FRANCE: European Political Institutions

Picture this: you and your friends are grabbing burgers and you overhear someone order a pop. You instantly get the urge to correct them because soda is the proper word you were taught. Later, the server brings the coke they ordered, which further increases your urge to intervene because they actually ordered Sprite. After all, soda is the correct word. Or is it? Which word is correct? Actually, they all are.

Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages and from a linguistic standpoint, all languages are equal. Yet, humans are continuously judged, evaluated, and discriminated against based on how they speak and write in professional, academic, and everyday settings. These seemingly innocuous comments about correctness have harmful effects on people who don’t conform to perceived language standards. As a result, various forms of discrimination and policies that exist continue to marginalize people due to misinformation and in some cases, disinformation. In this class, we will examine the intersections of language, ideology, and discrimination in everyday, educational, and professional settings while developing our research practices.

Classes will be facilitated through weekly reading discussions and discourse analysis of data (i.e., data sessions) in small and whole group activities. Readings will address the intersections of language and discrimination, such as accentism, racialization, language subordination, and social identities. The class will provide foundational concepts from applied linguistics and related fields, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The course is also focused on developing your research literacies and project management skills. You will learn how to develop and carry out a project, evaluate the credibility of information, and various types of data. Labs will be used to create space for data sessions and peer-reviews.

Through discourse analysis, you will apply concepts you learned in class to develop your understanding of linguistic diversity and language related issues. Projects can utilize print and digital media to address, for instance, monolingual policies and their impact in educational or workplace settings, intersections of language and gender or race, and various forms of linguistic discrimination in the US or other contexts.

There are no prerequisites and this course is suitable for students who are curious about language, discourse, social issues, as well as research. Students will be evaluated based on completed assignments, such as readings and other homework, research projects, peer-review, and overall class contributions, including lab sessions. You must be prepared to reflect on implicit biases and perceptions of language and rethink how you approach and conceptualize research. This course meets both the writing requirement and HS requirement as it develops genre knowledge, rhetorical awareness, understanding of writing as dynamic and iterative processes, and research literacies grounded in social sciences.

This course is an introduction to concepts and practices of nationalism, the modern nation-state, and questions about postcolonial contexts and concepts. Over the term we will draw on the disciplines of anthropology, literature, history, philosophy, and on the interdisciplinary fields of psychoanalysis, postcolonial and feminist studies to think critically about the relations between group and individual, between governments and corporations, as well as about citizenship, sovereignty, border control, migration, repression, genocidal violence, patriotism, belonging and exclusion. The course will begin with key points of historical reference such as the Peace of Westphalia and the French, US, and Haitian Revolutions. We will then proceed to focus on examples of nationalist projects in 19th, 20th, and 21st century Europe, as well as on nationalist and postcolonial movements in the Americas, Africa, and Western Asia. Students will be asked to consider course materials in relation to contemporary discussions about asylum, racism, sexism, capitalism and poverty, political economy, freedom of speech, academic and artistic freedom, genocide, human rights, and political violence. Course materials will likely include work by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Benedict Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Aime Césaire, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Eric Hobsbawm, Ranjana Khanna, Deborah Thomas, Carol Pateman, Jacques Rousseau, Edward Said, Carl Schmitt, Gayatri Spivak, and Françoise Vergès.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, weekly reading responses, and two short essays.

It’s through language that we construct our identities in everyday, professional, and academic contexts. We use language to make sense of our experiences and our ever-changing identities, whether these are national, social, local and/or global identities. Languages, cultures, and identities are intimately connected, but not all languages or people are treated as equal. So-called standard varieties of language are dominant in the media, entertainment, official documents, and education. In contrast, speakers of perceived non-standard varieties have been excluded and marginalized in different ways. Language can be used to exercise power over others on the basis of perceived linguistic divergence. While language and discourse are embedded in social issues, they remain invisible and are often absent from discussions about social issues. Using identity as the entry point to understand human experiences, this class examines how identity intersects with linguistic diversity, cultural practices, the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies, and asymmetrical power relations in everyday, professional, and educational settings. How do ideas about language maintain and perpetuate stereotypes and social hierarchies? Where do language standards come from? Do only foreigners have accents? We will use readings from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, migration studies, rhetoric and composition and other related areas to examine these questions and many more. The projects for the course will explore various aspects of identity and its connection to linguistic diversity and social issues through readings, interviews, and spoken/written narratives, which will be used to produce a podcast. Through genre and rhetorical analysis activities, we will explore different genres and podcasts to develop an understanding of writing and how people construct identities through discursive choices and multimodal elements. These activities will develop your understanding of connections between genre conventions and rhetorical situations and support your overall development of writing, in particular metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities. In addition to these skills, you will learn technical skills to produce an audio piece to tell your and other people’s (counter)stories to challenge dominant narratives about language, linguistic diversity, and identities. The audio production skills you will learn include recording, importing, mixing, editing, mastering, and exporting sound. You will be assessed based on participation in small and whole group activities, reading responses, literacy narratives, reflections, engagement with course materials, peer-review workshops, participation during a series of audio-production exercises, preparation for and completion of recordings, and the production of a short podcast episode incorporating all of the skills learned throughout the term. Please note that the course content is similar to College Seminar: “Soda, Pop, or Coke?”: Linguistic Diversity and Research for Change: Writing, Language, Social (In)justice, thus, this course is recommended for those who haven’t taken the previous courses as the content is similar.

How has human history shaped and been shaped by "the environment"? Environmental history is one of the most exciting new fields in history. In this course we examine world history from Mesopotamia to the present to see the role such things as resource scarcity, mythology, philosophy, imperialism, land policy, theology, plagues, scientific revolutions, the discovery of the new world, the industrial revolution, etc. on the natural, social, and built environments.

Ethnographic writing, literally the "writing of a people," is anthropology’s primary disciplinary mode of representation, based on participant-observation fieldwork. Early ethnographies were usually written by anthropologists from Europe and the United States about people they had studied in other parts of the world. In the 1970s and on, critical questions about representation increasingly challenged assumptions about ethnographic work, raising questions about objectivity, transparency, politics and the relationship of ethnographers to the people and places about which they are writing. This class will introduce students to a range of ethnographies in the discipline of anthropology, as well as to some of the political, cultural, and intellectual debates and contexts in which these ethnographies were produced. At the same time, we will consider epistemological, ethical, philosophical and methodological issues that such writing involves, including questions about representation, translation, difference and interpretation. In addition to classic ethnographies, we will also read some fiction, travel writing, and journalism. We will consider questions about how ethnographic knowledge is authorized, how assumptions about interpretation shape ethnographic writing, relations between individual and group, and the relations between author and reader. Students will be asked to experiment with ethnographic writing themselves, through a series of short writing assignments as well as a final project. The course is designed to allow students to workshop their own writing. Students will be evaluated on the development and improvement of their own writing over the course of the term, on their attention to observation of selected ethnographic sites, on their ability to critically evaluate and closely read ethnographies as texts, and on their engagement with their peers’ writing in peer review exercises.

This course is offered through collaboration with CAVILAM as part of the COA program in Vichy, France. Students take 20 hours a week of language classes and workshops taught by immersion methods and advanced audio-visual techniques. Students live with host families in homestays and take part in a variety of cultural activities. They are carefully tested and placed at levels appropriate to their ability and are expected to advance in all four language skills - reading, writing, speaking and listening - as gauged by the European Erasmus scale of competency.