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Choose your path to get involved as you reconnect with, learn from, inspire and serve ILRies on campus, in your city and around the world through: 

  • Social Events - Meet old and new friends at fun local events
  • Professional Development & NetworkingBuild your network as you upskill with established and emerging leaders in the field; meet, advise and learn from current ILR students and recent graduates through student/alumni programs and mentoring opportunities
  • Academic ExplorationLearn the latest on trending topics from ILR faculty and experts
  • Service ProjectsGive back with other ILRies

Contact ILRAA President, Nicole Mormilo ’12 (nmormilo@gmail.com), to get more involved!

#FromIvesWeRiseAndServe

Career Transition Initiative (CTI)

The ILRAA Board of Directors launched a Career Transition Initiative (CTI) in January 2024 to support alumni who are reentering the workforce, navigating a layoff, or pivoting in their career. To date, the CTI has offered complimentary headshots and alumni mixers in six cities and 12 skill-building webinars.

Complimentary Headshots: Look for an email announcement about where the ILRAA will host the next round of free professional photographs with Bitanga Productions.

Watch the Webinars: The CTI webinars equip alumni with practical tools and tips to navigate their career transitions. Watch them here!

Share Your Skills: Do you have skills, experiences, or resources to share with alumni in career transition? Tell us about your career-transition talents HERE! The ILRAA Board hopes to create new webinars, develop mentorship opportunities, host networking events and much more to support alumni. We hope you’ll consider sharing your time and talents!

Get Involved: The ILRAA Board encourages you to:

Alumni Bio-Bursts

See all Bio-Bursts

The ILR Alumni Association Bio Burst project, a monthly video series that introduces you to members of ILR's recent alumni community.

Pranav Sehgal

For our October 2020 Bio Burst, meet Pranav Sehgal, a member of the ILR Class of 2015 and a Research Associate at ARGA Investment Management. Check out Pranav’s story and hear about his appreciation for Cornell’s diversity and enthusiastic professors.
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Pranav Sehgal

Wendy Lamanque

For our September 2020 Bio Burst, meet Wendy LaManque, a member of the ILR Class of 2010 and Eastern Counsel for the American Guild of Musical Artists.
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Wendy Lamanque

Ashley Estrada

For our July 2020 Bio Burst, meet Ashley Estrada, a member of the Class of 2016, and a Middle Market Banking Associate at JP Morgan.
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Ashley Estrada

Mike Annunziata

For our May 2020 Bio Burst, meet Mike Annunziata, a member of the Class of 2011, and the CEO of Farther Farms. By developing novel technologies to extend shelf-life, preserve nutritional value, and achieve food safety, Farther Farms creates food products that solve foundational problems in the food system.
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Mike Annunziata

Nina Gershy

Nina Gershowitz '16, who has worked in the circus world, has continued her focus on the arts as a project manager for a dance video production company.
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Nina Gershy

Events

Kheel Center Research Symposium

Join us as the 2023 Kheel Center Travel Grant winners present their research findings. The Richard Strassberg Travel Grant supports scholars conducting archival research at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives in Catherwood Library. Catherwood, located in the ILR School, is part of Cornell University Library. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from the recipients and explore their work! Program information will be sent upon registration. Speakers: Hillary Dann, producer/researcher for historical documentaries: "The Investigation of NYC Public School Teachers in the 1940s and 50s." and Hella Winston, sociologist and investigative reporterBryant Etheridge: A Program of Social Reform: The National War Labor Board, Wartime Wage Policy, and the Origins of the Great Compression, 1942-1945Daniel Goldstein: "Luigi Antonini and the Italian anti-Fascist exiles: a symbiotic relationship?"Hunter Moskowitz, Phd Candidate at Northeastern University: “Practical Men: “White Patriarchal Skill in the Global Textile Industry.”

Localist event image for Kheel Center Research Symposium
Kheel Center Research Symposium

The Country and the City Graduate Conference

Why do we see the country and the city as intrinsically different spaces and ways of being? Almost 50 years after Raymond Williams (1973) argued that this contrast is “one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society,” we continue to see agrarian economies and life as relics of an idyllic past, dissolving at the hands of the forward-marching cities. Against perspectives that saw the development of capitalism as an urban/industrial set of forces slowly gnawing away at rural/agrarian harmonious and simple living, Williams saw industrial capitalism as intrinsically connected to feudalism and agrarian capitalism, the urban to the rural. Rather than reflecting a historical reality, he argued that this spatial and ideological binary was constructed in direct response to the growth of capitalism and imperialism. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas—but agrarian livelihoods and lives are not merely withering away. The country-versus-city binary continues to govern our efforts to find solutions to the grave crises of our times. Contemporary solutions, such as agroecology as an antidote to industrial agriculture or green energy as a foil to fossil fuels, invoke the return to a pristine, sustainable past. This conference will showcase graduate student papers that explore how the country and city constitute each other and investigate how capital, labor, imaginaries, and sentiments flow between the two. 10-11:30 am - Constructing Nature Presentations by: Michael Cary, Jessie Mayall, Suraj Kushwaha and Finn Domingo Discussant: Nataya Friedan Constructions of nature, Williams reminds us, often contain veiled arguments about people, societies and social relations. This panel asks what kinds of social arguments are embedded in ideas of environmental instability and what kinds of politics emerge from them. We begin in England, where romanticized understandings of ‘the countryside’ underlie contemporary visions for landscape ‘optimization’ for food production and carbon sequestration. We then move to the remote Siachen glacier, where representations of the world’s highest battlefield by the Indian Army mediate public consent for militarization through appeals to martyrdom and national pride. From there we move to the aftermath of wildfires in Los Angeles, where the financial mechanisms and socio-economic effects of homeowners insurance are exacerbating an already unaffordable housing market. Finally, we turn to Paraguay, where the infrastructures of defense from destructive floods—and the politics of blame for when they happen—shape the relationship between an expanding city and neglected countryside. 12:30 -2pm - Morality of Improvement Presentations by: Yui Sasajima, Maria Paula Espejo and Allen Huang Discussant: Paul Kohlbry These four papers examine the construction of rural spaces and urban fringes, paying attention to the flexible ideas of home that often lie behind the creation of certain spaces as desirable or ideal. At the heart of this question is the issue of improvement, which Raymond Williams points us to as a driver behind the subjection of tenants and the landless.Drawing on varying methodologies, these papers examine how rural and urban spaces are bridged—or thought to be bridged—through social reproduction, how home is made in new spaces, and who benefits from the drive to “improve.” 2:15-3:45pm - Structures of Feeling Presentations by: Liam Greenwell, Georgia Koumantaros , Andrew Colpitts and Grace Myers Discussant: Katharine Lindquist Raymond Williams invites us to investigate the dialogic relationship between the rural and urban through the unspoken, shared, and historically contingent “structures of feeling” that emerge from cultural texts. This panel examines Williams’s contribution in relation to the moral, symbolic, representational, and material assemblages by which the rural is imagined. In doing so, we ask how the country and the city become sites of imagined dystopia and utopia alike by which people reimagine life in generative ways. These papers track imagined promises of the countryside—from a site for family values, national becoming, future imagination, and self-actualization—in contexts from rural evangelicalism in New York, queer reckonings with both limitation and thriving, folklore and placemaking in coal country, and the contradictions of village life in Greece. The unclear lines between utopia and dystopia trouble the position of the figures involved and promise—or threaten?—collective self-fashioning.

Localist event image for The Country and the City Graduate Conference
The Country and the City Graduate Conference

Labor Economics Workshop: Joseph Mullins

Joseph Mullins Designing cash transfers in the presence of children's human capital formation This paper finds that accounting for the human capital development of children has a quantitatively large effect on the true costs and benefits of providing cash assistance to single mothers in the United States. A dynamic model of work, welfare participation, and parental investment in children introduces a formal apparatus for calculating costs and benefits when individuals respond to incentives. The model provides a tractable outcome equation in which a policy’s effect on child skills can be understood through its impact on two economic resources in the household – time and money – and the share of each resource as factors in the production of skills. These key causal parameters are cleanly identified by policy variation through the 1990s. The model also admits simple and interpretable formulae for optimal nonlinear transfers in the style of Mirrlees (1971), with novel features arising when child skill formation is accounted for. Using a broadly conservative empirical strategy, estimates imply that optimal transfers are about 20% more generous than the US benchmark, and shaped very differently. In contrast to current policies, the optimal policy discourages labor supply at the bottom of the income distribution due to the costly estimated impacts of work on child development. The finding underscores the importance of reconciling results in the literature on the developmental effects of maternal employment. Finally, a counterfactual model exercise suggests that changes to the welfare and tax environment after 1996 had negative average effects both on maternal welfare and child skill outcomes, with a significant degree of redistribution across latent dimensions.

Localist event image for Labor Economics Workshop: Joseph Mullins
Labor Economics Workshop: Joseph Mullins

Labor & Trade Economics Workshop: Jessie Handbury

Jessie Handbury Demographic Preferences and Income Segregation We study how preferences over the demographic composition of co-patrons affects income segregation in shared spaces. To distinguish demographic preferences from tastes for other venue attributes, we study venue choices within business chains. We find two notable regularities: preferences for high-income co-patrons are similar across racial groups, and racial homophily does not vary by income. These demographic preferences are economically large, explain much of the cross-group variation in exposure to high-income co-patrons, and correlate with movers’ neighborhood choices.

Localist event image for Labor & Trade Economics Workshop: Jessie Handbury
Labor & Trade Economics Workshop: Jessie Handbury

Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Eric Chyn

Eric Chyn

Localist event image for Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Eric Chyn
Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Eric Chyn

Labor Economics Workshop: Raffaella Sadun

Raffaella Sadun

Localist event image for Labor Economics Workshop:  Raffaella Sadun
Labor Economics Workshop: Raffaella Sadun