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Friday, October 20, 2017 at 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Uris Hall, G08
Central Campus
The exclusion of so called "local languages" in education, as in the case of Haitian Creole ("Kreyòl") in Haiti, is one of the most insidious tools (and a vivid reflex) of power struggles both within and across colonial and post-colonial societies. These struggles (around race, class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) go back to, at least, Europe's "mission civilisatrice." Indeed, language and education have long been two powerful vectors in the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few (i.e., in the transmission of inequity in the context of geo-political domination and elite closure). In this talk, DeGraff considers Haiti (including the MIT-Haiti Initiative http://haiti.mit.edu that he directs) as a case study, and he argues that linguistic equality is a prerequisite to economic and political equity---with the hope that linguistics and education can, indeed, be enlisted in our efforts to make the world better.
Linguistics, Sociology, Romance Studies, Africana Studies and Research Center, Center for the Study of Inequality
Free
Clara Elpi
Michel Degraff
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Public
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