Moynihan Institute News, Research and Commentary

“As the world prepares for COP28, the onus is on global leaders, corporations and individuals to rise to the occasion and champion the cause of climate justice. Wealthy nations must start putting real funding towards loss and damage, while ramping up their mitigation and adaptation efforts, and reining in the influence of the fossil fuel industry in climate policies,” Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment, writes in The Guardian.

Prema Kurien and Janet M. Wilmoth received awards, and several faculty colleagues were elected to roles in the American Sociological Association. 

Mona Bhan, professor of anthropology and Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies, co-edited and was a contributing author to the “The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies” (Palgrave, 2023).

"One initial impetus for the book was my desire to bring geography’s concepts and insights into better conversation with topics in Middle East area studies," says Timur Hammond, assistant professor of geography and the environment. "Although over a decade has passed since I started research on this topic, expanding the disciplinary connections between geography and Middle East area studies continues to be a core goal."

Prema Kurien, professor of sociology, says there is a logical reason why immigrant groups exhibit higher rates of religiosity. “Immigration and relocation from a familiar context to something completely unfamiliar is a theologizing experience,” Kurien says. “It raises existential questions—things that people don’t think about when they are in their home country with a familiar community.”

"Trajectories of Translation," co-authored by Timur Hammond, assistant professor of geography and the environment, was published in Progress in Human Geography.

One of 15 geographers from 11 states and the West Indies, Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment, will focus on climate and society. 

Six faculty members were granted tenure and promoted to associate professor and three were promoted to professor.

The position was created with a gift by Syracuse University alumni Yang Ni and Xiaoqing Li to strengthen connections between Maxwell faculty and scholars in China and Asia.

The awards support undergraduate research projects.

The Maxwell School professor participated in a conference on climate and sustainability.

"This can't continue as systems that become more unstable and unpredictable will harm more in chaotic ways," says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment.

What matters to China is consumer and investor confidence, "so it is not hard to see why Chinese officials are pushing back on the argument that a population decline spells economic decline," says Dimitar Gueorguiev, associate professor of political science.

"China wants to get a sense, are you really serious about figuring out some way of turning down the heat or not," says Dimitar Gueorguiev, associate professor of political science. "And they have reason to be suspicious on where we're going with the electoral cycle in the U.S. and how risky it is."

Timur Hammond, assistant professor of geography and the environment, has written “Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul” (University of California Press, 2023). 

Dimitar Gueorguiev, associate professor of political science, has contributed to and edited "New Threats to Academic Freedom in Asia" (Columbia University Press, 2023). 

"A bizarre situation with this balloon, in particular, is best understood as an attempt to kind of clarify what the terms of engagement are," says Dimitar Gueorguiev, associate professor of political science. "And what you’ve seen over the past couple of days is that surveillance aircraft at a certain level of altitude are now probably more likely to happen and are more at risk of being shot dow," he says.

With [Chinese President] Xi now signaling a shift to less rancorous bilateral ties, “I expect [Xie Feng, China's new ambassador to the U.S.] to be more kumbaya-ish,” says Dimitar Gueorguiev, associate professor of political science and expert on Chinese elite politics.

Prema Kurien was named director of the center as it received funding from the U.S. Department of Education.