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THE CENTRE FOR INDIGENOUS AMERICA STUDIES (CIAS)

will host a special event as part of its participation in the Horizon 2020 COLING project “Minority Languages, Major Opportunities”. The event will be a presentation and conversation with two esteemed colleagues: Vineta Vilcane, from Latvia, and Eleonora Petrulli, from Italy. They are activist members of minoritized linguistic communities in their respective countries and are also members of the COLING project.

Their talk will take place on:

Tuesday May the 21st in the Faculty of Humanities (building Van Eyckhof, room 2/001)

from 14.00 to 17.00.

Our guests will share aspects of their research and activism around the following topics:

Vineta Vilcane:

The Latgalian Culture – Between Tradition and Modernity
She works as a volunteer with the NGO `Students’ Centre of Latgale`. The main goal of the organization is to protect, develop and popularize the Latgalian culture and language in Latvia and Europe. She has a Master’s degree in History, but she works now as a journalist in the Latgalian Culture and News Web Page lakuga.lv. She also creates articles and podcasts about Latgale for other mass media in Latvia.

Eleonora Petrulli:

 The Greek of Calabria – New Eyes for an Ancient Language
She is a Gender Studies and Politics scholar, and a member of Jalò Tu Vua (JTV), a group working on the revitalization of the Greek of Calabria, a 2,000 years old ancient minority language spoken in Italy. JTV teaches Greko to young people using social media and other educational tools. She is one of the founders of the crowdfunding campaign “If You Speak Me I Live”. Her work for the COLING project consists on translating and adapting popular Italian and international songs into Greko, and using the songs to create grammar exercises.