linguistic anthropology lab

@ucsd

The curriculum offered in Linguistic Anthropology complements activities in the Lab. Occasionally, courses are held in the Lab because of their strong research component, involving use of the equipment; at other times, assignments and course projects may rely on students’ access to the resources here.

ANTH 4. Words and Worlds: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (undergrad, DEI; Yeh)
How does language shape the worlds we live in? How do we shape the world through language? This course uses linguistic anthropology to expose and rethink some of the most fundamental, taken-for-granted categories we use to navigate life: from time, space, and materiality, to gender, sexuality, and race.

ANSC 118. Language and Culture (undergrad; Berman)
What is the relationship between language and culture? Through a wide-ranging exploration of how this question has shaped anthropological inquiry – and how we might answer it today – students will acquire an essential theoretical foundation for social scientific research and thinking.

ANSC 119GS. Gesture, Communication, and the Body (undergrad; Haviland)
A critical examination of research connecting language to alternate complementary modalities—the hands, face, body, and aspects of “lived environments” (spaces, tools, artifacts). Program or materials fees may apply.

ANSC 122. Language in Society (undergrad, DEI; Yeh)
This course explores language’s multifaceted role in social life, with particular focus on formations of race and ethnicity in the United States. How does language reproduce inequality? How can we use it to challenge power? Students will gain practical experience using ethnographic methods to generate insight into contemporary life.

ANSC 131. Language, Law, and Social Justice (undergrad, DEI; Hallingstad O'Brien)
Legal systems are central in (re)organizing social institutions, international arrangements, (in)equalities, and are an arena where linguistic practices predominate and define outcomes. With an anthropological approach to language, we examine languages of the law, legal conceptions of language, and most importantly, the nature and structure of talk in a range of legal institutions and activities.

ANSC 141. Language and Political Action (undergrad; Berman)
This class explores how language use and people’s ideas about language benefit some people and work to the detriment of others. Actively engaging contemporary topics and materials related to race, gender, social class, activism, bureaucracy, and electoral politics, this course offers insight into the constitutive role of language in the making of political action.

ANSC 162. Language, Identity, and Community (undergrad, DEI; Berman)
This course examines the use of language difference in negotiating identity in bilingual and bidialectal communities, and in structuring interethnic relations. It addresses social tensions around language variation and the social significance of language choices in several societies.

ANSC 191. Narrative and Subjectivity (a.k.a. Stories and Selves) (grad/undergrad; Yeh)
If you conduct ethnographic research, you will inevitably find yourself dealing with stories. They play a huge role in human interaction, and they fundamentally shape who we are both as individuals and as collectivities. This class includes a lab component in which students collect narratives through ethnographic methods and learn how to analyze them anthropologically.

ANSC 194. Language, Migration, Borders (undergrad; Yeh)
This course uses the study of language to unpack contemporary processes of human mobility across geopolitical borders. We will explore both the role of language in shaping movement and the politics of language that arise from and around these movements. Migrations to the United States will be a core theme, though we will also work to put them in comparative perspective. Ultimately, our aim will be to critically rethink all three of the title terms – language, migration, and borders – in tandem.

ANTH 241. Linguistic Anthropology Workshop (grad; Yeh)
Get credit for attending the Linguistic Anthropology Workshop. One unit per quarter, up to four quarters.

ANTH 280F. Core Seminar in Linguistic Anthropology (grad; Yeh)
Examines the theoretical and methodological foundations and principal research questions of linguistic anthropology, providing the fundamentals for graduate study in this area. Required for students specializing in linguistic anthropology; open to interested students in all fields.

ANTH 279. Special Topics in Language and Society: Semiotics of Sight (grad; Yeh)
Drawing on the conceptual and methodological tools of linguistic anthropology, this course probes the semiotics of visuality across domains that are usually treated separately: from the multimodality of in-situ interaction, to emplaced engagement with one’s surroundings, to circulating (often mass-mediated) texts of diverse nature. How is biological sight transformed into cultural systems of visuality? How is “the visual” constituted as such? How does visual meaning emerge and how do subjects take shape through visual practice? Our readings will ground these questions (and more!) in recent linguistic anthropological efforts to rethink “images,” but will range as well across ethnographic case studies and classic and contemporary visual theory.