Empowering Language is one of the new core themes of the Faculty of Humanities, designed to build bridges between scientific research and society. With this theme, language becomes a central focus in the faculty’s research and impact strategy. Under this theme, we highlight how language and literature research sheds essential light on contemporary societal challenges. It plays an intrinsic role in sustaining linguistic diversity and multilingualism, fostering critical literacy in the age of new technologies, advancing empowerment and equity, and deepening our understanding of the relationship between language and healthy ageing, among other areas.  

On 29 January, we will host a kick-off event for Empowering Language. We warmly invite all colleagues working on topics related to language, literature, textual cultures and literacies to collaboratively think about impact strategies and community-based research. To foster our discussion, we will reflect on the background of this new policy, present examples of successful research and impact collaborations, and think together about how we want to shape Empowering Language for the future.

Programme (tentative): 

• Vision & Good Practices 
• Introducing Empowering Language
• Core Themes: faculty ambitions & support structures
• Examples of research and collaboration: 
  • Collaborating with schools for language and literacy research - Sybren Spit (UvA/OCW) 
  • LitLAB - Feike Dietz
• Exchange and inspiration: How to make impact? 
• Drinks!

Organized by

Aafje de Roest, Eva van Lier, Feike Dietz, Kimberley Mulder, Magdaléna Janosikova, Sible Andringa, Tjalling Valdés-Olmos