Language and Power
Course Description
This seminar introduces various themes and issues in linguistic anthropology, with a particular emphasis on the link between language and power. The seminar highlights that language is a constitutive of social realities, including social relationships and identities, rather than a passive tool for communication. The seminar delves into subjects such as the linguistic construction of gender, class, and race, hate speech, censorship, and the interplay of language and power unique to various institutions such as social media. Also, it explores the strategies for challenging the linguistic forms of power and domination. Students are expected to develop a research project that involves empirical data collection and analysis and thus gain hands-on linguistic anthropological research experience.
Meet the Instructor: Miyako Inoue
“As a linguistic anthropologist, I am interested in examining how language is used to construct identities and how this construction is linked to power relations. Born, raised, and educated in Japan, I am a native speaker of Japanese. The Japanese language has a complex system of polite language and other ways to show social status through language, such as 'women's language.' Upon learning English, I was struck by the stark differences in how the English language is linked to social values. For example, there isn't a complex polite language system in English like in Japanese. This shows that people who speak English have different ideas about social relationships."
Of related interest
