A bit more...
Did you know that "language" is "action" in and with our bodies, minds, and each other?
To begin let's change the name we use and add the -ing at its end - like you do with verbs in English (or add it in any other way you mark this meaningful category):
Languaging
How do you language?
This project is about noticing that our definitions of language/ing can grow... Think about the way you language about your day...
How do use emojis, gifs, and pictures?
In what ways do you use your body to tell stories or understand the world about you with your loved ones or people who cross your path?
How are your language varieties helping you read that recipe that hides folded in a cook book or remind you as you dance along a lullaby with your little one?
How do you say your name and who owns the meaning of it?
How do you feel when you are understood and misunderstood?
Aha! this project is about this very idea...
YOUR languaging and
our languaging, in the collective.
This project is also about dismantling any ideas or beliefs about what we believe is "good" or "proficient" or "fluent" languaging.
What Are Our Aims?
Through exhibits submitted and curated by members of the NYU community, we hope to:
Challenge ideas that any language and languaging can be more “educated,” “normal,” “competent,” “fluent,” or “good” than another. That means that we will invite exhibits that question “standard language,” “proficient bilingualism,” “assimilation,” and the need to “mask or code-switch” to belong.
Affirm and celebrate the diversity of communicative expression in communities, which means we will seek art-pieces that center the ways in which languaging is reimagined within households, neighborhoods, generations, through disabled/nondisabled ways of being.
Show creative ways of meaning-making as languaging to expand the construction of language use as only existing in the "spoken and written" continuum
Invite visitors to contribute their visions for representing liberated languaging in their fields and their lives.
