This course examines, through a range of topics and research frameworks, a relationship between language and digital media and the many ways language communication dynamics operates across changing mediascapes. The course provides a solid foundation in relevant theoretical concepts balanced with practical exercises and creative projects. The course adopts a broad interpretation of the term "media" focusing on existing online media platforms as well as on the issues that arise from various uses of digital media for social, political, and cultural purposes, including virtual community building, digital semiotics, memes, viral spreads, surveillance, political opposition and oppression, and propaganda, marginalization and liberation, participatory cultures, production dimensions, etc. The course is designed for graduate and undergraduate students in Russian sociolinguistics, and (second) language studies interested in learning how to research digital media discourse. The course is taught in English; no knowledge of Russian language is required.

Specialized work on an individual basis, consisting of training and practice in actual service in a technical, business, or governmental establishment.

Specialized work on an individual basis, consisting of training and practice in actual service in a technical, business, or governmental establishment.

This course explores, through a range of topics and theoretical lenses, the relationship between language, identity, and larger social and cultural contexts in Russia, the Post-Soviet geopolitical arena and beyond. We will first examine the ways in which language is used to create personal and group identities and how different cultural, social, and national identities are set off against one another, and against the criteria for inclusion or exclusion within and across national boundaries and various human communities of practice. We will then examine how particular forms of speech, language varieties, and accents are tied to specific traits of speakers and the ways in which the perception of particular people and the way they communicate impacts the projection of social and cultural characteristics. Finally, we will explore the critical dimensions of the language-identity relationship, looking at the function of language to build and divide nations, define peoples, create inequalities, and shape ideologies and local literacy practices in communities, digital spaces, and educational settings. Students will examine various approaches to theorizing identity in sociolinguistics and second language acquisition studies, and will learn to disentangle such constructs as multilingual identity, national\local\ethnic identity, subjectivity, self-concept, mobile identity, digital identity, the self-system, etc.

Survey of contemporary Russian literature. (In Russia)

Survey of contemporary Russian literature. (In Russia)

Conversational situations likely to be encountered in the target culture.

This course will examine a variety of seminal human rights in the Eurasian region. We will consider what are international human rights and how international human rights are integrated into the various states of the region, focus on the historical background and socio-cultural underpinnings of various states in the region when approaching human rights (especially of minorities and other communities) and then focus on specific issues including LGBTQ+, minority and linguistic rights, feminism in the region, and other important rights. We will then also consider how the international human rights system might (or is, at times) employed to uphold the various rights discussed, with a view to incorporating the variety of approaches and perceptions accorded to rights and to different groups by states and controlling factions.

A variable topics course taught in English or Russian (depending on subject material).

Survey of cultural monuments in Moscow and St. Petersburg. (In Russia)