I think the highlight of the conference is
the fact that we are looking at the Lusophone world.
and we are inclusive linguistically, are
inclusive in terms of literatures are
inclusive in terms of
all the disciplines, sociology, political
science, and so on
so it's multi-disciplinary.
Portuguese studies at York University
participated in the symposium in 2011
and the idea was born there because
we realized Portuguese is an important
world language
it's the 5th language most spoken on a
world scale.
The biggest Portuguese community
outside of Portugal resides here in
Toronto,
we want to attract different scholars
from different countries throughout
former colonies in Africa, in Brazil
and of course all over Europe not just
Portugal.
Other countries are already doing this, the
United States has been
very heavily engaged with Brazil the
Chinese are increasingly
engaged and involved with Angola for
example.
 Our colleagues
have moved from just Portuguese studies to the Lusophone studies,
The Lusophone world defines all of those
that speak Portuguese, it comes from the
folks that inhabited the territory that
later became Portugal, the Luso people.
It's one language that brings people
from different cultures
together
what we want to do is mainly look at
exciting research that's been done in
the Lusophone world internationally.
In recent decades
parts of this portuguese-speaking
world have become
very economically
vigorous, important in the case of Angola
Mozambique
Brazil, these nations are becoming
increasingly economically important in
the world.
We're going to be talking about the
recent wave of protests in Brazil
as far as defining public policy for
instance
the gender policy in Brazil, and also
the environmental policy as well.
 I happen to
work on Angola and York University
happens to be a relatively hot spot at
the moment for the history of Angola. The
first panel deals with methodological
questions in the Angolan past
the second panel is going to deal
specifically with the social
aspects of this contorted difficult
history.
Having that academic component and
having that inclusiveness i think is a
strength to the conference
It is a way of promoting the richness of this set of people that
speak Portuguese.
