Reclaiming Knowledge – Indigenous and Minority Languages in Communities, Education, Sciences, and the Arts

This COLING summer school will be centered on knowledge and the full cultural meaning of science. Over five sessions, it will focus on the interrelated themes of nurturing language, sharing innovative methods for education, alternative epistemologies, and the linkages between the sciences and the arts. Its central thread of reclaiming knowledge will also deal with histories of displacement, trauma, and community responses. It will emphasize the results of the COLING project over its five-year development to present methodologies of collaboration and co-investigation, recognition of traditional knowledge, and research and ethics. Specific topics will include the collaborative research in progress among Indigenous communities in the Americas and minority communities in Europe. Participants will include scholars and advanced students from the COLING institutions who will be completing their secondments as well as selected scholars and representatives of Indigenous nations in North Carolina or from other world regions via remote media. The workshop will be designed as a hybrid meeting with both in-person and remote access, allowing ample time for group discussion.

This event is organized in collaboration with the Americas Research Network (ARENET), the Institute for the Study of the Americas of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Warsaw´s Center for Research and Practice in Cultural Continuity at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Smithsonian Institution. This summer school is a planned event for the project COLING: “Minority Languages, Major Opportunities. Collaborative Research, Community Engagement and Innovative Educational Tools,” funded by Horizon 2020 MSCA RISE program (778384). COLING is an international, multi-institutional project that creates spaces for academics, experts, language and speech community members, and activists from various communities in the world to meet, discuss, and share their work and knowledge on language revitalization programs in varied contexts and through different disciplinary perspectives.