The Mershon Research Network in Cultural Resilience, a collaboration of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Center for Folklore Studies, the Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Comparative Studies, presents the colloquium "Sustainable Pluralism: Linguistic and Cultural Resilience in Multiethnic Societies," from 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 4, through lunchtime on Saturday, Sept. 6.
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 Mukfwene (U of Chicago) will offer views on the question from the Arctic, Brussels, and subsaharan Africa. 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.
For more information about the program, visit the Center for Folklore Studies website.
To register, please contact Ann Powers, specifying your attendance at the Thursday supper reception, Friday lunch, and/or Saturday lunch. For further information contact co-organizers Dorothy Noyes and Brian Joseph.
