causes and consequences of forest change in tropical mountains. I will focus on an example from southern Mexico, the Northern Mountains of Oaxaca, where satellite products show forest loss increasing in the last decade despite the development of community-based forest conservation projects. I take a social-ecological approach to analyze this contradiction by integrating remote sensing and socioeconomic data. Ultimately, this example is part of a larger research project where I seek to understand processes of forest change in tropical mountains around the world.

Sutirtha Lahiri (Conservation Biology) is a PhD student and ICGC scholar who will give a colloquium on "Grasslands then and now- how history shaped Indian wet grasslands and its biodiversity". 

Phoebe Young is a PhD Candidate and ICGC scholar in the Department of American Studies, and will give a colloquium on "Our Original Instructions: Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Anishinaabe Youth Education in the Twin Cities".