I’m the Coordinator for the Language Sciences Initiative, writing to you on behalf of our steering committee. We wanted to bring to your attention a talk we have coming up on Tuesday, Nov. 20th at 5:00pm in the C.K. Choi building (Room 120). We’re very pleased to welcome Dr. Luisa Maffi, Co-founder and Director of Terralingua, to give a talk on her work on preserving biocultural diversity. Luisa is in town to give a guest lecture in our university-wide undergraduate course Living Language: Science and Society. Because of the topic of the talk, and because Land & Food Systems is one of the faculties that cross-lists the course (we currently have a couple of LFS students enrolled) we wanted to reach out to you as an LFS faculty member and VPRI research cluster lead, in case you have colleagues and students who might be interested in the talk.
I’ve just sent around a save-the-date with Luisa’s biography (see text below my signature). If you think it’s worth promoting in LFS or within your research cluster, please feel free to send it around, or to point me towards other folks you think might be interested!
Warm regards,
Ella Fund-Reznicek MA
Coordinator
Language Sciences Initiative
The University of British Columbia | Vancouver Campus | Musqueam Traditional Territory
4031 Audain Art Centre 6398 University Boulevard | Vancouver BC | V6T 1Z4 Canada
Phone 604 822 7435
ella.fr@ubc.ca | @UBCLangScis
http://languagesciences.ubc.ca
I’m pleased to announce that we are welcoming Dr. Luisa Maffi, the Co-founder and Director of Terralingua, an international non-governmental organization that works to sustain the biocultural diversity of life, including language diversity, to give a Language Science Talk on Tuesday, November 20th, from 5:00 – 7:00pm in room 120 of the C.K. Choi Building (1855 West Mall). RSVP at https://bit.ly/2yQIlDh!
The title and abstract for the talk are forthcoming, but for now, please read Dr. Maffi’s biography, per the Terralingua website:
Luisa Maffi, Ph.D. (UC Berkeley, 1994), is co-founder and Director of Terralingua, and spearheads Terralingua’s program of work. Trained in linguistics, anthropology, and ethnobiology, Luisa is one of the pioneers of the concept of biocultural diversity. Her interest in the relationships between language, culture, and the environment, and between linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity led her to co-found Terralingua in 1996, and to launch the organization’s activities with the interdisciplinary conference “Endangered Languages, Endangered Knowledge, Endangered Environments” (Berkeley, California, U.S.A., 1996).
She was President of Terralingua from 1996 to 2006, and has been its Director since 2007. Since 2010 she has also been an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences at Royal Roads University, as well as an International Fellow of the Explorers Club. Luisa has conducted extended fieldwork in Somalia (1979-85) and Mexico (Chiapas, 1988-93; Chihuahua, 2000-2008), and has carried out research in China and Japan. She has written on a variety of topics ranging from Somali and Mayan linguistics to color categorization, ethnomedicine, traditional ecological knowledge, language maintenance and revitalization, indigenous peoples’ linguistic and cultural rights, culture and conservation, and the relationships between linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity.
Among her key publications on biocultural diversity are the edited book On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), the coedited volume Ethnobotany and Conservation of Biocultural Diversity (New York Botanical Garden Press, 2004), and the co-authored book Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook (Earthscan, 2010).
Warm regards,
