Colloquium: Mark Turin (UBC)
Our next colloquium speaker will be Dr. Mark Turin, Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, UBC.
Date: Thursday March 19, 2015, 11:30 am-1:00 pm
Location: Clearihue C108
Talk title: Collaborations in Language
Abstract: This talk focuses on several key partnerships in which Dr. Turin has been involved over the last two decades, both with members of historically marginalized, indigenous speech communities in the Himalaya, and increasingly with a committed global community of scholars in print, on air, and online. His presentation explores issues of orality, orthography, visibility, and the enduringly problematic metaphor of “mother tongue”. Dr. Turin will draw on long-term fieldwork in Nepal and India with speakers of Thangmi, a community whose language has long been effaced from the national record in the states where it is spoken, while also reflecting critically on the decade that he has spent directing two international, interdisciplinary collaborative research initiatives—the Digital Himalaya and World Oral Literature Projects. All those interested in learning more about the complexities of community collaboration, recording endangered voices, and working to maintain global linguistic diversity in the twenty-first century, are invited to attend.