Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the ILR School. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to study the intersection of environment and economy in South Asia and the Indian Himalaya. Her work analyzes how both materials and bodies take on value under changing political economic regimes, from colonial occupation to late capitalism. She also attends to the diverse forms of gendered, racialized, paid, and unpaid labor that make and maintain that value.
   
   Sarah is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (2020) both with the University of California Press, as well as the co-editor (with Alex Blanchette) of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019). Her articles have appeared in disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals and collections, including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Antipode, Environmental Humanities, and Environment and Planning. Her current and ongoing research explores the intersections of agricultural science and extension, colonial and postcolonial governance, and small-scale farming on the India-Bhutan border. Sarah’s research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright. 
   
   At Cornell, Sarah teaches courses on the anthropology of labor, economic anthropology, and critical studies of capitalism and agriculture. She leads a graduate lab group, Agrarian Studio, which brings PhD students and postdoctoral scholars from multiple departments and programs together for regular discussion and mentoring. 
   
   Sarah took her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. Before coming to Cornell, from 2015-2020, she was Charles Evans Hughes 1881 Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. At Brown, she was the Associate Director of the Center for Contemporary South Asia. From 2012-2015, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.

 

 I arrived to Ithaca and my new position at Cornell in Fall 2020 in the height online-only engagements at the university. Nearly two years later, I am excited to become more involved in the university and particularly in shared governance. I’m honored to have been nominated to run for a seat on the UFC. At Cornell, I am active in the South Asia Program and the Einaudi Center, and I am a member of the graduate fields of Anthropology, Development Studies, and Labor Relations. I believe that this track record of collaboration with faculty, staff, and students from across colleges has provided me a unique perspective on the crucial issues facing the faculty as a whole. I would also come to the UFC with a track record of leadership in my previous institutions as well as through multiple section-level executive boards of the American Anthropological Association, where I am currently President of the Society for the Anthropology of Work.

 

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Eric Cheyfitz, Professor, American Indian and Indigenous Studies (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences); Literatures in English (College of Arts and Sciences)

Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where he is on the faculty of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and has served as its director. His scholarship and teaching focus on the force of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples and their ongoing resistance in the form of alternative ways of thought and action to the predatory capitalism embedded in settler existence. Exemplary of this work are his award winning book The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (1991; reprinted in paper and expanded, 1997), which was named by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books of 1991 and is still in print after twenty-nine years; and his co-edited volume Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly which won the award for the best special issue of an academic journal in 2011 given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and was acknowledged for "Outstanding Indigenous Scholarship" in the same year by the American Indian and Alaska Native Professors Association. His most recent book is The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States (Routledge, 2017; expanded paper edition, PaperBoat Press, 2019), which in its final chapter, “Thinking From A Different Place: What Is A Just Society?,” offers, beyond “the limits of capitalism’s imagination,” an Indigenous alternative to the way out of the current crisis of climate collapse and wealth inequality. His current work focuses on the intersection of settler colonialism in Palestine and Native America, which includes an essay in the Cambridge History of Native American Literature (2021). He has written four books and published over forty articles, including such titles as “Israel, Palestine, And the Poetics of Genocide” (co-authored with Mark LeVine); “Native American Literature and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”; and “Reading Global Indigenous Resistance in Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back.” His journalism appears in the online publications CounterPunch, LA Progressive, and Mondoweiss. Among radio shows, he has been on the Michael Smerconish program on Sirius XM, and Against the Grain with Sasha Lilley. On TV, he has appeared on Democracy Now. He also appears in the documentary film “Our Land, Our Life” which won best film at the American Indian Film Festival in 2007. He can be seen in the forthcoming documentary The Story of Wealth. He is currently completing a book "The Settler Colonial Construction of Indian Country: U.S. American Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law," which is under contract to the U. of Minnesota Press. His scholarship is joined by his social action work both in Indian country and on behalf of Palestinian rights.

 

My interest in serving on the UFC is to focus my continuing advocacy for faculty governance as mandated by Article XIII, Section 2 of the Cornell By-laws, which requires senate review of any proposed educational policy that impacts more than one department or unit or the university as a whole. As recent and past senate resolutions have argued the administration has been by-passing this rule, both for the Ithaca campus and for its international partnerships, in implementing educational policy without proper senate review. My record of pursuing this agenda is visible in my previous service on the senate (2006-2016, 2017-2018) and the UFC (2009-2012). I also served on the Senate’s Special Committee on Governance from 2005-2007, In addition to my directorship of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (2008-2011). I have been consistently active in supporting diversity issues. Among a range of participation on diversity committees, I served as the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program from 2004-2011, and was a member of the Mellon Post Doctoral Diversity Seminar in 2012-2013 and its director in 2013-2014. Most recently, I served as a member of Working Group S, established in 2020 by the Dean of the Faculty to draft a proposal for a university-wide course on “structural racism, social justice, race, and related issues.” Given my consistent and ongoing record supporting issues of faculty governance and diversity, you can be confident of my continued strong support for these issues if I am elected to the UFC.

 

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Johannes Lehmann, Professor, Soil and Crop Sciences (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)

Johannes Lehmann, Liberty Hyde Bailey professor of soil science at Cornell University, received his graduate degrees at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His work focuses broadly on sustainable soil management, climate change mitigation, and the circular economy. During the past 20 years, he worked on nano-scale investigations of soil organic matter, the biogeochemistry of carbon sequestration in soil, as well as nutrient management including the development of innovative fertilizers from wastes. Much of his work examines smallholder agriculture in Africa, South America and Asia, including collaborations with CARE, The Nature Conservancy and EDF. Johannes has been developing alternatives to slash-and-burn and alternative fertilizers from wastes in Ethiopia, Burundi and Sierra Leone. As part of the Productive Safety Net Program he developed carbon sequestration options and climate-smart agriculture practices in Ethiopia. As part of an interdisciplinary group Johannes has been working on biofuel and biochar production for rural smallholder farmers in Kenya, including management of latrine wastes in the slums of Nairobi. Johannes is a member of the steering group of the International Soil Carbon Network, has testified in US congress, briefed the President’s council of advisors, and was part of Workgroup 2 on Monitoring and Assessment of Sustainable Land Management of UNCCD and various IPCC groups. At Cornell, Johannes teaches courses in carbon and nutrient management in natural and managed ecosystems. He is the co-instructor of a course that explores the humanities’ and artistic viewpoints on environment, science and sustainability, serves on the faculty committee of the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, and develops approaches to include art practices in science. He has authored more than 250 journal publications, was named Highly-Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuter-Clarivate since 2014, is member of the German National Academy of Sciences, and served as editor-in-chief of the journal Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems from 2014-2021.

 

The university holds a unique position in society, educating a new generation, providing knowledge for the future and advising the public today. Cornell has a special role to play, being both a private and a land-grant university. Many of our faculty and students work with diverse stakeholders not only in New York State but also internationally. At the same time, the different disciplines conduct education, research and outreach in very different ways, including with varying incentive structures. I would like to motivate us to intensify our efforts to bring these different protagonists together within and outside the university in meaningful co-creation and collaboration, with respect and a mutual understanding that we are in this world together. 

 

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Margaret McEntee, Professor, Clinical Sciences (College of Veterinary Medicine)

Dr. McEntee is Professor of Oncology in the Department of Clinical Sciences. Prior to joining Cornell in 2000 she was on faculty at the University of California, Davis. She came to Cornell University to help establish a veterinary oncology program. She is a native of Ithaca, NY, and a graduate of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. Postgraduate training included medical and radiation oncology residency training programs at North Carolina State University, and she is a board-certified diplomate of American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) in medical oncology, and American College of Veterinary Radiology subspecialty of radiation oncology (ACVR(RO)). She most recently served as the Alexander de Lahunta Chair of the Department of Clinical Sciences for over 11 years. She has been actively engaged in both of her specialty organizations including serving as President of ACVR(RO). She has also completed a 6-year term as an American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) Council on Education accreditation site visitor, visiting other veterinary academic institutions nationally and internationally over the course of that period and serving as Chair for three of the six accreditation site visits. 

 

I have always felt a keen obligation to give back to those organizations that have supported me and made my career possible. Early on this entailed volunteering to serve on various committees within my specialty organizations including residency standards committees, examination committees, and serving as president elect, president, and past president for ACVR(RO) which spanned a 6-year period. In 2010 I was asked to serve as the interim department chair for the Department of Clinical Sciences. Over the 11+ years that I served as department chair, I found gratification in supporting our faculty members at all stages; as we interacted in the initial hiring process; as they progressed through the reappointment and promotion process; as well as providing support to faculty as they transitioned to retirement. Each step in my mind was equally important and deserved attention. I always felt that my role was as the advocate for faculty members. The opportunity to work closely with the hospital and college administration was a singularly rewarding experience and gave me greater insight as to the workings of the whole. While I have had the opportunity to serve on the Faculty Senate, engaging at the University level on the University Faculty Committee would be an opportunity to engage at a new level and give back to my academic institution. While I would have much to learn I believe that I have the passion for supporting faculty in all their endeavors and have much to offer through this new and challenging role. 

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Mingming Wu, Professor, Biological and Environmental Engineering (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)

The Wu lab focuses on discovering fundamental principles that single cells use to communicate with their environment, in particular, how physical forces regulate cell migration. An equal thrust is to develop micro- nano- scale technologies for studies of biological systems. The problems of choices are motivated by contemporary problems in health and environment. Dr. Wu received B. S. and PhD in physics, in Nanjing University and the Ohio State University respectively, postdoctoral training at Ecole Polytechnique in France and University of California at Santa Barbara, before she started her academic career at Occidental College. She joined Cornell University in 2003 and was elected fellow of American Physical Society in 2016. 

 

Candidate Statement:
The current crises at national, international levels emphasizes the urgent need of creating and maintaining an inclusive community, where people of all colors, genders, and ethnicities have equal standing in their voices and governance. Having working experiences in three colleges (CALS, College of Engineering, and Arts and Science) at Cornell, I believe that I am in a good position to contribute to Cornell's mission to make it an inclusive community across all colleges.

 

https://biofluidics.bee.cornell.edu/