Graduate student Marisol Villela Balderrama will co-facilitate the workshop "Beyond Language Access: Creating Multilingual Spaces Through Language Justice" during Pitt’s Diversity Forum 2024: Amplifying Our Voices Through Active Listening and Constructive Dialogue, on January 22, at 10 am ET. Since 2022, Villela Balderrama has collaborated as a volunteer simultaneous interpreter with BanchaLenguas, a collective of language justice workers founded in New Orleans in 2017. Together with BanchaLenguas founding member Sabina Hinz-Foley Trejo, they will explore questions such as how to create multilingual spaces where all participants feel welcome and encouraged to speak using the language in which they feel most powerful and what voices are left out when a meeting is run only in the dominant language. Participants will learn about the history and present practices of the Language Justice movement in the United States and develop an awareness of what is needed to create multilingual spaces. They will learn how to prepare in advance for their events, and how to hold meetings that incorporate translation and interpretation based on the key principles of Language Justice.
Register for Pitt’s Diversity Forum 2024 here.
