The Yale Center for International and Area Studies and the McDougal Graduate Student Center are cosponsoring a mini conference on the topic "Wars and Words: Political Change and Language Use in Africa" on Thursday, March 26. The conference will be held in Rm. 119 of the McDougal Center, 320 York St. All sessions are free and open to the public.
The conference will address language usage and its relationship to political change in various regions of Africa. Conference participants will explore aspects of political upheaval such as military conquests, population movements and policy changes through their impact on language and culture. According to the organizers of the conference, identifying the effects of political changes on people's everyday lives at the level of language and culture will provide a unique point of departure from more common efforts to analyze political changes in terms of their economic or global impact.
There will be three sessions:
* "Languages of Conquest and Liberation: Changing uses of Language in the Great Lakes Region" (9 a.m.), focusing on how the political and social upheavals of the past five years in Africa's Great Lakes Region -- which includes Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda -- have had an impact on language use and policy.
* "The Languages of Refugees and Exiles: Communication Issues for Uprooted Populations" (1-3 p.m.), offering both historical and contemporary analyses of issues involving mobile populations in East and West Africa.
* "Language after Liberation: Addressing Policy Issues as the Dust Settles" (3:30-5:30 p.m.), exploring perspectives on language policy issues in South Africa, Malawi and Ghana.
The conference is organized by the Language and Culture unit of the "Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies" initiative funded by the Ford Foundation. For more information contact susan.cook@yale.edu.
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