"Linguistic Perception and Production in Heritage Language"
Gláucia Silva
Professor of Portuguese, UMass Dartmouth

Heritage language (HL) speakers tend to assess their linguistic competence in binary terms, such as "good" and "bad," and to consider that they speak "slang" or a "broken" language (Byram et al., 2021). However, research on HL production does not confirm these perceptions: Rinke et al. (2024) show that structures that prove most challenging for HL bilinguals are also problematic for monolingual speakers. Furthermore, Torregrossa et al. (2023) indicate that age and formal instruction in the HL may lead to better performance in those challenging structures. Drawing on examples from Portuguese grammar, this talk discusses research on linguistic production in HL, including gender and verb tenses, as well as the perception of learners in relation to instruction and to their own abilities in the HL.

Bio: Gláucia Silva is a Professor in the Department of Portuguese at UMass Dartmouth. She specializes in heritage and foreign language learning, with a focus on Portuguese. Professor Silva has co-authored four Portuguese language textbooks and is the author of Word Order in Brazilian Portuguese (De Gruyter, 2001/2013). She has also published several scholarly articles and book chapters, both in English and in Portuguese. Her graduate advisees have investigated different aspects related to Portuguese language and linguistics, such as the roles of attitude and motivation in learning Portuguese, service encounters in Portuguese in Massachusetts, gay articulations of desire in Rio de Janeiro, the impact of anxiety on learning Portuguese, using songs in the foreign language classroom, task-based language teaching, and mother-child interactions in a bilingual family, among others.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center, the Department of Romance Studies, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program through its Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

"Doing It (Gender) Justice: Reimagining Language Education Through Trans Knowledges"
Kris Aric Knisely
Associate Professor of French and Intercultural Competence, University of Arizona

As people who teach, learn, and research language, the time for us to work toward forms of gender justice that honor and revel in the knowledges and linguistic practices of trans people has long since been here and it grows ever-more overdue in the ongoing wake of globalized and localized forms of anti-trans, anti-education, and other oppressive actions (Knisely, 2023; Knisely & Russell, 2024). If we are to move toward gender justice in language education, we need not only increasingly inclusionary pedagogies, materials, research, and languaging, but also to think beyond the confines of inclusionary discourses alone. When we unscript the cisheteronormativities and cislingualism that are engrained in much of our field, we open ourselves up to new ways of thinking about language-as-social-verb, learning as participation in languaging communities, and education as a site for gender justice, among other key concepts (e.g., trans translanguaging, undoing competence). In this session, we will engage with some of the burgeoning research into trans ways of doing and teaching language in order to reimagine what we do as language scholar-educators, deepen our understanding of what it means to work toward gender justice in our field, and, ultimately to “stand in the tensions of our own humanity, our own languaging and gendering, our own doing and undoing, and look through it for what might be our greater potentiality” (Knisely & Russell, 2024, p. 254). Together, we will ask: What will we do to work toward a world where language enriches the livability of all of our lives?

Bio: Dr. Kris Aric Knisely (Ph.D., French and Educational Studies, Emory University) is Associate Professor of French and Intercultural Competence as well as affiliated faculty in both SLAT and TSRC at the University of Arizona. Knisely’s research focuses on the interplay between the social, relational practices of doing language and doing gender, particularly as they relate to language education and to trans linguacultures. Dr. Knisely’s work has appeared in a variety of venues including Contemporary French Civilization, CFC Intersections, Critical Multilingualism Studies, Foreign Language Annals, The French Review, Gender and Language, and The Modern Language Journal, among others. Knisely is also co-editor (with Eric Russel, UC-Davis) of Redoing linguistic worlds: Unmaking gender binaries, remaking gender pluralities (Multilingual Matters).

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

African Integration Within the Imperatives of Neo-Liberal Globalism, Multipolarity and the African Union Agenda 2063: Can it be Feasible?

AGENDA 2063 is Africa’s blueprint and master plan for transforming Africa into the global powerhouse of the future. It is the continent’s strategic framework that aims to deliver on its goal for inclusive and sustainable development and is a concrete manifestation of the pan-African drive for unity, self-determination, freedom, progress and collective prosperity pursued under Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance.

https://au.int/en/agenda2063/overview

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IAD Spring 2025 Seminar Series:

In the 1960s and 1970s, in response to holdouts of colonial power in southern and Portuguese Africa, self-described African national liberation movements took form. These organizations engaged in military and diplomatic efforts to achieve independence, usually with the goal of seizing state power. These groups were surprisingly successful at mobilizing western support, especially from civil society organizations ranging from moderate to militant left groups. Supporters organized American speaking tours for liberation movement representatives; for example, in 1973, Cape Verdean guerrilla leader Amilcar Cabral spoke at Syracuse University. Supporters also channeled aid money to development projects run by the liberation movements. This talk will explore the methods of connection with African liberation movements, looking at how they worked together to attract western support, and what that support entailed. This paper will argue that this period constituted a unique moment of political, intellectual, and strategic connection between a small set of African political formations and an equally small set of western formations. It therefore sheds new light on the history of aid and development politics.

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This presentation summarizes a new book analyzing the history of food security and agricultural development initiatives in post-colonial Africa and outlining a vision for future prosperity. The basic argument has three parts. First, development organizations and governments will only begin to seriously address food insecurity in Africa when they more fully question the assumption that production agriculture is the solution, an idea that is central to crop science or agronomy. Second, agricultural development must be seen as more than the first step in an industrial development process, but as a sustainable livelihood that has value in and of itself. Third, an agroecological approach, combined with good governance, will allow people to have greater control over their food systems, produce healthy food more sustainably, and enhance access to food by the poorest of the poor. Following a broad conceptual introduction emphasizing political agronomy and political ecology, the author reviews past food security and agricultural development experiences in four countries where he has undertaken research: Mali, Burkina Faso, South Africa and Botswana. He then examines successful efforts in each of the aforementioned countries and outlines future directions that emphasize agroecology, the application of ecological principles to agricultural systems. He concludes with some ideas about institutions at the national, regional and international levels. To build more resilient food systems and a different kind of development, new institutions will need to emerge that support agroecology and vibrant rurality.

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