2026  Summer CoRSAL Heritage Language Internship (CHLI)

 

The CHLI program aims to help Indiana students and their families explore how digital assets can be used to remember, preserve, and celebrate their community memories, including language, personal and family history, intangible cultural heritage, and material culture. This internship program, open to IU students of South or Southeast Asian heritage in the U.S. diaspora, was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant entitled Community Memory and Language Archiving & Curation Training (IMLS RE-222696-OLS-23), awarded to the University of North Texas (PI Oksana Zavalina) and Indiana University (PI Shobhana Chelliah)

 In Summer 2026, five IU students of South and Southeast Asian heritage met with the CoRSAL team throughout July for virtual discussion, practical knowledge sharing, and lectures. Participants learned how to identify cultural items of interest and value, create a digital record of the items, save and preserve them, and share them with their families and communities. CHLI culminated with each intern creating a personal digital collection of heritage items, ranging from pictures accompanied by family recollections of their ancestral home in Southern India to rare books of hymns and prayers to materials used for community language education. 

We share here some reflections for the summer:

Intern Reflections

Intern reflection:  This workshop was a huge reflection for me, especially about my culture and helped me appreciate my language that I began to lose as I grew up and the importance of preserving languages. It also made me realize how valuable the items in my home are. They had been sitting there all this time, but I now see that they are important pieces of evidence of my culture and identity.

Intern Mallika reflection: I have always been interested in archiving and the preservation of cultural heritage. As a Human Computer Interaction Master’s student, it’s especially interesting to learn how digital tools can help with this. This internship was a valuable experience because it allowed me to learn more about my family heritage and traditions and be able to preserve cultural artifacts to show to future generations.

Moderator Reflections

Mary Burke: I was so impressed with the creativity of each students’ approach to building their collection–I am especially excited to see these projects develop as they continue sharing with their families and friends!

Justin Fuller: I enjoyed our meetings and discussions. They were a good mix of exchange of ideas with practical skill-building in a supportive and relaxed environment. The students remained engaged and excited about working on their projects, and it was fun seeing their collections, which were remarkably professional-looking after just a few weeks of work. I look forward to seeing how they continue to develop!

 

CoRSAL is excited to continue offering these workshops, expanding our circle of  family archivist and curators of family knowledge.