Connecting Language and Health

ELA Co-Directors Ross Perlin and Daniel Kaufman spoke last week on “Language Access, Health, and Indigenous Communities in New York City” at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancel Center’s Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities Service. It was a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between linguist work and public health, specifically addressing NYC’s substantial and growing Indigenous Latin American communities who often remain dispersed, invisible, and without access to services, including translation and interpretation. We discussed linguistic, cultural, and health challenges and opportunities in working with this new and relatively little-known community, based on research in collaboration with the NYC Department of Health.