September 4, 2014
All Day
Rm 120, 1501 Neil Ave, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University
To register, please contact Ann Powers at powers.108@osu.edu or (614) 292-8535.
Turning away from policy discourses of preservation, protection, and heritage, we look at the grassroots strategies by which minority languages and cultural practices are sustained in plural societies. Weak actors defend themselves and pursue their goals through the arts of accommodation, avoidance, and nichemaking. But cultural flourishing is not identical with human flourishing. How do the two intersect and diverge over time? Our international case studies come from Tibet, New Orleans, Mongolia, the Philippines, Greenland, Jewish Krakow, Russian Alaska, indigenous Honduras, Kyrgyzstan, the Lake Michigan Potawatomi, the Senegambian borderland, western China, and beyond.
Keynote speakers Lenore Grenoble (U of Chicago), Camiel Hamans (European Union), and Salikoko Mufwene (U of Chicago) will offer us views on the question from the Arctic, Brussels, and subsaharan Africa. Your colleagues and students from the Departments of Comparative Studies, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Geography, Linguistics, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures will also present their field studies. Find the program here.
Comparative Studies participants include Professor John Low, Professor Dorothy Noyes, and PhD Student Kati Fitzgerald.
Organized by the Mershon Research Network in Cultural Resilience, a collaboration of the Center for Folklore Studies, Department of Linguistics, Department of Comparative Studies, and Mershon Center for International Security Studies. For further information, contact network co-conveners Dorothy Noyes noyes.10@osu.edu or Brian Joseph joseph.1@osu.edu.
Photo courtesy of Thomas Beardslee: "Abdelhakim and Band2"
