Seminar

Organizers:

Date:

April 8 & 9, 2024

Time:

5:00 PM – 07:00 PM

Fee:

FREE Entrance

Location:

Room Garden 1, University of Aruba

Decolonization as epistemic vitality: Language and discourse in colonial and formerly colonial contexts

Seminar

Description

The workshop will consist of two parts. In the first part, scheduled for Monday, April 8, 2024, Michael Meeuwis will share his views on how the notion of decolonization should be understood most profitably. He will specifically emphasize the decolonization of epistemologies and discourses on language and identity, discuss important recent and current theoretical thinkers, and provide examples from the Global South that offer insights into achieved milestones and future directions. Throughout this discussion, he will highlight how the Global North traditionally recognized as ‘science’ and ‘scientific truths’ is often rooted in patterns of (neo)colonial epistemological violence.

In the second part, which will be held on Tuesday, April 9, Michael Meeuwis will lead a more interactive session. During this session, he will engage in an exchange with participants on how the ideas developed in the first part can be applied to the Antillean context. Specifically, the focus will be on avoiding Western epistemological violence by reconceiving commonly unquestioned concepts such as ‘language’ and ‘identity’, and by rethinking relationships between languages, language groups, and language rights in a more fruitful and locally more relevant manner, aligning with emically relevant epistemological paths.

Facilitator:

Michael Meeuwis (born 1968) studied African history and philology at the University of Ghent, Belgium, and sociolinguistics and pragmatics at the Universities of Antwerp, Belgium, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD at the University of Antwerp in 1997with a sociolinguistic ethnography of the Congolese community in Belgium. Since 2002 he is Professor, and since 2020 Full Professor of the African language Lingala and African sociolinguistics at the University of Ghent. His domains of research include the history and sociolinguistic present of Lingala; the colonial and missionary history of Central Africa, in particular the history of the European production of scientific knowledge on African languages and communities, including the ideological and colonial underpinnings of the knowledge production; and issues of epistemological decolonization in the Global South. His full list of publications can be consulted at: https://biblio.ugent.be/publication?text=meeuwis

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