Workshop Proposal: Master Class Series at the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports a series of interdisciplinary Master Classes to be held as a special nonrepeating component of the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC), to take place at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in early 2013. The theme of the conference is "Sharing Worlds of Knowledge," which references the need of documentary linguists to be familiar with many disciplines outside of linguistics, because language encodes knowledge from all facets of life. The Master Classes will be taught by experts in a range of fields (e.g. ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, kinship systems), and are designed to give participants at the ICLDC the opportunity to learn how to document these topics. This project will bring one plenary speaker to the conference to talk about interdisciplinary field-based documentary work; it will also sponsor six graduate students and/or nonacademic language workers to attend the 3rd ICLDC and Master Class series. The 3rd ICLDC is a much-anticipated conference that builds on the firm foundation established by the previous two conferences in 2009 and 2011. As evidenced by its growing popularity, the biennial conference is considered by many to be the flagship meeting of the field of documentary linguistics. The Master Classes have great potential to enhance the value of language documentation by giving researchers some basic knowledge of fields outside of linguistics. Although this is just one series of classes, it builds on the growing interest in interdisciplinary approaches to language documentation. Data collected with an eye toward the needs and interests of other disciplines will be more useful to a wider academic audience in the future, may foster increased collaboration between documentary linguists and researchers in other fields, and will help preserve for language communities the cultural and procedural knowledge that is often lost when a language disappears.