Race at the Center of the Humanities

As part of the Mellon Foundation-funded Race at the Center of the Humanities initiative, CSREA hosts an annual convening of Brown faculty, graduate students, scholars, and practitioners for mini-conferences and workshops that center race in humanistic inquiry. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2022 Race at the Center of the Humanities Event

Liberatory Letters: Language as Resistance

December 1, 2022

4:00 - 6:00PM

Pembroke Hall and on Zoom

Register to Attend.

 

This roundtable conversation explores the confluence of race, ethnicity, linguistics, and culture in order to better understand the acts of expression and resistance that characterize the practice and preservation of language. The featured panelists bring deep knowledge of the histories and contemporary teachings of Haitian Creole, Asian-American and Latinx raciolinguistics, the revitalization of indigenous languages, and Black ASL.

 

Event Panelists

Jacques Pierre

Lecturing Fellow of Romance Studies, Duke University

Jacques Pierre was born in Cap-Haitien on the northern coast of Haiti. He has been teaching Haitian Creole since 2010 at Duke University where his classes include students from the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University by teleconference. Before his arrival at Duke, Jacques taught at Florida International University and at in the Creole Institute at Indiana University. Jacques is an outspoken advocate for the use of Kreyòl at all levels in Haiti as a means of helping create a more inclusive society.

 

Adrienne Lo

Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Waterloo

Adrienne Lo (B.A. Yale, M.A., Ph.D UCLA) is a linguistic anthropologist. She is the co-editor of Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America (Oxford, 2009) and South Korea’s Education Exodus: The Life and Times of Study Abroad. (Center for Korean Studies, University of Washington, 2014). Her current research examines ideologies of multilingualism in the South Korean popular media and the history of the racialization of Asian American linguistic competencies.

 

X̱'unei Lance Twitchell

Professor of Alaska Native Languages, University of Alaska Southeast

Lance X̱ʼunei Twitchell is an American scholar, poet, and language revitalization advocate. He works as an associate professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast.

 

Jonathan Rosa

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University

Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He also currently serves as Director of Stanford’s Program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and President of the Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association. Dr. Rosa is author of the award-winning book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of the volume, Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). Dr. Rosa’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships awarded by organizations including the National Science Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and Ford Foundation. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The Nation, NPR, The New York Times, and Univision. Dr. Rosa obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and his B.A. in Linguistics and Educational Studies from Swarthmore College.
 

 

Joseph Hill

Associate Professor, Department of ASL and Interpreting Education, Associate Director of the Center on Culture and Language, and Assistant Dean for Faculty Recruitment and Retention, Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institutes for the Deaf

Dr. Joseph C. Hill is an Associate Professor in the Department of ASL and Interpreting Education, Associate Director of the Center on Culture and Language, and Assistant Dean for Faculty Recruitment and Retention at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institutes for the Deaf. His research interests are the socio-historical and -linguistic aspects of Black American Sign Language and the American Deaf community’s attitudes and ideologies about existing signing varieties. His contributions include The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (2011) which he co-authored with Carolyn McCaskill, Ceil Lucas, and Robert Bayley and Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community (2012).

 

Moderated by Paja Faudree

Paja Faudree is a linguistic anthropologist whose research interests include language and politics, indigenous literary and social movements, the interface between music and language, the ethnohistory of New World colonization, and the global marketing of indigenous rights discourses, indigenous knowledge, and plants. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and came to Brown following a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She is affiliated with Brown's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Program in Science and Technology Studies, and Development Studies. Professor Faudree teaches courses on language and society, social movements in Latin America, language and politics, language and music, and the anthropology of drugs. She is also a published poet and playwright, and holds an MFA from Brown's literary arts program.