Your background includes work on international development, social mobilization, land use and critical ethnography. How have these experiences shaped your worldview and what you bring to your role?
Wolford: I always laugh because when people introduce me, they grab those terms off my website, but they’re obscure to most people! I work primarily in Latin America and Africa, asking a few key questions: How do people in rural areas make a living and carve out a life on the land; how does the distribution of land across social classes shape the formation of everything, from the economy to the nature of the national state; and how do people draw on social, institutional and political tools to mobilize for a different, better life.
Critical ethnography – its less technical name is “deep hanging out”– allows me to compile in-depth, close-up understandings of daily life in the communities and institutions where I work. I’m currently working on a book on the politics of agricultural research and rural development in Mozambique, drawing on the research I did while on a Fulbright a couple of years ago.
I have been interested in traveling, living and working internationally since I was young. I grew up in a small rural town but I had the very good fortune of having wonderful Latin teachers from fifth grade through high school. My last year in high school, I capitalized on my Latin in the best way possible – by taking a year of Italian at the local college (Dartmouth).
At 17, I moved to Florence for a year and worked as a cocktail waitress, which is an unusual way to get your start in academia, but I highly recommend it.
Living on my own in Italy for a year gave me an appreciation for different cultures, for being outside your comfort zone, for traveling independently and for really trying to become a local – for the joy of becoming fluent in another language.
I then went to McGill University in Montreal as a double major in economics and international development. In my junior year, I read a book that argued that Latin America lagged behind the so-called developed world because of exceedingly high levels of inequality – and without a doubt the most important source and area of inequality was inequality in land ownership.
So, I left school again (my poor mother!) and went to Brazil to work with a social movement that was organizing the rural poor to fight for land distribution. The people in this movement were – and are – inspiring. The themes of social movement organization, inequality and rural development have stayed with me ever since.
And your approach has always naturally been interdisciplinary?
Yes, I’ve always been interdisciplinary. I was trained in doctoral “fields” rather than in disciplines at UC Berkeley, so Cornell is a natural fit for me.
It’s trite but true to say that you cannot grapple with the big problems in the world today from the lens of a particular discipline. Climate change, migration, inequality, geopolitical conflict – to understand and maybe even address these, we have to start from the problem, not the discipline.
How has the Office of Global Learning, created just before you took on the vice provost position, adapted to its role?
It really is still brand new as a combined unit, but it has been wonderful to see the Education Abroad (formerly Cornell Abroad) and International Services (formerly ISSO) teams come together. Both think about international affairs from the perspective of mobility and the community, respectively. In fact, many of our international students study or work abroad, combining mobility and community.
The international landscape has been challenging this past year – but the staff in the office is excellent. They’ve all doubled down to provide high-level immigration services, and to incorporate new programing to help international students feel welcome and get the most out of their experience here. At the same time, the Education Abroad folks are seeing increased demand for international experiences and trying to navigate a complex political environment.