Pike Center awards two small grants

Through its Small Grants Program, the Pike Center sponsors research and publication that address issues faced by language communities on the margins of society. We are pleased to announce that two grants have been awarded in the latest cycle of this program.

$3,000 has been awarded to Erin SanGregory for a project entitled “Language Documentation and Grammatical Description of the Wakhi Language.” Wakhi is a minoritized language of the Southeastern Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. There is an ongoing language development program within the language community, but the language is under-documented. The funding will allow Ms. SanGregory to travel to the language area to begin developing a corpus of language documentation for use in linguistic analysis, as well as to travel to an international conference to present preliminary findings on a known  feature of the language that is of interest to language typologists—its use of locative constructions to express possession. She is a Linguistics Consultant-in-Training with SIL International and a Pike Scholar; she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Oregon.

$3,000 has been awarded to Christopher Troutman for a project entitled “Ethnographic Arts Research Among Forcibly Displaced Communities in Tbilisi, Georgia.” Historically, Tbilisi has been a major site for people groups seeking to escape violence in that region of the world, including the recent conflict in Ukraine. This research will study how artists among a number of communities of forcibly displaced persons (FDP) relate their artistic practice to their experience of displacement. It is hoped that the findings will give insights to practitioners in the fields of FDP advocacy, healing, education, and cultural preservation into how to better work with these communities and help them restore agency. Mr. Troutman is an Arts Specialist with SIL International and is a PhD candidate in World Arts at Dallas International University.