AFRS 350 - Seminar in Linguistic Anthropology

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

A set of offerings that prepares students for advanced, self-directed research in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. Topics range from language and culture, language and colonialism, language and gender, or linguistic documentation and revitalization to religious and ritual linguistic practices, language and political order, historical linguistics, language and media, or an intensive focus on the languages spoken in a specific region.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2024/25b: Race, Language, and Digital Media. (Same as ANTH 350 and MEDS 350 ) Much recent critical work on digital media and society has scrutinized how organizational, cultural, and ideological blindspots of tech companies in and around Silicon Valley have led to technologies that entrench existing racial biases, strengthen the dominance of English over other languages, and magnify both state and corporate power at the expense of democracy and civil liberties. This course explores the communities of engineers, content creators, entrepreneurs, hackers, digital nomads, and activists who inhabit seemingly peripheral locales that challenge our prevailing views of the digital media technology industry. These far-flung locales include Pacific or Caribbean island tax havens that, despite their smallness, play an outsize role in the global technology industry, and also cities such as Hyderabad, India, and Medellín, Colombia, which host thriving communities of tech developers and hackers. This course introduces concepts such as raciolinguistics, decoloniality, and racial capitalism to examine the role of digital technology industries in perpetuating or contesting racism and linguistic imperialism. Meanwhile, reading and discussing ethnographic research on technology in the so-called global peripheries unsettle prevailing US-and-Eurocentric notions of technology and digital media. This course concludes with a research capstone that surveys a community of tech workers or content creators interested in addressing the inequities produced through digital media technologies. Louis Römer.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS