(gentle music) - In this moment, we know that the pace and scale of climactic changes, of environmental changes are so accelerated.

And that is creating new pressures and new opportunities for adaptation.

And so in this moment, for us to be able to understand the way in which political, legal parameters shape our adaptation to a changing world is really a critical moment due to this accelerated pace and the interconnectedness of human and planetary wellbeing.

I'm Rachel Riedl, I'm the Director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and I'm a political scientist, I work on questions of democracy and governance and basically what governance can bring to citizens across the world.

At the Einaudi Center I really seek to bring people together around the areas of research that they are interested in to be able to identify global challenges that we're addressing from across different interdisciplinary perspectives with different regional expertise and knowledge and to be able to come together in this intellectual community to address key questions of our time.

Political science brings to the study of migrations, for example, a particular way of looking at the legal infrastructure that allows people passage over one type of boundary to another.

The types of political and social cleavages that help us to understand how people are put into particular sets of categories, be it through the census, be it through political campaigns, be it through partisan rhetoric, be it through our understanding of how the educational system gets shaped.

All of these sets of things are political processes.

How we understand who are classified as migrants versus who are classified as refugees and what different types of rights they have access to claim and what different types of boundaries they can traverse.

So political science brings to our understanding of social phenomenon the political lens that prioritizes how decisions are made, where power resides, and what that means for people who are seeking to claim power and rights.

(gentle music) So often when we think about migration we assume that the goal of leaving is in-built characteristic of people want to be on the move and seek opportunity.

And yes, people do want to seek opportunity, we all want to seek and have the right to seek opportunity.

But so often, first and foremost, people want to find opportunity where they are.

They want to be able to stay in what they consider to be their homes, their home region, their home environment, their home community.

And so as those homes become untenable for a variety of reasons, maybe it's political conflict, civil conflict, maybe it's colonialism that forces dispossession and displacement, when people have to move it's often out of conditions of duress.

And so the ways in which we think about that displacement and the counter, which is the ability to thrive where one considers to be home.

One of the leaders of our Migrations Initiative is Wendy Wolford who's the Vice Provost for International Affairs here at Cornell University as well as a faculty member in the Department of Global Development in our College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

And Wendy's work is really visionary in terms of thinking about migrations and interconnected systems.

Her own connection as a geographer comes to helping us to think about the ways in which the organization of economies and production also shapes the movement of people as they respond to the utilization of land for production of certain goods for an export market and the ways in which that has different types of consequences.

This is just one example of the way in which scholars from across the world are able to connect on thematic research-based priorities that connect land, the environment, economic production and human migration and rights in one interconnected framework.

As an educational project, this Migrations Initiative has many goals.

One is to offer an extended set of understanding to our current students here at Cornell who will be involved in the project and will better be able to understand this interconnectivity and interdisciplinary approach to migrations at large and the multi-species approach that we are taking.

But I think that the impact also spreads much larger because our goal is also to contribute to public understandings about migration and what it means for our contemporary challenges that we face locally, nationally, and globally.

So, part of the project is to seek to communicate to global publics, to local publics, what our current understanding of migrations is and how we can think about it in ways that allow us to adapt and to seek kind of productive and sustainable futures in this accelerating pace of a migratory and mobile world.

We hope it's an opportunity to share knowledge and to push forward the frontiers of knowledge on this topic.

(gentle music continues)