Kurdish academic wins Joshua A. Fishman Award
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) –Kurdish academic Demet Arpacık from Graduate Center, City University of New York (USA) won the Joshua A. Fishman Award on Tuesday for her dissertation research on Kurdish language activism in Turkey.
We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Joshua A. Fishman Award!
— De Gruyter MOUTON (@dg_mouton) October 6, 2021
Congratulations, Ben Ó Ceallaigh and Demet Arpacık!
🏅https://t.co/r66eZdZZHg#Sociology #Linguistics pic.twitter.com/67NQlFxRIl
Arpacık’s ethnographic study, called 'The Medium of Liberation: Kurdish Language and Education Activism in Turkey', examines the Kurdish language and education activism, which generates decolonial forms of practices as responses to “colonial language governmentality” inflicted by the Turkish state.
Prohibited to be spoken until 1991 in Turkey, the Kurdish language has been an intense object of struggle between the Turkish state and the Kurdish population. Until now, Kurdish is not taught in schools in Turkey.
The Joshua A. Fishman Award was established in 2018 to honor Joshua A. Fishman’s intellectual contribution to research on the sociology of language, the field that he has played a prominent role in shaping for many decades.
The award recognizes outstanding dissertations that push intellectual boundaries and offer innovative, forward-looking perspectives in the sociology of language.
Many dissertations from early-career researchers across the globe were submitted for consideration in 2021. However, only Ben Ó Ceallaigh and Arpacık were found to be exceptional.
The selection committee consisted of an international panel of 30 renowned scholars in the sociology of language.