October 2025
How Corruption Undermines Sustainable Development, Human Rights, and Social Stability
October 23, 2025
4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Unity Hall 520
In an increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world, integrity has become a cornerstone of sustainable development. Corruption, governance weaknesses, and lack of transparency not only hinder economic growth, but also erode public trust, exacerbate inequalities, and limit opportunities for future generations.
As the Vice President of Integrity at the World Bank Group, Mouhamadou Diagne oversees investigations of alleged fraud and corruption involving World Bank Group-financed projects and activities, staff, and corporate vendors. The Integrity Vice Presidency also pursues and litigates sanctions for credible allegations, introduces best practices to prevent fraud and corruption in World Bank Group operations, and helps to raise compliance standards among private sector entities.
Diagne has more than 25 years of experience managing teams in the fight against fraud and corruption. Most recently, he served as the Inspector General of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, one of the world’s largest international health financing organizations. In this capacity, Diagne led the investigations and the audit functions of the organization and oversaw investigations of alleged fraud, corruption, misappropriation, and other forms of abuse in Global Fund-financed programs and in corporate operations. Before joining the Global Fund, he was the Director of Strategy and Operations for Internal Audit at the World Bank Group, where he led the strategic shift from compliance-audits to more strategic risk-based audits. Diagne also served as the Director of Internal Audit at Fannie Mae, one of the largest financial institutions in the US and the largest provider of mortgage financing in North America, and he has held various managerial positions in international public accounting firms.
Collaborative Learning to Confront Climate Coloniality and Decolonize Global Futures
November 8, 2024
Odeum A & B, Rubin Campus Center
12 - 1:30 pm
Amidst growing ecological crises and climate-influenced worsening disasters, the need to confront systems that perpetuate and exacerbate impacts appears to be a unanimous global desire. Yet that is not necessarily the case. Climate coloniality disrupts simplistic narratives of climate justice or the understanding of what just global futures could be. Climate Coloniality reproduces the hauntings of colonialism and imperialism, thereby complicating climate politics at global and local scales. This requires decolonizing both epistemic violence's and material outcomes for meaningful climate justice. Collaborative learning and education focused on community-based praxis and ethics of care offer possibilities for more just futures.
Farhana Sultana is Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Dr. Sultana is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar, author and teacher of political ecology, post‐colonial development, social and climate justice, decolonizing knowledge, and transnational feminisms. Her research and scholar-activism draw from her experiences of having lived and worked on three continents as well as from her backgrounds in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy experience. Author of several dozen publications, her latest book is “Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice” (2024). Dr. Sultana graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University (in Geosciences and Environmental Studies) and obtained her Masters and PhD (in Geography) from the University of Minnesota, where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow. For recognition of her path-breaking research and public engagement, she was awarded the Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues” in 2019 and honored as an Elevate Geo Fellow in 2023. Further information: https://www.farhanasultana.com
September 25, 2024
Can Machine Learning (NLP, LLM) Make Policy Research more “Reflexive”?
September 25, 2024
Unity Hall 500
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
This talk will discuss the potential of making policy research more “reflexive” by combining qualitative and quantitative methods and employing Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and LLMs to reduce the distance between researchers and the people they study. This can substantially increase the relevance of research by bringing it closer to lived realities and thus improve policy effectiveness. The talk will provide a general overview of this idea and illustrate it with two examples: (1) On deliberative democracy, and (2) On understanding human aspirations. It will also show that there are pitfalls from over-relying on NLP and LLMs without critical human input.
Vijayendra Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank who works at the intersection of scholarship and practice. He integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology and political science to study the social, cultural, and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries. His books include Oral Democracy, Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?, and Culture and Public Action (edited). His articles have been published in the leading journals in Economics, Political Science, Sociology and Development Studies. His policy work has focused on issues of bottom-up participation, local democracy and gender. He is Chair of the Advisory Committee of the program on Boundaries, Membership and Belonging at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.