[Linganth] Talking Politics Roundtable “Transnational Language Politics, Old and New”

[SLA Online]

*Talking Politics Roundtable*
“Transnational Language Politics, Old and New”

Featuring Jessica Chandras, Jaime Pérez González, Martina Volfová, and
Keisha Wiel | Moderator: Molly Hamm-Rodríguez

Friday, May 5, 2023 | 4:00 pm Central (U.S.) | On Zoom
<https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/j/91355921345?pwd=aGhwL0RlYThzeW8vRndwQUJlYjFBUT09#success>

*About the Roundtable:* What is a mother tongue? What is an indigenous
language? Who uses them, who defines them, and who gets included or
excluded when their boundaries change? These categories might seem
self-evident, but they’re backed by decades – even centuries – of political
confusion, contestation, advocacy, activism, study, and
institutionalization, both national and transnational. This roundtable’s
participants will share how “mother tongue(s)” and “indigenous language(s)”
appear across their research, advocacy, and revitalization work, and
discuss what is made possible or impossible through these large-scale
categories.

Panelists will deliver a series of short (5–10-minute) flash presentations
before a collective discussion and audience Q&A.

*Flash Presentations*
*Jessica Chandras*
In 2020, India’s National Education Policy (NEP) featured new provisions
designed to integrate mother tongues into all levels of pedagogy for
equitable education, yet despite these provisions, the policy does not
account for linguistically diverse classrooms where multiple mother tongues
are present. This presentation explores how Banjara speakers, a socially
and linguistically segregated Tribal community in western India, get left
out by a policy designed to include them and how they seek to mitigate
stigma in both classrooms and broader society.

*Jaime Pérez González*
Mexico’s bilingual education system does not exist in practice. Even though
Mexico has an official bilingual Spanish-Indigenous language education
system, monolingual Spanish is still the norm. Although there have been
substantial advances in the recognition of Indigenous languages in recent
years, there is still a long way to go to make linguistic rights effective
and truly enable the use of national indigenous languages in all spheres of
public and private life.

*Martina Volfolvá*
For decades, Indigenous peoples in Canada have drawn attention to harms and
violences perpetrated on their communities. In response, the 2015 Report of
Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission featured 94 Calls to Action to
advance national reconciliation, including recommendations for the
revitalization of Indigenous languages. But what does reconciliation mean,
what is language, and how is language recovery understood on different
scales? This presentation considers the impacts of state administrative
responses and the ways they misalign with community understandings and
priorities.

*Keisha Wiel*
In the past fifteen years, the Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curaçao have
shifted the language of instruction from Dutch to languages that are
actually spoken by the student population. While policy efforts have been
slow, teachers and students have always used their full linguistic
repertoire in the classroom – a dynamic that I analyze as translanguaging
rather than multilingualism. This presentation explores how students' and
teachers' translanguaging allows them to comprehend both their lessons and
classroom dynamics.

Moderated by *Molly Hamm-Rodríguez*, University of Colorado Boulder.

*JOIN THE WEBINAR ON MAY 5
<https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/j/91355921345?pwd=aGhwL0RlYThzeW8vRndwQUJlYjFBUT09#success>*

This virtual series is free and open to the public. Events will be followed
by a live Q&A session where you can ask questions and engage in dialogue
with the speakers.

All events in the Talking Politics 2023 series will use the same Zoom link.
Check out the full schedule on the Talking Politics 2023 website
<https://cscs.uchicago.edu/talking-politics/> and use the button or link
below to join our events on May 5, May 19, May 26, and June 1:

Zoom link: bit.ly/TP2023webinar
Passcode: 494955

*Meet the Panelists*

*Jessica Chandras *is a linguistic anthropologist and assistant professor
of anthropology at the University of North Florida. Dr. Chandras's research
focuses on identity construction and social stratification through
languages in education. Her on-going research in India examines values
attached to language and practices of multilingual language socialization
pertaining to education through a lens of power. She explores a political
economy of language with a focus on intersections of language and
socioeconomic class, caste, and politics of language revitalization
movements.

*Jaime Pérez González *is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in
the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz
(2021–2023), and since 2021, an assistant professor in the Department of
Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained his
Ph.D. from UT Austin, and his MA from CIESAS (Mexico). His research goes
from descriptive linguistics, language documentation, language maintenance
and revitalization, interpretation and translation, language ideology, and
literacy.

For nearly a decade, *Martina Volfová* has been working with Kaska Dene
communities in the Yukon Territory and Northern British Columbia, Canada on
the reclamation, revitalization, and documentation of the Kaska language.
Currently, Dr. Volfová is the Director of the Liard First Nation Language
Department, where she continues her community-based research. She uses
film, photography, and audio and video recording to carry out
community-based, collaborative research, which aims to produce innovative,
culturally appropriate, and visually engaging language and cultural
materials and resources.

*Keisha Wiel* is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistic anthropology at Temple
University. Her research examines language socialization, multilingualism,
linguistic rights, and education in a postcolonial state. Primarily, it
focuses on the socialization of language ideas in education and how it
shapes the identity of students.


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We look forward to seeing you there!

– *The Talking Politics 2023 Team*

-- 
*Society for Linguistic Anthropology Online*
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