Language Lives in Unexpected Places
The Center for Humanities & Information at Penn State University invites you to join the special webinar series “Language Lives in Unexpected Places,” a discussion of Indigenous language revitalization, information systems, and communicative technologies.
November 17 & November 18, 2020 2:30 - 4:30 PM EST
In 2020, the futures of Indigenous languages are both vibrant and precarious. A surge in Indigenous media production and political action, combined with formal declarations recognizing the value of Indigenous languages from the UN and UNESCO, have solidified the visibility of Indigenous languages and their speakers. Scholars face a responsibility in this moment to move beyond archival and salvage paradigms, to support and amplify processes of Indigenous renewal underway around the globe. Popular depictions of Indigenous languages rarely place them in the Information Age, but attention to Indigenous languages in what Dakota Sioux historian Philip Deloria might call “unexpected places” (2004; see also Webster and Peterson 2011) challenge representational expectations of where and how Indigenous languages are meaningfully deployed. Across the Americas, Indigenous languages are finding emergent vitalities in both institutional and grassroots contexts. How are languages—and speakers—transformed by their contemporary engagements with new media and informational technologies? How are Indigenous users transforming media and communication technologies?
Contemporary engagements with Indigenous media, performance, activism, and scholarship demonstrate ways in which what is old may be made new again, or what is new can be made old and invested with the authority of the past for future action. The speakers in this webinar traverse the unexpected, regenerative, and sometimes contradictory, linguistic and media practices of Indigenous-language speakers across the America, who work to decolonize and Indigenize various spaces and media, both old and new.
Schedule & Speakers
Nov 17
2:30 - 4:30 pm EST
2:30pm Welcoming Remarks
Panel 1 “Mediated Methods”
Erin Debenport (UCLA) – “Business as Usual: The Twin Futures of Indigenous Language Media”
Chris Bloechl (UChicago) – “Formulations of Locality and Modernity in Mediatized Yucatec Maya”
Qui’chi Patlan (UT Austin) – “Accessing Knowledge & The Branding of Pirated Dreamcatchers Through Narration in Otavalo”
Georgia Ennis (Penn State) – “Reweaving Worlds: More-than-Language Reclamation in the Western Amazon”
Discussant, Tony Webster (UT Austin)
Panel 2 “Transforming Textuality”
Karl Swinehart (University of Louisville) – “Text, Toponyms, and Transformation: Aymara in La Paz’s Linguistic Landscape”
Joseph Marks (University of Arizona) – “(Re)contextualizing and Transforming Indigenous Motifs for Healing During Times of Sorrow”
Morgan Siewert (UT Austin) – “The Grammar of Stories: Reimagining Intellectual Authority and Lexicography in the Production of a Community-Generated Nishnaabemwin Word List”
Discussant, Jenny Davis (U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)