Feb. 26th PSN: What is Language Justice and Why Does it Matter in Oral History Work?
What is Language Justice and Why Does it Matter in Oral History Work?
Monday, February 26th
6:00-7:15pm Eastern/3-4:15pm Pacific
When we refer to language justice, we mean that everyone has the right to communicate in a language in which they feel most comfortable. But what does this mean when another language has more dominance? And how does this impact the way we make oral histories available to the general public when our narrators speak one language and the public another?
During this Practitioner Support Network, Fanny García will conduct a short interview with Allison Corbett about her emerging work with language justice, and then we’ll turn the tables around and Allison will interview Fanny about her work interviewing Spanish speaking Central American refugees.
Together with PSN participants during a discussion after the brief interviews, Allison and Fanny aim to raise awareness about language justice and learn to recognize some of the questions that may unfold during our oral history encounters with communities that speak various languages.
To register, click here.
Allison Corbett is a Spanish interpreter and oral historian from Williamsburg, VA. She has been living in Harlem for the past 4 years and is a graduate of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. Her work explores what it means to listen in community, and how, to paraphrase both Krista Tippett and one of her brilliant narrators, listening in new ways, to new voices, across languages can lead to new ways of talking and living together. She is currently the organizer of the Language of Justice Oral History Project, a member of the Groundswell committee working on the Mixtape 2.0 project, and an enthusiastic member of the volunteer collective that runs Word Up Bookshop/Librería comunitaria in Washington Heights. Her previous work includes explorations of place, memory, and resistance in post-dictatorship Argentina.
Fanny Julissa García is an oral historian contributing work to Central American Studies. She is currently writing a literary oral history poetry manuscript using the interviews of Central American refugee women jailed in detention centers at the U.S./Mexico border and interspersed with her own migration story. She has written plays about the impact of HIV on Latinas and their families, plus short stories and essays about the Central American diaspora. She works for Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change and she is also a co-founder of Social Exchange Institute, a company that uses multi-media tools to produce work that promotes social justice and equity. She recently graduated from the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University and works at the New-York Historical Society.