Ep 14: Fieldwork in the Time of COVID-19 with Guillem Belmar

Today’s episode is Guillem Belmar, a Linguistics PhD student at UC Santa Barbara. In this episode, we discuss the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on fieldwork. This discussion was inspired by UCSB grad students who have started a group to share and debate online fieldwork, and this post on social media from Guillem, which urged fieldworkers to pause field trip plans in light of the pandemic.

Guillem has many years of experience in language revitalization strategies as well as documentation of endangered or minoritized languages. He has worked on language promotion for many European languages and runs the #Europeminoritylanguages project on social media. He is currently involved with the project Maintaining Indigenous Languages within Immigrant Oaxacan Communities in the United States (MICOP/UCSB).

Things mentioned in this episode:

• Coronavirus ‘could wipe out Brazil’s indigenous people’ (BBC)
• COVID-19 RESOURCES IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES FROM SOUTHERN MEXICO
• COVID-19 info by language (Endangered Languages Project)
• Language Archives: ELAR, AILLA, PARADISEC
• Harvesting an archival deposit for your linguistics dissertation (ELAR blog post by Jonas Lau)
• Mixtec language family
• To learn more about how virtual communities can operate as breathing spaces online for minority languages, reach out to Guillem on Twitter @GuillemBelmar or by email: gbelmarviernes@ucsb.edu

Other things:

• Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic (crowdsourced Google Doc)
• Crowdsourced Suggestions for Online Field Methods Classes (Google Doc)

Listen here, or on your favorite podcast app! Field Notes is available on Apple Podcasts app (iPhone), Google Play Music (Android), Google Podcasts app (Android), Stitcher, Spotify, Podbean, Podcast Republic, Castbox, Player FM, and several other apps via RSS.