Good afternoon.
Hi, Prof. Daily, How are you?
Good. How are you doing Dr. Fountain?
Or is it okay if I call you Amy for this?
You are welcome to call me Amy.
Our linguistics community is,
we just have this practice
where we're extremely first namey with each other.
So I'm just most used to be addressing that way,
to being addressed that way.
Excellent. All right, I like calling you Amy.
And you are welcome to call me Diana or Prof. Daily,
which is the students call me.
And so, can you tell me a little bit
about what you created, I guess, chapter about
for "Humans R Social Media?"
Sure.
So I am a linguist and we linguists
are big fans of language.
And that means that some of us
are also big fans of languages.
So one of the things that I'm really, really interested in
is the linguistic diversity around us,
particularly that we find in indigenous languages
here in Arizona, but also elsewhere.
So over the years, I've gotten very interested as,
I am a white lady, I am not an indigenous person.
But I got really interested in indigenous languages
because their structural properties are super interesting.
And in the process of doing that, I met humans
who speak them, imagine a world, right?
And they, so I got interested also in issues of equity
around language use, especially as that relates
to the indigenous languages around us.
So, here in Arizona, you might know
there's 22 federally recognized tribes, native nations,
they're all sovereign nations.
And each of those nations has at least one,
most of them have multiple heritage languages.
And these languages are spoken by people here on campus.
They're all living languages.
A lot of us, white people aren't aware of that.
Outsiders aren't often aware of that.
And the languages are so cool and so beautiful.
But they're just not represented online.
And so, and I know some younger speakers
who are working hard to bring their heritage languages,
indigenous languages into the digital world,
use them in social media and stuff.
But they just face a lot of structural barriers.
And so I thought that would be a really interesting thing,
maybe to share more broadly with students in your class
where I'm assuming some students will know about this a lot,
because they're in that situation
and others might really not have experience with it.
So that's what we'll discuss.
And I'm really excited to do it.
I'm very, very excited that your work is in the book
and that I get to know you and talk to you about it.
And is there a particular moment in your background
that made you more aware of languages
in the world and their importance?
So yes, there have been multiple ones,
but I'll pick one key moment for me
with respect to the indigenous languages of Arizona.
I did my PhD in linguistics and anthropology,
and my language of study was Navajo,
which I had studied in the classroom, but did not speak.
And I worked with a peer who was, I actually,
I think he was an undergraduate student here at the UofA,
who was a heritage speaker,
first language speaker of Navajo.
And as I got to know him better, brilliant young man,
I learned about him that he was,
had among his first languages, Navajo, Hopi,
Spanish and English.
DIANA: Wow.
And he is just a student.
Like, I met him in a class and he was just a nice guy.
And I found out he spoke and then we arranged a deal
where we could help each other out on things.
And he helped me with my dissertation.
And it was such an eye opening experience to me
thinking about the richness that's right here.
And at the same time I had heard from friends and family
and I was sort of raised in an environment
where we always talked about native American languages
as though there was one and it was called Indian,
and as though it was gone.
And I'm like, oh no, no, no, this is really important,
and he was really important.
And so that was a big moment for me
during and after the dissertation.
That's amazing.
And it really intersects with our I Voices program,
that is a program that we teach,
it's a student media lab here,
and the "Humans R Social Media" textbook
does use some of the media from the I Voices program
including student voices.
And one of the things that we base that on
is this concept of funds of knowledge,
this idea that students come into our classrooms
with really, really important knowledge in their lives.
And when they've used technologies a lot in their lives,
which generally they have in this generation
and upcoming generations,
their knowledge around these technologies,
the ways that they've used to work them,
the cultural moments where they've learned
how to navigate various things,
whether it's racism online
or learning how to use work arounds or various things,
all of this knowledge is super important.
A lot of the times just their experiences
with understanding what a platform really means culturally,
in a way that it would never say explicitly.
This knowledge is so important for students
to be able to have recognized in a classroom
is important knowledge.
They don't walk in as blank slates or canvases.
And this is a really good example language wise
if you're coming in and you're learning
all about the internet
as though it includes everything in the world,
and you know that you have this entire rich body
of knowledge and understandings and language
that's not included on it,
it is important to at least have that recognized
as a gap, and ideally as a gap
that can maybe be filled in by you as you grow up,
that you can make that knowledge part of this online world.
And, anyway, this is a really nice introduction
for students to do that.
And I appreciate you ushering them through it
and us through it.
And we're looking forward to the chapter and to seeing you.
I'm looking forward to it as well. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Amy.
I was about to stop the recording.
I don't need to stop the recording.
I just have to stop, so let me do that.