The Cornell University Library Chats in the Stacks is a series of book talks featuring recent publications by Cornell authors. This semester, all the book talks will be virtual, so you can tune in from wherever you are! A live Q&A with the author will follow each talk, and the audience is encouraged to submit their questions in the chat.
We’re excited to share the fall line-up for the Mann chats below:
Eswar Prasad (Dyson School): The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance
The concept of money is about to be fundamentally redefined, says Eswar Prasad, the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks book talk on his new book, The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance (Harvard University Press, 2021), Prasad explains how this transformation will impact corporations, banks, states, and individuals. Changes may lead to improvements in efficiency, personalization of services, and market access for the unbanked, but they may also bring instability, lack of accountability, and the erosion of privacy. The Future of Money explains how to maximize the best and prepare against the worst, as businesses, governments, and individuals embrace new financial technologies that have the power to fundamentally change our lives. Prasad is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and previous chief of the financial studies division in the International Monetary Fund’s research department.
Phil McMichael (Global Development): Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective
How has development thinking and practice shaped our world? The answer lies in four interconnected phenomena—colonialism, the development era, the neoliberal globalization project, and sustainable development—according to Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 7th Edition, (Sage Publications, 2021), written by Philip McMichael, professor emeritus in the Department of Global Development, and Heloise Weber, senior lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. In this live, virtual book talk, McMichael discusses “the development paradox” and how powerful nation-states aiming toward progress and prosperity can also produce crises that threaten the health and well-being of millions of urban-dwellers and rural cultures. McMichael also explores the possibilities of a world with more just social, ecological, and political relations.
Qi Wang (Human Development): Remembering and Forgetting Early Childhood
Our earliest memories are complex and ever-shifting. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks book talk, Qi Wang—professor of human development and psychology in the College of Human Ecology—will discuss insights from Remembering and Forgetting Early Childhood (Routledge, 2020), a book she co-edited with Sami Gülgöz. Originally published as a special issue of Memory, the book deepens our understanding of the dynamics that influence the accessibility, content, and accuracy of memories from early childhood, and how the development of autobiographical memory is shaped by a variety of interactive social and cognitive factors.
Lourdes Casanova (Emerging Markets Institute) and Anne Miroux (Emerging Markets Institute)
As emerging markets have come to represent the largest share of global GDP, corporations in these economies have taken on a new level of importance in driving innovation, local development, and global competition. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks talk, Lourdes Casanova (Gail and Rob Cañizares Director of the Emerging Markets Institute, S. C. Johnson Graduate School of Management) and Anne Miroux (Faculty Fellow, Emerging Market Institute), discuss their new book Innovation from Emerging Markets: From Copycats to Leaders (Cambridge University Press 2021). Building upon research conducted by the Emerging Multinational Research Network (EMRN), this collection includes studies of innovation in regions that have not previously received focused analysis as well as a re-examination of dominant theories of innovation and capability creation based on a broad range of case studies and research insights. A live Q&A will follow the talk. The audience is encouraged to submit their questions in the chat.
Denise Green (Fiber Science and Apparel Design): Fashion and Cultural Studies
Fashion can be considered from cultural, technical, and theoretical perspectives. In a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks talk, Denise Green and Susan B. Kaiser discuss their book, Fashion and Cultural Studies, 2nd Edition, which explores how race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other identities are woven into the clothes we wear. Green is an associate professor of fashion design and the director of Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, and Kaiser is professor emerita of design, textiles, and clothing, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. Drawing from intersectionality in feminist theory and cultural studies, they interrogate the complex entanglements of production, regulation, distribution, consumption, and subject formation within and through fashion.