4/21 @ 11:30 AM + 2:30 PM | Languages In The City Workshop

The workshop is part of A Feeling of Itself, a three-part program developed by Project for Empty Space (PES), Lives in Translation (LiT), and the Design Consortium at Rutgers University–Newark, led by designers Chantal Fischzang and Gisela Ochoa, unfolding across multiple Newark sites from March through June 2026. The event will take place at 800 Broad St, Newark, NJ 07102, within the exhibition space.

The two-part workshop on multilingualism and language documentation is for faculty, students, researchers, and language enthusiasts interested in understanding local language use and learning how to document languages in practice. Part I offers a big-picture introduction to language documentation and its connections to multilingualism, language mapping, and survey-based approaches. Part II focuses on practical guidance for those interested in trying this work themselves, including how to design and conduct language surveys and interviews, collect and organize language data, and build responsible workflows for documentation and analysis. The workshop will be relevant to participants from a range of fields, such as Linguistics, Political Science, and Social Work.

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Ross Perlin is a New York City-based linguist, writer, and translator from Lenapehoking. He is the author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, which has received major recognition including the British Academy Book Prize and the New York City Book Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book. He also writes on language, labor, and China for outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper’s. Perlin serves as co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, where he has led research and public programming on language documentation, mapping, and policy since 2013. His scholarly work includes extensive fieldwork on Himalayan languages, culminating in a trilingual dictionary, recorded corpus, and descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, completed as part of his PhD research. He teaches linguistics at Columbia University and works as a translator primarily from Chinese into English, including translations of works by Liao Yiwu and Chen Guangcheng, and has contributed Yiddish translation and media projects through The Forward and the National Yiddish Book Center.

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