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Bonnie McElhinney & Sinfree Makoni
University of Toronto, Pennsylvania State University
Bonnie McElhinny grew up at the confluence of Connoquenessing and Glade Run Creeks in Western Pennsylvania, on Lenape and Seneca Territory. She currently lives in Toronto, on and with niigaani-gichigami, or chi’nibiish, also known as Lake Ontario. She is Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies. Her books include Words, Worlds and Material Girls, Filipinos in Canada (edited with Roland Coloma, Ethel Tungohan, J.P.Catungal and Lisa Davidson) and Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History (with Monica Heller). She directs Water Allies (waterallies.com) and is a member of the Water Pathways Research cluster at Univ. of Toronto Scarborough. In 2024-5, she will be a Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowship in the Humanities at the Jackman Humanities Institute, where she will work on her book manuscript, The River Runs a Long Way Straight Here.
Talk Information:
Once Upon a River: A Conversation About Water, Water Epistemologies, and Language
April 26, 2024 | 9:00 AM
What are the kinds of contributions that sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and applied linguistics can make to ongoing conversations about, and interventions in, climate and environmental crises? In particular, what does listening to water, and watery ways of knowing, ask us to rethink about politics, governance, pedagogy, and methodology? In this session Dr. McElhinny and Dr. Makoni each share insights from recent publications on language and water, and then interview each other on where the water is taking us.
Dr. McElhinny’s chapter: “ Water Teaching, While the World Burns” will appear in Critical Sociolinguistics: Dialogues, Dissonances, Developments edited by Alfonso Del Percio and Mi-Cha Flubacher.
Dr. Makoni’s chapter, written with Dr. Alistair Pennycook: “Waterscape epistemologies, waves of knowing and translanguaging as wet ontology” will appear in the Handbook of Translanguaging.