Princeton International

Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater & Music Theater presents A Moment of Silence by acclaimed Iranian playwright and director Mohammad Yaghoubi Oct. 31-Nov. 8. Surreal, poetic, and unexpectedly humorous, the play offers a deeply human meditation on Iran’s turbulent modern history.
Learn more: https://www.mccarter.org/momentofsilence

Thirteen Princeton students traveled to Kenya this summer as part of the Global Seminar “Technology for African Languages in the Digital Age,” spending six weeks studying Swahili, collecting and analyzing data in the country, and collaborating with six students from Maseno University to build digital tools for underrepresented languages.

Working in small groups, the students completed three projects related to language models: one on topic classification, one on automatic speech recognition, and one on speech tagging, each focusing on translating to English, Swahili, and one or two of Kenya’s Indigenous languages. The students also conducted fieldwork, where they visited fish markets, beaches, and community centers across the country, and took and captioned photos of culturally significant places, objects, and interactions to generate datasets.

“Not only is having the data in the language important, but having it be culturally relevant is also important,” Rachel Adjei ’28 told PAW. Most large language models (LLMs) rely on automatic translations, but the students conducted manual, on-the-ground work to ensure accuracy and nuance.

“We were really engaging with local people,” said Andrei Florian ’28.
Read more: https://paw.princeton.edu/article/global-seminar-students-help-bring-african-languages-digital-age

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🔊Today is the final day to submit your Global Research project to Princeton Research Day!
The Office of International Programs sponsors a 💰$1,000 award for the undergraduate researcher whose project best demonstrates the importance of international engagement and on-site research.

Princeton Research Day Submission Portal Open: Due April 30, 2025 The submission portal is open. You may save your progress as a draft provided it is completed and submitted within 30 days. All Princeton undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, and early career researchers are welcome to submit their research...

Shipping plays a crucial role in global circulation and geopolitical imaginaries of mobility. Approximately 90% of the world’s imports and exports travel by sea on some 93,000 merchant vessels, operated by 1.25 million seafarers, carrying almost six billion tons of cargo. Based on fieldwork conducted along these routes of maritime commerce, specifically focusing on ports and shipping lanes in the Bab-el-Mandeb, a narrow strait that separates Africa from Asia and connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, this talk explores the possibilities of an anthropology of and from the ocean. Specifically, it argues for taking apart two of the guiding metaphors for ethnography—fieldwork and immersion— in order to explore the distinction of land and sea that undergirds them. While the field in fieldwork has been heavily theorized, immersion often appears as a metaphor to signal anthropological legitimacy. But for those who are at sea, immersion is not just metaphor but materiality. For objects to be immersed at sea, requires an understanding of displacement and buoyancy. Beyond dislocation, displacement produces the buoyancy essential to navigation. Thinking through this principle allows for an ethnographic practice attuned not only to the frictions of contemporary life, but the ways displacement moves forward, in unequal and haphazard ways, but forward, nonetheless.

Princeton University Press and the GESEI research group for independent publishing are hosting a conference to discuss the current state of publishing in Latin America on Monday, April 7, and Tuesday, April 8. Learn more:
https://spo.princeton.edu/events/latin-america-world-publishing-today

Attention Princeton students! You're invited to learn about the PIIRS Undergraduate Fellows Program on April 14 @ 4:30 PM, Louis Simpson Building, Room 144. Learn about the opportunity and the wide range of ideas it supports.
Application Deadline: May 30, 2025
Questions: Rachel Golden, [email protected]

Ready for a trip around the world from your living room? The Princeton Inti'l magazine, mailed alongside the December edition of Princeton Alumni Weekly, includes an internationally themed crossword puzzle. Send us your completed grid by April 15, 2025, and you'll be entered into a contest for a hand-held wifi-free translation device. https://international.princeton.edu/news/princeton-intl-2024-crossword-puzzle-here.Good luck!

French-speaking students, take notice! Applications are due Dec. 2 for a once-in-a-lifetime trip this summer to Bayonne, France in the heart of the Euroregion Aquitaine-
Euskadi, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees. Learn more about FRE 329F, the Department of French and Italian's new summer immersion community engagement course here: https://fit.princeton.edu/programs-abroad/summer-immersion/bayonne

World Politics Journal considers illegal mining in Peru; scholars Zaraí Toledo Orozco and Moisés Arce unpack why attempts to legitimize illegal mining has yielded mixed results.
Read more: https://wpj.princeton.edu/storied-teller/2024/faces-labor

The Faces of Labor In the October 2024 (Volume 76, Number 4) issue of World Politics, Zaraí Toledo Orozco, assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and Moisés Arce, Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and a professor in the D...

Today: India's Historical Elections & After: Does India's Diversity Safeguard Her Democracy? Hear from a slate of expert panelists about how caste, class, gender and regional politics shaped India's "shock" 2024 election results. 4:30-6 p.m. Green Hall 0-S-6

Check out the latest international news around campus, including 50 years of nuclear disarmament scholarship and more!

🌐 Princeton International's Latest: Scholarship and Global News! The Storied Teller — a new series from World Politics, a quarterly journal of comparative politics and international relations — aims to bring the journal’s research to a lay audience. Featuring interviews with authors, each story distills rigorous academic research into digestible takeaways.