March 2, 2016
“Rethinking Our Condition: Language Minorities in Globalised Modernity”
In his inaugural lecture, on 19/04/16, Professor Conchúr Ó Giollagáin will offer a reappraisal of the minority language condition from the joint perspective of local and global challenges. He examines how modernity has influenced our contemporary world in contradictory ways. On the one hand, it has ushered in enormous socio-cultural change which has manifested itself chiefly as metropolitan diversity. On the other hand, this trajectory of change has also witnessed the emergence of a destabilising dynamic which now threatens the survival of the minority language groups constituting much of the world’s cultural diversity. In the context of contemporary scholarship on the Celtic languages, he questions whether the current academic configuration of Celtic Studies, an exploration of past cultural heritage wedded to utopian cosmopolitan sociolinguistics, offers the most suitable intellectual basis for current challenges. Conchúr sets out the need for a different response to current circumstances and outlines an alternative approach to addressing the challenges of the minority language condition.
Further information here.