Language and Power

Through this course, students will analyze how power manifests itself through language and how people use language to create, reproduce, or resist/defy power. By studying the relationship between language and capital, language and institutionalized oppression (e.g. racism, ethnocentrism), and language and activism, students will explore the relationship between language, inequity, domination, and resistance. Students will analyze, through applying Critical Discourse Analysis to language events related to politics, policy, media, and institutional interaction, the power and perceived value of certain dialects and languages (e.g., discrimination towards and ideologies about languages/dialects). Students will engage with relevant critical social and linguistic theories relating to power.

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