Events

UPCOMING: Friday September 28, 2018
Force of Place:  An Artist's View of the Bakken Oil Region 2013-2017
3:15pm, Fillmore 170, Refreshments and meet-and-greet before and after

Documentary artist Valery Lyman spent nearly 5 years photographing and recording audio in the Bakken region of North Dakota, documenting the rise of the oil industry there and a substantial labor migration that occurred along with it.  She will share her photographs and her experiences from this period of radical and complex changes to the landscape, economy, built environment, and population.  Her documentary fieldwork cuts across many lines of work and life there, and does not use a political or an academic lens as an entry point to the region.  Her upcoming exhibit, Breaking Ground, approaches what has occurred in North Dakota as the latest iteration of a recurrent cyclical phenomenon of boom and bust, and looks at the texture of lived human experience as it interacts with the force of place in North Dakota.  

Valery Lyman has an extensive background in documentary film, working for 15 years as a sound recordist, cinematographer and director. She was the Director of Photography for numerous independent documentary film and television works including the hit indie documentary Fresh (2009), and she worked with the embed longform unit of ABC News for 6 years, filming 41 hours of award winning verite documentary. Lyman’s directorial debut, One of These Mornings (2010), a short film portrait of the 2008 election narrated by voicemail messages from voters across the country, was exhibited in the Museo Nazionale delle Arti XXI Del Secolo in Rome in 2014. Lyman has published photo essays in The Guardian, the LA Times and The Christian Science Monitorfrom her work in the oil fields of North Dakota, and opened five solo exhibits over the last two years showcasing the same work. Over the past 4 years she has been invited to give numerous artist talks at MIT, Harvard, Emerson College, Simmons College, Living Arts of Tulsa, Connect the Docs, the New England Media Coalition and the Doc Summit. She is currently a University at Buffalo’s Creative Arts Initiative resident, and was a Film Studies Center Fellow at Harvard University. In 2015, Valery helped found AgX, a collaborative dedicated to photo-chemical and alternative filmmaking, in Waltham, MA.

Friday September 21, 2018
Rethinking East and Southeast Asia in the New Global Economy

Based on his recent book with Cornell University Press, Strategic Coupling, Dr. Henry Wai-chung Yeung, National University of Singapore argued that state-firm relations in East and Southeast Asia have evolved beyond the developmental state model, and that production network-level dynamics and firm-specific initiatives are more critical to the successful industrial transformation of these Asian economies in the contemporary era. This key mechanism of strategic coupling with global production networks offers a dynamic conception of state-firm relations in the changing context of global economic governance in East and Southeast Asia.

Henry Wai-chung Yeung is Distinguished Professor (and Professor of Economic Geography since 2005) and Acting Head at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Co-Director of the Global Production Networks Centre (GPN@NUS), and Director of the JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Centre in the NUS Global Asia Institute. He is Principal Investigator of a S$4.95 million strategic grant awarded by the National University of Singapore to establish the GPN@NUS Centre. He is a leading social scientist specializing in theories and the geography of transnational corporations, global production networks and global value chains, East and Southeast Asian firms and developmental states in the global economy.

March 8, 2018
Uneven Footprints: Class and Geographies of Carbon Responsibility

Dr. Matthew Huber, Department of Geography, Syracuse University presented the inaugural CTED lecture on carbon responsibility. Who wrecked the climate? We are normally told that climate responsibility is diffuse. Particularly in the Global North it is “all of us” with our high carbon footprints and affluent lifestyles. In this talk, he used theories of social class to critique this narrative and argue that climate responsibility is actually quite concentrated among the small minority of people who own, control and profit from production. He suggests this class approach to climate politics yields dramatically different policy recommendations for how to address the crisis of climate change.

CTED and the Law School welcomed a State Department trade delegation made up of business and government leaders from six central Asian countries to discuss trade and development issues.

Dr. Abigail Cooke spoke to community members in Buffalo as part of an International Institute speaker series called "The Truth about Trade, Jobs and Politics."

The Canada-U.S. Trade Center organized a symposium on November 5th, 2016, sponsored by The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, University at Buffalo’s Geography Department, Asian Studies Program, and The Nila T. Gnamm Research Fund to discuss the governmental, academic, and legal implications of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Read the full event summary here.

Graduate students presented their research findings during a student symposium on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Exploring the implications for public health, food systems, investment, and labor.

Robert Manogue, the Director of the Office of Bilateral Trade Affairs for the State Department, came to UB to talk with students about trade negotiations and career opportunities.