The 2023 ICLDC: Building infrastructure for achieving justice in Language Documentation & Conservation

The International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) has become a central meeting for research on language documentation and conservation, which brings together leading researchers, students, and community members around the important science of language documentation. The 2023 ICLDC offers its highly-diverse audience opportunities for formal and informal science education and training that includes new methodologies and best practices in cutting-edge language documentation and that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Participants include undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty from linguistics, anthropology, biology, computer science, and other academic disciplines. ICLDC has also included a large number of citizen scientists from historically underrepresented groups in the sciences, such as Native Americans, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, offering opportunities for broadening participation in the language sciences as one of the broader impacts of this conference.

In addition to its other crucial scientific benefits, research in language documentation and conservation has the potential to increase awareness of and interest in a greater emphasis on justice in research in the language sciences. Justice goals have always been central to community-based and community-led language work, even if they have not always been primary among goals for academic linguistics.

By bringing together stakeholders from multiple areas in the language sciences, the special theme of the 2023 ICLDC aims to normalize the idea that linguists have social responsibilities that extend beyond the strictly linguistic. The International Decade of Indigenous Languages presents an opportune time for the field of language documentation and conservation to develop a disciplinary framework that establishes justice as both the starting point and end goals of this work.

The field of linguistics has not yet held an international conversation on achieving justice within language documentation and conservation, what role language workers play in achieving justice in intersecting realms, and how justice can critically inform, and reform, best practices in language documentation and conservation work. The 2023 ICLDC is a venue for this critical and timely conversation, providing a key opportunity for practitioners to build relationships and develop the social infrastructure necessary for working toward a justice-driven model of language work.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.