Events

Author of There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.

Date: Thursday, February 12, 2026
Time: 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Location: PAIS 290
Registration: https://tinyurl.com/lingregister

Join us for an engaging discussion covering:

• Atlanta's working homeless
• Inequality in America
• Journalism, narrative & storytelling
• Ethnography
• Language
  
  

Hosted by Emory Program in Linguistics, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

Brian Goldstone is a journalist and the author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and named one of the 10 Best Books of 2025 by The New York Times and The Atlantic. His longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He lives in Atlanta with his family.

The James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, in partnership with the Program in Linguistics, the Mellon Foundation, and Barnes & Noble @ Emory University, is hosting an engaging colloquium presented by Tracey Weldon titled “Now That’s a Word! Middle Class African American English and the Strategic Construction of Identity.”

• Monday, December 1, 2025
• Time: 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
• Location: Emory Bookstore (2nd floor)
• Registration: https://form.jotform.com/jwjijwji/colloquium-series-rsvp

Dr. Karl Swinehart, Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Louisville, will give a talk on November 7th at 4:30pm in PAIS 290 on "A Difficult Language:  Aymara Media, Linguistic Labor, and Urban Indigeneity in Bolivia."

Aymara is a difficult language in more ways than one. The language’s difficulty is sometimes embraced by Aymaras themselves. Its cultivation affords forms of expertise and authority for language professionals and diverse Aymara cultural interventions foreground its difference from Spanish and other European languages. Bolivian Aymaras’ insistence on keeping the language in the public sphere poses difficulties to a colonial status-quo and to those who would rather not accommodate, much less learn, this or any other Indigenous language. Drawing on analyses of Bolivian media and research among Bolivian Aymara-language educators and media professionals, this talk examines these dynamics and their impact, both on the Aymara language itself and on the unequal terrain of Bolivia’s plurinational, multilingual society.