Please join us for a panel discussion with:
Nawang Tsering Gurung, Independent Researcher and Community Activist
Dan Kaufman, Founder and Co-Director, Endangered Language Alliance; Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Queens College – CUNY
Kesang Tseten, Filmmaker, Shunyata Fillms
Sienna Craig, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College
Over the past two decades, the presence of people from greater Himalayan region in New York City, particularly in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, has expanded exponentially, from several hundred people in the 1980s to thousands of individuals from specific ethnic communities today. As these new immigrants from Nepal, Bhutan, and North India, as well as diasporic Tibetans from India and culturally Tibetan regions in China, have settled into New York, their senses of identity have begun to transform. How are they finding a sense of community, navigating transnational and intergenerational cultural dynamics, and responding to the fluid relationship between ‘home’ and being ‘over here’ in New York? What does language have to do with this? This presentation will address these questions by describing Voices of the Himalaya, a collaborative research project that uses the medium of video interviews and short documentary film to explore the lived experiences of Himalayan New Yorkers.
