Jan 24
Guest Lecture: Embodied Voices, Voices Embodied: The Raciolinguistics of Multilingualism by Dr. Lindsay Preseau
Embodied Voices, Voices Embodied: The Raciolinguistics of Multilingualism
Dr. Lindsay Preseau
Guest Lecture (St. Olaf, Viking Theater)
Have you ever wondered why French textbooks feature pictures of the Eiffel tower, baguettes, and macarons when most daily speakers of French live in Africa? Or why universities promote multilingualism as an asset while “English Only” movements which seek to limit the use of Spanish in the US continue to flourish? In exploring such contradictions, this talk introduces the field of raciolinguistics, drawing on examples from English, French, German, and Spanish. I will show how, on one hand, language is used as a proxy for racial discrimination, while on the other, it is used to construct racial categories themselves. Finally, case studies in language activism will demonstrate how language education and policy can be a site of linguistic reclamation, empowerment, and liberation.
Lindsay Preseau is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Iowa State University. She received her Ph.D. in German with a specialization in Germanic Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of the book Kiezenglish: Multiethnic German and the Global English Debate (2020)
from German Department