Mary Louise Pratt's keynote address : Language ecology, language politics : towards a geolinguistic imagination = Ecología del lenguaje, política del lenguaje : hacia una imaginación geolingüística.

Video documentation of Mary Louise Pratt's keynote address, 'Language Ecology, Language Politics: Towards a Geolinguistic Imagination, ' presented as a part of the 7th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, held in August of 2009 in Bogotá, Colombia, under the title 'Staging Citizenship: Cultural Rights in the Americas.' This 10-day event brought together activism, scholarship, and art around the themes of legacies, memories, struggles, and frontiers of citizenship. With an introduction by Esther Gabara, Mary Louise Pratt's keynote asks: What will the world look like linguistically a hundred years from now? This lecture discusses some of the processes of linguistic change, including language death, language migration, and the formation of lingua francas and interlanguages. It asks the idea of rights in this context and considers what an ecological approach to language might involve. Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where she teaches Latin American literature and cultural theory. She has published extensively on the subjects of Latin American women's writing; travel literature and imperialism; language and militarization; and modernity and neoliberalism. She has been affiliated with the Hemispheric Institute since 2002. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics