Frances Kvietok Duenas, MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at MultiLing Center, University of Oslo, will give an open guest lecture on Indigenous language reclamation
Title of the talk
“Dentro de la universidad es donde surge un cambio en mi” (In university a change arises in me): university students’ lived experiences of Quechua and Aymara language reclamation
Abstract
How do female university students experience and shape processes of Indigenous language reclamation? In this talk, I will explore this question drawing on findings from a participatory qualitative research project conducted with university students of an intercultural bilingual education (IBE) teacher education program in Perú.
In recent years, IBE teacher education programs in Perú have increased in response to Indigenous movements’ demands for linguistic and culturally pertinent schooling and the shortage of bilingual educators in the national education system. The growing recognition of the contemporary diversity of bilingual learner profiles and trajectories (Andrade, 2019; Zavala and Brañez, 2017), calls our attention to understand individual experiences of becoming Indigenous language speakers in this educational context.
In this talk, I present a study conducted in 2022 with Angelica Choque, Victoria Charca, Guisell Quispe and Grendy Nina, former and current IBE student teachers, and myself, a former IBE teacher educator. Across three in-site and online research workshops, we used and developed biographical methods to explore, together with 20 participants, their lived experiences (Busch, 2016) of Indigenous language reclamation. Engaging with Indigenous language reclamation (Leonard, 2012), new speaker (Rasmus and Lane, 2021) and Indigenous and decolonial scholarship (Cabnal, 2010; Menezes de Souza, 2019), I will discuss how becoming a speaker of Quechua and Aymara is an embodied process through which individuals identify and speak back to some of the impacts of coloniality in their lives and in their communities. I will also explore potential affordances that visual and material biographical methods, guided by participatory and Indigenizing (Chilisa, 2012) stances, can have for better understanding and supporting individual and collective processes of language reclamation.
Bio
Frances Kvietok Dueñas (PhD, Educational Linguistics) researches, teaches and consults on bilingual education, Indigenous language revitalization and qualitative research methodologies. Her recent publications include a co-edited special issue on Quechua language planning and policy for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and chapter contributions on raciolinguistic ideologies (The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism) and youth in language endangerment and reclamation processes (The Routledge Handbook on Language & Youth Culture). She is currently MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at MultiLing Center, University of Oslo.