2019-2020


Histoires d’Oka, l’événement : territoire, film et littérature. Isabelle St-Amand (Queen’s University) @ YH A100 (Glendon, Centre d’Excellence)

Feb 10 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm

Isabelle St-Amand (Université Queen’s)

le lundi 10 février, de 15 h 00 à 16 h 30 

Dans la salle YH-A100

 

Conference will be given in French, with quotations/interactions in English.

Résumé de la présentation :

À l’été 1990, la crise d’Oka, ou résistance de Kanehsatà:ke, a exposé une rupture dans les relations entre colonies de peuplement et peuples autochtones dans l’ensemble canadien. Dans la foulée de l’échec de l’Accord du lac Meech, le conflit armé a rendu visible une présence autochtone contemporaine que la société canadienne avait imaginée au bord de la disparition, ce qui a ébranlé le statu quo. Le siège de 78 jours a simultanément réactivé une longue histoire de résistance des peuples autochtones aux politiques coloniales visant l’assimilation des peuples et l’appropriation des territoires autochtones. Le conflit territorial au fondement de cet événement hautement médiatisé soulève des questions politiques et judiciaires évidentes, mais il s’inscrit aussi dans un contexte plus large qui nous incite à examiner pleinement les façons dont les histoires sont jouées, appelées, mises en scène, racontées, imaginées et interprétées. Cette conférence examinera donc le siège en acte, sa mise dans les films documentaires et les récits littéraires, autochtones et non-autochtones, au Canada et au Québec, ainsi que le profond conflit colonial qui les animent. Les questions de fond que soulève cette étude interdisciplinaire et multiperspective de l’été 1990 pourront être mises en dialogue avec différents aspects des relations entre peuples autochtones et colonies de peuplement au Canada, d’hier à aujourd’hui.

Notice biographique

Isabelle St-Amand est professeure agrégée et Queen’s National Scholar en littérature autochtone francophone au Département d’études françaises et au Département de langues, littératures et cultures de l’Université Queen’s. Ses recherches portent sur les approches critiques en littérature autochtone au Canada et au Québec, les méthodologies de recherche collaborative en cinéma autochtone dans les Amériques, les théories des évènements et les rapports entre peuples autochtones et colonies de peuplement. Elle a récemment a publié le livre Stories of Oka. Land, Film, and Literature (2018, version traduite et mise à jour de la version française publiée en 2015), codirigé l’anthologie Nous sommes des histoires. Réflexions sur la littérature autochtone (2018) et codirigé avec Warren Cariou un dossier bilingue de la Revue canadienne de littérature comparée sur l’éthique environnementale et l’activité militante dans la littérature et le cinéma autochtones (2017). Son projet de recherche actuel interroge les méthodologie de recherche en littératures et en cinémas autochtones ainsi que les histoires autochtones au fil de paysages en transformation (Queen’s Research Leaders Fund, 2019-2020; CRSH, subvention institutionnelle, 2019-2020).


Lyse Hébert: Une histoire traduite et retraduite

When:

February 12, 2020 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Where:

Canadian Language Museum (Glendon)

“La conférence portera sur ma traduction du poème « History Lesson » de l’auteure autochone Jeanette Armstrong et, plus précisément, sur cet exercice (re)(dé)colonisateur qui consistait à ré-énoncer dans deux autres langues coloniales — le français et l’espagnol – un discours résolument décolonisateur. En m’appuyant principalement sur les écrits de Walter Mignolo et de Jeannette Armstrong, je m’attarderai sur deux catégories de questions. D’abord celles que je me suis posées en amont : Le processus de traduction mettrait-t-il en lumière l’ancrage géo-historique et linguistique de la colonialité ? Si oui, quelles stratégies adopter pour le conserver ? Et ensuite celle qui a surgi pendant le processus de traduction et qui m’anime encore aujourd’hui : Ces traductions viennent-elles confirmer ou infirmer deux mythes contre lesquels Armstrong et Mignolo s’insurgent, soit la transparence des langues et l’universalité épistémologique ?”

Lyse Hébert


Jennifer Hartog: Fragments de savoir(s) – une analyse de discours (Brown Bag Lunch series)

When:

February 26, 2020 @ 12:00 am – 1:00 am

Where:

Canadian Language Museum (Glendon)

Presentation will be in French.
Nous nous pencherons sur la transcription d’une communication entre médecins et patients de langues et de cultures différentes et nécessitant l’intervention d’une interprète (non-professionnelle). Nous analyserons les fragments de savoir(s) qui s’en détachent pour tenter d’expliquer les processus de compréhension ou de non-compréhension. Nous serons ainsi amenée à aborder les questions suivantes:

  • qu’est-ce qu’un fragment de savoir?
  • que devient ce fragment dans un  discours plurilingue?
  • que dire alors de la tension entre fragment et idée d’un tout?

Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings (MIT Press) Dr. Gabriel Levine-Book Launch

With our Special Guest:

Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Halfbreed), interdisciplinary artist, singer, songwriter

(rsvp research@glendon.yorku.ca before noon on May 21)

May 21 @ 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm

The Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact at Glendon  is pleased to invite you to a Book Launch.


2018-2019


May 8, 2019

ISABELLE ZAUGG

Global Language Justice in the Digital Sphere:  The Ethiopic Case

We currently face unprecedented rates of extinction of minority and indigenous languages and scripts, and digital technologies appear to be contributing to their decline.  Scholars predict 50-90% of languages will become extinct this century, while only 5% of languages will attain digital vitality.  This presentation investigates what can be done to close this digital divide through an instrumental case study of Unicode inclusion and the development of supports for the Ethiopic script and its languages, including the national language of Ethiopia.  Mixed methods include observation of digital governance institutions, archival research, a content analysis of script and language choices on social media, and interviews with Ethiopic digital pioneers.  This presentation concludes with recommendations to strengthen supports for digitally-disadvantaged languages, from inclusion in the Unicode Standard, to grassroots coding within and on behalf of digitally-disadvantaged language communities, to advancing the idea that supporting linguistic diversity is Silicon Valley’s corporate social responsibility. 


April 24th, 2019

PROFESSOR JULIE MCDONOUGH- DOLMAYA 

TRANSLATION IN CANADIAN MUNICIPALITIES: REFLECTIONS ON THE TORONTO.CA WEBSITE

According to the 2016 Canadian census, the City of Toronto has a population of 2.73 million. While the vast majority of the city’s residents speaks one of the country’s two official languages, 43.8% of Torontonians have a non-official language as a mother tongue, and 26% speak a language other than English at home. This means that many of the city’s residents likely prefer to access municipal information in a langauge other than English. But, if the city decides to translate certain documents into non-official languages, which ones should be targeted: those with the greatest number of speakers, those in danger of disappearing (such as indigenous languages), those that have the greatest number of professional translators, etc. (cf. Patten 2001, Pool 1991)?

In this presentation, I will discuss the City of Toronto’s Multilingual Information Provisions Policy, which came into effect on August 2, 2017, and the Toronto.ca website, which provides information on various municipal policies and services in multiple languages. My research is inspired by three studies: one by Lyse Hébert (2017), which studied Toronto’s previous language policy, one by Jiménez-Crespo (2012), which discussed the degree of localization of US non-profit websites, and another by Carroll (2010), which examined translation in the municipal websites of Japan. I will focus particularly on the following questions: which pages and documents are available in a language other than English? Which language communities are targeted by these translations and how do these compare to the number of Toronto residents who speak these languages at home? And finally, how do the languages and texts chosen for translation reflect the city’s translation policy? When concluding, I will briefly discuss questions of linguistic justice and consider how the City of Toronto’s website could be made more linguistically accessible without greatly increasing the costs of language services.


April 17th, 2019

York Hall- B209 – CRLCC meeting room 

 ELENA BASILE 

In the “pore (pour) of languages”: displacements and tears of self-translation in the work of Nathanaël  

This presentation explores questions of self-translation as they accrue around the dispersal of selves and languages in the work of Nathanaël, a bilingual (French and English) auteure whose work defies genre and gender expectations, obstinately performing a poetics of radical refusal of identity and its discursive imbrications in hegemonic politics of naming and belonging. Specifically, I will discuss some issues that are emerging from a bilingual anthology of the auteure’s work, which I am presently putting together for a US literary publisher, Nightboat Editions. Hailing from diasporic Sephardic ancestry dispersed between Morocco, France and Canada, and living by choice in a space of gender dissonance, Nathanaël’s work pointedly explores questions of erasure and displacement attendant to the movement of self-translation as it gives rise to divergent processes of “equivocation” – of the name, of the body and of writing itself. In my presentation I plan to loosen some conceptual threads tightly wrapped around the name, the body and writing, in an attempt to render visible the existential aporias and epistemological indeterminacies that take hold when one attends carefully to the reasoned madness of translation and its ever shifting boundaries.


APRIL 10TH, 2019

PROFESSOR IAN MARTIN

Towards an Observatory of Indigenous Languages Policy in the Americas. ( PPT available here: Toward an Indigenous Language Policy Index Brown Bag April 10, 2019

2019 has been designated by the United Nations as the Year of Indigenous Languages, and this talk is part of Glendon’s effort to mark this  significant year. Inspired by such ‘observatories’ as the Queen’s Global Democracy Observatory, the proposed Observatory of Indigenous LP would be a scholarly research project  that monitors the evolution of Indigenous LP in all the countries of the Americas. The Observatory would provide information about Indigenous language policies in a standardized format that would aid comparative research and contribute to the creation and development of Canada’s and other countries’ legislation on Indigenous LP.  In its present state of ‘towardness’, the Index has been designed with the purpose of evaluating the current Canadian federal government promised response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action #13, #14 and #15, by applying the principles expressed in the TRC report to evaluate Indigenous language policies at the national/federal level in selected countries of the Americas. Also, in search of an index, we have drawn upon the Canadian experience with the protection of Official Language Communities in minority contexts, and sub-national legislation such as Nunavut’s Inuit Language Protection Act (2008), and existing provincial legislation (such as in B.C.) on Indigenous languages. An example of LP at the level of Indigenous Nation – the Kahnawa:ke Language Law – is included as well as a glance at two non-American Indigenous legislative measures: the Sámi Language Act and the M version of this talk has been delivered at the IAAL conference in Rio de Janeiro (August 2017), the FLACSO International Studies Conference in Quito (August, 2018), the Giidwewinanan/No Lang Indigenous LP Conference, Thunder Bay (May, 2017). 

It’s appropriate that this talk be presented under the auspices of the CRLCC, since the contact between Euro-origin culture and language(s) and Indigenous culture and language(s) of the Americas could arguably be said to have been the ‘Big Bang’ of language and culture contact/conflict in the history of the world. It is certainly the only example of language/culture contact which has been claimed to have given rise to a such changes in planetary ecology as to warrant defining the contact as producing a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. 

_______________________________________________________________________

March 13, 2019

ALTAF QADEER (PH.D.)

WHEN LANGUAGES TRAVEL  TO THE HEARTS OF THE WORLD FOR CENTURIES.

CONCISE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY ​​AND THE CHANGING TRENDS OF MULTILINGUALISM

(Some Urdu/Hindi lexemes in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary  )

Where:  Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Abstract

The expanding universe of languages with multilingual dimensions has some intriguing interactions. Languages go through many changes in the frames of cognitive-net, social-net, linguistic-net, internet, i.e., multiple-nets.

Lexemes fly with multidisciplinary wings in various multilingual spaces.

A brief study of Urdu/Hindi lexemes in various editions of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COED) provides some data for diachronic and synchronic analyses. The changing descriptions of some words in the COED indicate the influences of various social and historical changes. Multilingualism is increasing in many forms and frames. Multicultural cities have language speakers of various languages and their communication back-home can be a powerful resource for multitudinous purposes. Languages have fascinating influences at local, national and international forums. There is a possibility to think about the ways in which we can play an important role to empower social, cultural, educational, linguistic, economic, scientific and cultural growth through the multilingual power of Canada. The deep understanding of these factors can also give Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact (CRLCC) some possible pathways to explore further.


March 21, 2019

Where:  Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Visual literacy: a social semiotic approach to analyzing magazine covers in a foreign culture

Isis Pordeus

Federal University of Minas Gerais

“Within a simple cover of a newspaper [or magazine], there is a professional work in the selection of small and apparently insignificant details, which, nevertheless, are decisive in the communicative action.” (CF – a student in the research project)

“Literacies are legion.” (Lemke, 2004)

Abstract

We live in a world populated with images: illustrated magazines, newspapers, comic books, videos and movies. In my experience as a teacher of foreign languages – English and Portuguese – I have always tried to guide my students into exploring what images can communicate. Nothing is accidental in an image used in advertisements, newspapers, magazine covers or text books’ illustrations. Becoming media critical in a foreign culture (and in one’s own culture) is essential to uncover meanings not ‘directly’ accessible to the reader as in a text, for example. Social semiotics (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996) allied to insights on visual communication (Jewitt & Oyama, 2001) offer invaluable support in helping learners to read images critically. This presentation reports on an activity conducted with learners of Portuguese as an Additional Language. The learners were presented to theory on Social Semiotic Analysis of Visual Communication and some examples before receiving samples from magazine covers to analyze. The results indicate that the students were able to derive powerful readings from the combination of images and text, going beyond initial expectations.

Keywords: Media Critical; Portuguese as an Additional Language; Social Semiotics; Visual Communication.


March 27th, 2019

Where:  Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

EVA C. KARPINSKI 

Associate Professor – School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies 

LA & PS

Unsettling Settler Biopower through Multilingual Eco-Ethnography and Indigenous Oral Histories”

My presentation focuses on two published oral history narratives collected among Indigenous communities in the North: Lorelei Anne Lambert Colomeda’s Through the Looking Glass: Breast Cancer Stories Told by Northern Native Women (1996) and Ila Bussidor and Üstun Bilgen-Reinart’s Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene (2000). In both cases we are dealing with hybrid translations of traumatic experiences; both texts preserve traces of multilingualism and combine personal, ecological, anthropological, and biopolitical discourses with the use of innovative epistemologies and methodologies rooted in Indigenous traditions. I want to explore the productive potentialities of multilingualism in these authors’ engagements with Indigenous communities, and examine in particular how they work together with their respondents towards challenging and unsettling the colonial matrix.


February 14, 2019

Professor Daniel Ferraz 

University of São Paolo- Brazil

Where:  Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Brazilian education “under attack”: On the urgency of critical literacies

This talk problematizes contemporary language education in Brazil in the face of the recent neoliberal and neoconservative political context. In doing so, we ask: Where do we place critique within the curriculum in neoconservative times? What is left to teachers in their commitment to educate critical citizens? Do critical literacies suffice? To respond to these questions, a set of contemporary snapshots are brought to the fore, unveiling all the anguish brought up by the complex politics of “us” versus “them”. Some understandings of Critical Literacies (CLs) within the field are then reviewed, preparing the terrain for the reading of ourselves in relation to our theories and practices. To conclude, I outline a few orientations which seek to relocate CLs beyond the dichotomic view of the micro versus macro as a formative strategy in dealing with our frustrations in such complex times.


February 13, 2019

PROFESSOR IAN MARTIN

Where:  Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Towards an Observatory of Indigenous Languages Policy in the Americas.

2019 has been designated by the United Nations as the Year of Indigenous Languages, and this talk is part of Glendon’s effort to mark this  significant year. Inspired by such ‘observatories’ as the Queen’s Global Democracy Observatory, the proposed Observatory of Indigenous LP would be a scholarly research project  that monitors the evolution of Indigenous LP in all the countries of the Americas. The Observatory would provide information about Indigenous language policies in a standardized format that would aid comparative research and contribute to the creation and development of Canada’s and other countries’ legislation on Indigenous LP.  In its present state of ‘towardness’, the Index has been designed with the purpose of evaluating the current Canadian federal government promised response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action #13, #14 and #15, by applying the principles expressed in the TRC report to evaluate Indigenous language policies at the national/federal level in selected countries of the Americas. Also, in search of an index, we have drawn upon the Canadian experience with the protection of Official Language Communities in minority contexts, and sub-national legislation such as Nunavut’s Inuit Language Protection Act (2008), and existing provincial legislation (such as in B.C.) on Indigenous languages. An example of LP at the level of Indigenous Nation – the Kahnawa:ke Language Law – is included as well as a glance at two non-American Indigenous legislative measures: the Sámi Language Act and the M version of this talk has been delivered at the IAAL conference in Rio de Janeiro (August 2017), the FLACSO International Studies Conference in Quito (August, 2018), the Giidwewinanan/No Lang Indigenous LP Conference, Thunder Bay (May, 2017). 

It’s appropriate that this talk be presented under the auspices of the CRLCC, since the contact between Euro-origin culture and language(s) and Indigenous culture and language(s) of the Americas could arguably be said to have been the ‘Big Bang’ of language and culture contact/conflict in the history of the world. It is certainly the only example of language/culture contact which has been claimed to have given rise to a such changes in planetary ecology as to warrant defining the contact as producing a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. 


January 23, 2019

Professor Elaine Gold 

Canadian Language Museum and Language outreach

Research and Outreach: Planning Exhibits for the Canadian Language Museum by Elaine Gold

One of the goals of the CLM is to “introduce the public to the scientific study of language and to current language research in Canada”.  In this talk I will describe different ways in which the CLM has attempted to fulfill this part of its mandate over the past eight years.  We have put a lot of thought into how to make linguistic concepts accessible to those who might have little or no background in the field. I will illustrate the talk with examples from our exhibit panels currently on display in the gallery.  I would then like to open the discussion to the group: how could the CLM help you inform a wider public about your research?


January 9, 2019

Karla De Souza Araujo

Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Pernambuco (Brasil)

“Advisor-Advisee Relationships in MA Studies: The Hermeneutics of Facticity and Encounters of Being”

In the context of MA studies, the relationship established between the advisor and the advisee may have several configurations, which motivates the question: how can scholarly advising and mentorship promote spaces for building knowledge? This presentation considers the results of a PhD thesis in Linguistics, developed at a Brazilian University, based on a case study of MA students and their advisors. The study is rooted in two theoretical traditions: on the one hand, Bakhtin’s philosophy of language (1997, 2002) and on the other, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity (2003, 2012), which have become intertwined, allowing us to observe how subjects discursively construct the narrative of their relationship. We also refer to ergology (SCHWARTZ, 1998 and FAÏTA, 2002), through which we work with and through the notion of academic orientation as an activity. We conclude advising, as an activity, is a space for the possibility of change, and its vocation is to foster encounters and openings of being.

December 12, 2018 


PROFESSOR AURELIA KLIMKIEWICZ

LA VOIX EN TRADUCTION ET LE PRINCIPE POST/DIALOGIQUE

La voix introduit une dynamique dialogique dans le processus de traduction et de ce fait rend visible/audible la participation du sujet traduisant dans la co/production du sens étant donné que « Le sens se répartit entre diverses voix » (Bakhtin 84 : 323). Mais capter la voix du sujet traduisant va au-delà d’une simple refonte du statut ontologique de la traduction (invisible-visible, passif-actif) : cela permet de mettre en scène la relation entre le propre et l’étranger et du même coup d’analyser les modalités d’articulation entre ces deux instances telles qu’elles se manifestent dans le processus de traduction. Dans cet exposé, la réflexion sera menée à partir des approches narratologique (objectivité) et herméneutique (subjectivité) et débouchera sur les problèmes de traduction/réception dans le cyberespace. Différents exemples de traduction et retraduction seront discutés pour illustrer le propos


November 28, 2018

Bruce Connell

Reconstructing Tone: Mambila, Mambiloid, Bantoid and Beyond

 

Connell’s scholarship is motivated by an interest in historical linguistics and phonetics. In this work, Connell systematically studies the Mambiloid language, used in a region that spans the Nigeria-Camerooon border, north of the Cameroon Grassfield. Mambiloid is a Bantoid group comprising some 35 different lects or language varieties; it is related to Bantu languages that cover most of the southern half of Africa. In the literature, Mambiloid languages are under-described — only extended word lists exist for the great majority of Mambiloid lects. All are tone languages, with complex tone inventories. Specifically, Mambiloid languages have either three or four lexical tone registers, which combine to create a number of contours. Through the systematic study of these contours across different lects, Connell seeks to reconstruct the lexical tone in proto-Mambiloid. The empirical materials are drawn from more than 800 items for most Mambila lects, from Connel’s own field work, as well as additional data from other researchers. The evidence suggests support for a proto-Mambiloid language that now exists in a wide variety of lects.