Linguistics

Building bridges between Boulder and Ukraine

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:21:58 +0000

Building bridges between Boulder and Ukraine Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 10:21

Rachel Sauer

CU scholar Rai Farrelly is partnering with English language teachers in Ukraine this semester through a U.S. Department of State program

In some of Rai Farrelly’s first meetings with her new colleagues, they warned her that the air raid sirens might go off while she’s observing their classes.

If that happens, she recalls them telling her, they’ll run down to the bunker in the basement and hope that a nationwide effort to increase internet capacity in subterranean locations has reached their schools and universities. And then they’ll pick up where they left off, because students are still eager to learn, and her colleagues’ job is to teach them.

Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) director in the �鶹��Ƶ Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the U.S. Department of State English Language Specialist Program.

Rai Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and TESOL director in the CU Boulder Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the U.S. Department of State English Language Specialist Program.

The Ukrainian educators are part of the State Department’s Access Program and work with either teenagers in after-school programs or undergraduate students training to be teachers in any subject because “Ukraine has a plan to start teaching all their content in English coming up very soon,” Farrelly explains.

In her role as an English Language Specialist (ELS), Farrelly will observe classes and partner with teachers in Ukraine on strategies and methods for teaching large, mixed-level English classes. Farrelly’s TESOL students at CU Boulder also will partner with English language students in Ukraine via virtual conversation sessions.

“Our realities are worlds apart,” Farrelly says, “yet we'll be connected online and building community together.”

Educational collaboration

Farrelly, whose teaching experience has taken her around the world—from Armenia to Tanzania, where she co-founded Project Wezesha to help support students from rural areas who are pursuing post-secondary education—qualified as a State Department ELS several years ago.

To qualify as an ELS, an educator must have a master’s or PhD in TESOL or applied linguistics and the ability to partner with teachers and students around the world either in person or virtually. The program, which is organized through U.S. embassies and regional language officers around the world, focuses on “delivering and maintaining quality English language programs overseas and promoting mutual understanding between the U.S. and other countries.”

During the COVID pandemic, Farrelly accepted virtual ELS positions in South Korea and then Panama. Last semester, her pedagogical grammar class at CU taught English through a virtual cross-cultural exchange with learners at a language school in Arequipa, Peru.

“I have a really nice relationship with colleagues at this school, and they were like, ‘Rai, send your teachers,’” Farrelly says. “Because of that, we have had three CU students teach there, so this program really opens up doors, and I’m going to be working with them again this semester.”

The teachers in Ukraine with whom Farrelly is collaborating this semester have mentioned many of the challenges that English language teachers worldwide face: how to scaffold instruction in classes that contain everything from absolute beginners to intermediate-level speakers; when and how to correct pronunciation and grammar; how to group students during oral exercises; how to invite participation in a way that helps students feel excited to speak.

To help her support the teachers in Ukraine, Farrelly is even arranging a Zoom session with the 14-year-old daughters of three of her friends “so I can do a playful interview on the gender dynamics in class and what their teachers do in a U.S. class to make it comfortable for them,” she says. “That’s one of the concerns that my colleagues in Ukraine have expressed, that 14-year-old boys won’t work with girls and how can they get them to work in groups.”

Seeing people as people

Farrelly says her experiences working with English-teaching colleagues around the world—including in Indonesia and Russia—have taught her the vital importance of a “community of practice and what it means to work closely with teachers who ‘speak your language,’” she says.

I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

One of the biggest and most pervasive challenges in the TESOL field is the incorrect notion that anybody who speaks English can teach it. “Decades ago, anyone could step off a plane, and if you looked like me and talked like me, you could get a job,” Farrelly says. “Meanwhile, teachers in those countries who go through pedagogical training, who get degrees in teaching English, weren’t getting jobs.

“Even now, there are a lot of short TEFL or TESOL certificates you can get online. Meanwhile, I’m the director of the TESOL program at CU, and my students are taking five or six courses with me to earn a TESOL certificate. There’s a depth and breadth of proper preparation that goes beyond how to teach a language. It’s about understanding individual differences, personalities, motivations, culture, how your (first language) influences acquisition, classroom management, curriculum design. There’s so much that goes into it that’s beyond simply speaking English.”

In her ELS role, Farrelly says a significant focus is teacher mentoring and teacher development: “I’m such a huge fan of collaboration, especially among teachers,” she says. “So much of what I’ve done is grounded in working with teachers, and I never want teachers to see me as this expert outsider who’s coming in and telling them what to do. I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

The fact that Ukraine is a country at war and that geopolitics add a complicated layer to Farrelly’s collaboration with teachers there—in fact, she doesn’t mention her previous experience with teachers and students in Vladimir, Russia—underscores the importance of global partnerships, she says.

“It helps you see people as people and humanizes everyone,” she says. “That’s one of the main aims of State Department programs. It’s access for learners and mentoring for professionals, but it’s about bridging those gaps and promoting cross-cultural understanding. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, at the end of day we can all find so many commonalities.”

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CU scholar Rai Farrelly is partnering with English language teachers in Ukraine this semester through a U.S. Department of State program.

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Making the case for President Average Joe

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:40:59 +0000

Making the case for President Average Joe Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/10/2024 - 08:40

Bradley Worrell

CU Boulder doctoral student examines how an unconventional social media campaign worked in 2020 to make Joe Biden more appealing—or at least less unappealing—to progressive voters

As the U.S. presidential campaign heated up in 2020, Kate Arnold-Murray’s friends started sharing social media posts that simultaneously poked fun at Joe Biden while also promoting him as a much better alternative to Donald Trump.

One such post on Instagram compared Biden to a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, with the accompanying tagline “Unappetizing but still edible.” Another post showed Biden preparing to swing a baseball bat, with the tagline “Because a foul ball is better than a strike,” while a third post showed Biden taking a knee in front of a chalkboard, with the tagline “Because a C+ is better than an F.”

“My friends started sharing these, what I would call memes, on Instagram—and I thought they were absolutely hilarious,” says Arnold-Murray, a doctoral student in the �鶹��Ƶ’s Department of Linguistics.

Kate Arnold-Murray, a CU Boulder PhD student in linguistics, was intrigued by the "Settle for Biden" campaign, in part, because it seemed doubtful to her that the Biden campaign was behind it, but the catchy posts appeared to be produced by an operation that knew how to create a social-media buzz.

“I also felt (the ads) were impactful, because my friends were sharing them as a way of saying, ‘Hey, I’m not thrilled about it, but I’m voting for Biden, and you should, too.’ That was a really powerful messaging strategy when Biden wasn’t really liked by a lot of progressives, or when people on the left had a hesitancy with Biden in a way I didn’t see with people sharing they were voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Arnold-Murray says the social media campaign—dubbed “Settle for Biden”—intrigued her, in part because it seemed doubtful to her that the Biden campaign was behind it, but the catchy posts appeared to be produced by an operation that knew how to create a social-media buzz.

Meanwhile, the way in which the campaign stumped for its preferred choice for president—as someone who is less than ideal but still much better than the alternative—was something that captured her attention as someone who studies the effect that language and visuals can have on an audience. That, in turn, prompted Arnold-Murray to write the paper “Settle for Biden: The scalar production of a normative presidential candidate on Instagram,” which was published online by the journal Language in Society earlier this year.

Recently, Arnold-Murray spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about insights she gained from examining the verbiage and visuals from the Settle for Biden campaign, her view on the pros and cons of promoting a candidate as mediocre but safe and her thoughts on whether such a campaign can be successful a second time around, now that Biden has an established presidential track record. Her answers have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space.

Question: Why did you think ‘Settle for Biden’ would be a good topic to explore in a research paper?

Arnold-Murray: Since Trump first ran for president, the U.S. has been in such political turmoil, and in my opinion, the political left has been a mess. We have had a really hard time figuring out how to respond to Trump and how to message.

What I saw—and what I’m still seeing—is that the left is constructing this new strategy. This campaign (Settle for Biden) was doing something that I hadn’t seen before. Usually, when people are running for office—and you’re advocating that people should vote for them—you’re saying, ‘He is the best of the best.’ ‘She has the highest level of education.’ ‘He has done so much to help people.’ ‘She’s an incredible person.’

We haven’t historically seen (a campaign for a politician) that says, ‘Because a C+ is better than an F’ or ‘Because a foul ball is better than a strike.’ We don't see people saying, ‘Our candidate, we don’t love them, but we are going to support them.’

And I think that’s something that needed to happen in 2020 among a divided Democratic Party, or especially with progressives feeling divided from the Democratic Party—to get people onboard against a common enemy.

"The (Settle for Biden" campaign was always able to find a way to position Biden above Trump—even if he’s not ideal to their demographic, and simultaneously to acknowledge there is really no person at the top of the scale who we can vote for who can win," says CU Boulder researcher Kate Arnold-Murray.

Question: It seems like an underlying goal of the Settle for Biden campaign is to get people to pick Biden as the safe, if mediocre, candidate?

Arnold-Murray: Yes, definitely. This is why I chose to use this kind of scalar theoretical framework, because in each post we really have three candidates: We have the nonexistent, nonrealistic, ideal candidate for young progressives. But in a two-party system—and especially in 2020—that candidate did not exist, at least in terms of having chance of winning.

So, in that scenario, we have the home run or A+ candidate; then we have Joe Biden in the middle, as a foul ball or C+; and then we get to Donald Trump, always portrayed as the worst possible thing.

In constructing that scalar world, the campaign was always able to find a way to position Biden above Trump—even if he’s not ideal to their demographic, and simultaneously to acknowledge there is really no person at the top of the scale who we can vote for who can win.

Question: In your paper, you talk a lot about ‘scalar normativity.’ What does that mean?

Arnold-Murray: It’s a somewhat new theoretical framework for thinking about normativity. When we talk about normativity in the social sciences, usually we’re talking about things that are viewed as so normal that they usually fly under the radar. … I was looking at how this campaign was appealing to centers of authority, like with the Dairy Queen example, to say, 'What is normal to the middle class?' Well, maybe it’s like a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, because you can eat it, but you don’t necessarily love it.

Question: In the Settle for Biden memes you highlighted, Trump isn’t named, but there’s the assumption that the audience is going to understand whom Biden is being compared to, correct?

Arnold-Murray: Yes, Trump is always there in every post, and I think that’s always true of an election between two people. When you are campaigning and saying things about yourself, it’s known and assumed that you are going against this other person. For the most part, in the posts I examined, the campaign did not mention Trump at all—but he’s kind of this haunting presence.

For example, in the post ‘Joe Biden knows how to pronounce Yosemite,’ even if you did not know that Trump had mispronounced it earlier, you would be able to infer it, based on how the campaign talks. So, the other guy must have done it wrong if Joe Biden is doing it right.

And when we get these two positionalities, in the post that claims ‘Because of C+ is better than an F,' the caption says, ‘Joe Biden isn’t the A we wanted … but four more years of Trump would certainly mean failure.’ So, you know who the F is.

Again, I very much view (Trump) as almost kind of haunting this campaign, and at least for me personally, I found it a really effective strategy. As someone on the left, I just didn’t want to see pictures of Donald Trump; I didn’t want to hear his voice; I didn’t want to read his words in my daily life, because it was just so toxic. This strategy of calling Trump in, therefore, gave a wary audience a way to engage with him less directly.

CU Boulder scholar Kate Arnold-Murray notes that the "Settle for Biden" campaign might not land as well in the 2024 presidential election.

Question: Is there any way to gauge whether the Settle for Biden campaign actually helped get progressives to vote for Biden on election day?

Arnold-Murray: The campaign’s director, Sam Weinberg, ended up doing quite a few interviews that got a fair amount of media attention. And they (Settle for Biden) ended up partnering with organizations that were dedicated to motivating young voters to vote and helping people register to vote.

I would have loved for there to have been a poll (about the campaign’s effectiveness) but that doesn’t seem to exist. So, I can only judge things based on the media coverage it generated and the work that the group was able to do because it had this platform to support on-the-ground efforts.

Question: Do you think the campaign can be successful a second time if progressives don’t believe Biden has been sufficiently liberal during his first term in office?

Arnold-Murray: The resonance of an average Joe, after he’s been in office for four years, might not land as well the second time around. I think the Settle for Biden campaign might need to give more props for what Biden has done, because I think he actually has accomplished a lot. …

But with some of Biden’s actions and policies, especially with Israel, being so unpopular on the left, does that idea really stack up anymore? Does good enough still work? It’s a fair question.

Then again, it’s still the same opponent he faced four years ago. So, for me personally, I’m hoping the campaign is going to figure out how to make Biden the much better choice for progressive voters.

Question: Have you received any reaction to your paper?

Arnold-Murray: My most exciting feedback that I’ve received on the paper has been when I shared it on Facebook or on Instagram. Hearing from people who are not linguists or academics or anthropologists, who were able to read and understand it and enjoy it, was rewarding.

For me, that’s a big win, because I feel like I was doing a couple big things with theory that were a little complicated, but at the same time, I really tried to make it something that’s accessible for people to engage with. And the Instagram posts themselves are interesting and entertaining.

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CU Boulder doctoral student examines how an unconventional social media campaign worked in 2020 to make Joe Biden more appealing—or at least less unappealing—to progressive voters.

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Using both sides of brain to speak American Sign Language

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:26:43 +0000

Using both sides of brain to speak American Sign Language Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/08/2023 - 17:26

Maxwell Garby

At a talk Thursday evening, CU Boulder researcher Karen Boyd spoke about two of her studies on American Sign Language (ASL) conducted with colleagues in linguistics and psychology

American Sign Language is both a spatial and visual language, meaning it uses both hemispheres of the brain. Even for something as simple as pauses, different brain functions are necessary to best communicate in American Sign Language (ASL).

�鶹��Ƶ researcher Karen Boyd, an instructor in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, has studied which brain hemispheres are used for specific parts of the grammatical structures and pauses in ASL.

Boyd was born to deaf parents and has deaf siblings, so ASL is her heritage language. Growing up, she struggled to learn English, but had a breakthrough when she began to understand the language “not through a normal English class, but through a linguistics class,” she said at a Thursday afternoon talk focused on her research findings.

CU Boulder researcher and ASL instructor Karen Boyd (center, at her Thursday presentation) studies which brain hemispheres are used for specific parts of the grammatical structures and pauses in ASL.

Boyd highlighted a prominent aspect of her research: the second-language learner perceptions of spatial tracing constructions in ASL.

“There's a formal term within ASL called size and space specifiers, also known as SASSes, which help describe a person or an object,” she explained. “This study focuses on your perceptions of understanding where my hands move in space, how your brain and those hemispheres can cross and understanding what exactly you're seeing being constructed in space.

“I decided on the research topic of learning ASL as a second language and how that affects your dominant hand. While you are signing, you are required to pick one hand that acts as the dominant throughout your formation of the language. In ASL, there are signs that only require one hand, but there are also two-handed non-symmetrical signs, where your non-dominant hand stays stationary and your dominant hand is the one that moves, and two-handed symmetrical signs.”

However, Boyd noted that these differences in signs are what can cause issues for second-language learners.

“In my research, I noticed that some people would incorrectly switch their dominant hand when indicating shapes. So, why is it that the brain is switching things?”

Boyd chose to focus on the right hemisphere, the part of the brain that deals with deals with objects in space. She cited a study by her mentor, Karen Emmorey of San Diego State University, that found second-language learners struggled with their spatial awareness compared to people who are deaf.

“The brain is a phenomenal thing,” Boyd said. “You may be wondering, do hearing people use their right hemisphere? And they do, but not in the same way that I do, because I have to sign every day.”

Translating pauses

Boyd also had researched the use of pauses in both spoken English and ASL.

“Something that I noticed that was quite cool in hearing culture is called Utterance Boundary Pause,” she explained. “With spoken language, we're used to pauses in a sentence, where we use filler words such as ‘ah,’ or ‘um.’ I wanted to see what the people were looking for within these pauses and how that translates over into ASL.

“When language is involved, where there is a greater vocabulary, there are more pauses. Within spoken language, there tend to be pauses right after the end of a word. In ASL, it follows almost the same rules, except if we were to have a pause while signing, we would repeat the last signed word over and over. That's considered a pause. You can't really do that in spoken language. It is very unique.”

Boyd notes this difference in how pauses work in each language can also bring up some issues, especially when someone is speaking a blend of the two languages.

“It is important that these pauses are conveyed to students in educational settings, especially in K-12 settings,” she said. “For example, a deaf child might get a little frustrated if they’re listening to the English that’s being spoken by the teacher, and the teacher takes a pause. The interpreter will never convey that pause with an ‘um,’ or a pause, which might lead the deaf children to think that spoken language is always perfect and that they are able to speak without issue. That's not true.

“The interpreters must convey to those deaf kids that the speaker is struggling for the word to teach the child that when you are stuck trying to think of a word, it's OK, that’s perfectly normal.”

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At a talk Thursday evening, CU Boulder researcher Karen Boyd spoke about two of her studies on American Sign Language (ASL) conducted with colleagues in linguistics and psychology.

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What does ‘Ted Cruz cucks again’ actually mean?

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 21:23:30 +0000

What does ‘Ted Cruz cucks again’ actually mean? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/16/2023 - 15:23

Clint Talbott

CU Boulder graduate student in linguistics applies painstaking analysis to alt-right, white-supremacist groups that popularized a clipped version of an antiquated word

In 2017, TV late-night host Stephen Colbert mocked then-White House advisor Steve Bannon for calling Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law, a “cuck.” Colbert dubbed Bannon’s shenanigans a TCM, or “total cuck move.”

That joke might have drawn as much confusion as laughter, because the meaning of “cuck” can be hard to discern.

Maureen Kosse, a PhD student in linguistics at the �鶹��Ƶ, has spent years studying the evolution of “cuck” in “alt-right,” or far-right, white-supremacist movements. She contends that those who use the word “cuck” are telegraphing their belief that Jewish people seek to oppress and eliminate white people and that Black people want to overtake whites in a “white genocide” or a “great replacement.”

Kosse argues that “cuck” and similar terms are “disguised as innocuous” but are actually linguistic weapons employing misogynist and racist “humor” in the alt-right’s efforts to radicalize others.

Kosse’s analysis of the alt-right’s use of “cuck” appeared in the academic journal Gender and Language last summer under the title: “‘Ted Cruz cucks again’: the insult term cuck as an alt-right masculinist signifier.”

As Kosse notes, “cuck” stems from the antiquated term “cuckold,” a noun meaning a husband whose wife is unfaithful.

“Cuck” became widely used after a 2014 controversy in which women working in the video-game industry were subject to a campaign of harassment, and a far-right media personality called one whistleblower’s husband a “cuck.”

A screenshot from a slideshow explaining the meaning of terms used by the alt-right.

The epithet then proliferated in explicitly racist subreddit channels and took on the added implication of “white genocide” or a “great replacement,” in which a “Jewish cabal covertly encourages white women to have children with non-white men in order to eliminate the genetic purity of white men,” Kosse writes.

That conspiracy theory has been cited in several terrorist manifestoes, including that of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooter in 2019 and the Buffalo, New York, grocery-store mass-murderer, who targeted Black people.

“I argue that the link between ‘cuck’ and white genocide comes from a crucial intertextual relationship that remains under-analyzed in the literature: the imagery provided by interracial cuck pornography,” Kosse writes.

Using a sociocultural linguistic analysis that combines linguistic anthropology and construction grammar, she traces how a misogynistic meme evolved to take on racist meanings. She explains how “alt-right memes such as ‘cuck’ spread covertly racist online discourse by cloaking medieval sexual logic and racial anger in misogynistic humor.”

Additionally, she reports how cuckoldry evolved from its medieval origins to its “racialized appropriation in pornography,” and analyzes data she collected from alt-right discussion groups since 2015 to show that constructions in which the term appears “convey racist meanings by recalling the imagery of interracial cuck pornography.”

An excerpt from a 2017 op-ed in The Washington Post.

Additionally, she observes: “Such constructions depend on a psychosexual metaphor that positions patriotism as protecting the nation from nonwhites and represents political capitulation as sexual shame.”

Kosse’s data comes from personal observations of several U.S. alt-right and far-right digital platforms, including Reddit (/r/altright and /r/Identitarian), Voat, 4chan, 8chan/8kun and The Daily Stormer.

In an October 2022 interview on a podcast called The Vocal Fries, Kosse noted that “cuck” was used in ways that required a linguistic “frame analysis.” The term “cuck” has a complicated frame structure, because it’s related to historical notions of ownership of women and consent, she told the podcasters.

As she studied the use of “cuck,” she said, “I noticed it being used in ways that do not seem to be immediately related to the idea of a cuckold. I had trouble getting from A to B.”

That was especially true when she saw the phrase, “Ted Cruz cucks again,” a sentence that prompted her to conclude that, “Something really strange is going on here.”

In that case, “cucks” is used as an intransitive verb, meaning that it has no object. (“I exist,” has no object and is an intransitive construction, while “I dropped a ball” has an object—ball—and is transitive.)

Kosse also noticed other unusual formations, phrases like “feminists cucking for Israel again” or “cucking for Muslims again.” In those cases, “cucking” was being used like “shilling.”

As she told The Vocal Fries podcast, she noticed that whoever is doing the cucking or whoever is being cucked, “It is happening because there is some outward force causing it to happen. You’re doing this because someone else tells you. You’re being humiliated, and you love it because you’re following what your overlords say.”

She continued: “In my data, I see it most frequently used against conservatives. It’s mostly a conservative-on-conservative insult for people like Ted Cruz, who are not considered sufficiently white supremacist enough for the alt-right faction.”

An excerpt from a 2017 Washington Post op-ed.

In her article, Kosse cites several examples of intransitive use, including “Trump cucks in Israel,” a usage that she identifies as coming from Holocaust deniers, and “Trump cucks on immigration, promises amnesty for illegal DACA invaders.” In these cases, she notes, the verb “cuck” is followed by a preposition denoting an arena in which the subject behaves like a cuckold: “in Israel” or “on immigration.”

“This syntactic pattern is similar to other verbs of submission, e.g., to give up on something, which supports the argument that ‘cuck’ is a syntactic blend,” she writes.

In the case of “Ted Cruz cucks again” and similar examples, Kosse employs a Construction Grammar framework to observe that when “previously transitive verbs” are used intransitively, readers must resolve “conflict between linguistic cues which do not ordinarily compete during interpretation.”

Thus, she notes, “Ted Cruz cucks again” implies that Cruz has chosen to “cuck himself by acting against his own best interests.”

“As revealed across the online data I collected, those ‘best interests’ are what the alt-right perceives to be best for ‘white people’—namely, resistance to the cultural influence of a Jewish global elite whose support for social programs (e.g., immigration, welfare, feminism, taxation) is thought to undermine white European populations in the West,” Kosse writes.

A 2017 Washington Post headline.

Additionally, she observes, those who participate in “alt-right and manosphere digital spaces may be more likely to infer a racialized reading to ‘cuck’ given the preponderance of pornography and anti-Black racist discourse in their online spaces.”

All of this can make it hard to discern what a person using the word “cuck” means by it. But this is not a drawback but a feature of far-right discourse, Kosse argues, noting that the ambiguity “affords alt-righters a degree of plausible deniability as they circulate ‘cuck’ into other domains.”

While the meaning is ambiguous to many, Kosse argues that it is “particularly legible to those the alt-right seeks to recruit: young, online, white men.”

Maureen Kosse specializes in sociocultural linguistics, language and identity, language and power, conversation analysis, Old/Middle English and French.

If Kosse were to convey one “takeaway” from her research, it would be this:

“Many people from across the political spectrum have casually adopted the word ‘cuck.’ There may be some awareness of the context around cuckoldry, cuck pornography or replacement theory in these usages, but we can also reasonably assume that many people do not know of the word's connotations within the alt-right,” Kosse says, continuing:

“Still others have adopted the term ironically, or to weaponize the concept against alt righters. I would say that regardless of any knowledge or intention, all usages of ‘cuck’ evoke racist and misogynistic frames of reference that are characteristic of alt-right discourses. In my opinion as a linguist, there is no way to appropriate expressions like ‘cuck’ without also circulating an alt-right perspective of the world (one that has already had enormous real-world consequences, as numerous white nationalist mass-murderers have cited replacement theory in their manifestos).”

Cay Leytham-Powell contributed reporting for this story.

CU Boulder graduate student in linguistics applies painstaking analysis to alt-right, white-supremacist groups that popularized a clipped version of an antiquated word.

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Zygmunt Frajzyngier wins Fulbright Specialist Award

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 19:14:24 +0000

Zygmunt Frajzyngier wins Fulbright Specialist Award Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/04/2022 - 13:14

With Fulbright support, CU Boulder linguist developed new approach to semantics of natural languages with international colleagues gathered in Italy

Zygmunt Frajzyngier, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the �鶹��Ƶ, has won a Fulbright Specialist award, with which he recently delivered a series of lectures at the Università degli Studi L'Orientale in Naples, Italy.

Recipients of Fulbright Specialist awards are selected based on academic and professional achievement, demonstrated leadership in their field, and their potential to foster long-term cooperation between institutions in the United States and abroad.

In Naples, Frajzyngier delivered lectures on the semantic structures of West African languages. He is an expert on Chadic and Afroasiatic linguistics and descriptive grammars and dictionaries of Chadic languages. He has also been drawing implications from the descriptive work for linguistic theory.

Zygmunt Frajzyngier, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the �鶹��Ƶ, has won a Fulbright Specialist award.

While there, Frajzyngier further developed “a new approach to the semantics of natural languages that I have addressed in my recent books and papers,” some of which were co-authored by his former students Erin Shay and Marielle Butters and some by international colleagues.

“I was also able to exchange ideas with colleagues from different countries and from different disciplines,” Frajzyngier said. “I was happy to note that some of those ideas have already enriched at least one new publication of mine. The years of support from CU do bring positive results!”

Frajzyngier’s stay in Naples coincided, by design, with the fourth Symposium on West African Languages.

“The symposium was a true feast for a linguist, because colleagues from France, Ivory Coast, Germany, United States, Poland, Nigeria, Italy, Cameroon, Portugal, Brazil and Austria, including both established scholars and PhD students, presented studies of hitherto-undescribed languages and studies of hitherto-unanalyzed issues,” Frajzyngier said.

Università degli Studi L’Orientale is the only university in Italy that is completely dedicated to the study of all social sciences and humanities, disciplines that are related to people and countries in Asia and in Africa, he observed.

The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

Since its establishment in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

The Fulbright Specialist Program, part of the larger Fulbright Program, was established in 2001 by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). The program pairs highly qualified U.S. academics and professionals with host institutions abroad to share their expertise, strengthen institutional linkages, hone their skills, gain international experience, and learn about other cultures while building capacity at their overseas host institutions.

Specialists, who represent a wide range of professional and academic disciplines, are competitively selected to join the Fulbright Specialist Roster based on their knowledge, skill sets and ability to make a significant contribution to projects overseas.

Frajzyngier is one of 400 U.S. citizens who shared their expertise abroad this year. His award is the 32nd to be won by a CU Boulder faculty member since 2002.

Fajzyngier earned his PhD from the University of Warsaw in 1968 and joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1970. He retired in 2021 after serving more than five decades on the faculty. He expressed gratitude for the 2022 Fulbright award:

“For me, nothing can replace the first-person experiences of living and working in another country,” he said. “It is also an excellent way to escape, at least for some time, the noise and preoccupations of daily life.”

With Fulbright support, CU Boulder linguist developed new approach to semantics of natural languages with international colleagues gathered in Italy.

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Land acknowledgment honors contributions of Indigenous peoples, history of land

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:09:20 +0000

Land acknowledgment honors contributions of Indigenous peoples, history of land Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/26/2022 - 09:09

CU Boulder has adopted a land acknowledgment recognizing its campus sits on land that is part of the traditional territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute and other Indigenous nations with historic and ongoing ties to the state.

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Collaborators preserve voices from the fire

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:50:38 +0000

Collaborators preserve voices from the fire Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/22/2022 - 15:50

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder anthropology professor, students collaborate with local museum to preserve narratives from the devastating Marshall Fire

Around 11 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2021, a wildfire ignited in dry grass near Marshall Road and Colo. 93 in Boulder County—and several months later, inspired a novel collaboration between the �鶹��Ƶ and a local history museum.

Driven by winds gusting up to 115 mph—more than 150% faster than “hurricane force” winds, according to the National Weather Service—the fire blew up almost immediately, sending choking clouds of smoke in a vast, eastward plume.

Forty minutes after firefighters first arrived, thousands of residents in Superior, Louisville, Broomfield and nearby areas were ordered to evacuate. By the time a snowstorm had doused the blaze some 36 hours later, it had roared through more than 6,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 structures, mostly homes, killed two and cost more than a half a billion dollars to fight, making it the most destructive fire in Colorado history.

At the top of the page: A view of a burned neighborhood in Superior. A grass fire fueled by 100 mph winds destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in Superior and Louisville (Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder). Above: A map of the extent of the Marshall Fire (Inciweb).

In the wake of the disaster, devastated staff at the Louisville Historical Muse um, some of whom had been forced to evacuate, wondered how they might help a shocked and reeling community understand and recover from the trauma.

“We are museum people, we have an oral-history program, and the answer was, one way we can help the community is with stories,” says Jason Hogstad, volunteer services museum associate.

Honoring the museum’s mission to share and preserve the stories and lives that “make up the heart and character of Louisville,” the staff created the Marshall Fire Story Project to facilitate ways for people affected by the fire in any way to share their experiences for the historical record. In February, the museum held the first on-site workshop and launched an online platform to gather residents’ stories.

Not long after, something unexpected happened: students at the �鶹��Ƶ stumbled upon the Marshall Fire project while seeking information about air quality in the wake of the fire for Assistant Professor Kate Goldfarb’s advanced practicing anthropology course.

“I’m developing a research project about community experiences of air quality, ‘Knowing Air,’” says Goldfarb, a Boulder native who returned to her hometown to teach at CU Boulder in 2015. “With the Marshall Fire, air quality and potential health impacts of dust and burned materials were an immediate concern.”

The students contacted Hogstad and the museum and asked if they could collaborate in some way. The museum shared some data, but the students were eager for a more hands-on experience, particularly speaking with those affected by the fire, which also impacted the CU Boulder community, with one former regent losing their home of four decades.

“It was the students who really piloted this effort,” Goldfarb says. “I trusted them and was impressed by their high regard for Jason and the Story Project.”

Goldfarb contacted Hogstad (whom she’d never met) to ask if he’d be interested in putting together a proposal for a $5,000 CU Boulder Community Outreach and Engagement Grant to support the project with student help.

Even though the request for proposals had an eight-day turn-around, the museum enthusiastically jumped in. The grant was awarded in June. One of Goldfarb’s practicing anthropology students, anthropology and linguistics major Emily Reynolds, will continue work on the project, along with incoming anthropology master’s student Lucas Rozell. The students will assist in “whatever needs to be done, transcription, video processing, mobile story-collecting” or anything else, Goldfarb says.

“The project’s purpose is threefold,” according to the grant application: “To create a community archive useable by community and academic researchers, provide a space for affected individuals to share their story (a critical part of processing trauma), and offer the entire community a place to have their voice heard and added to the historical record. By the end of the project, we hope to have all audio and video stories processed and ready for use by researchers.

We are museum people, we have an oral-history program, and the answer was, one way we can help the community is with stories.

The project will also capture hundreds of GoFundMe campaigns created in response to the fire.

These campaigns are a critical community-created source—most include a narrative of affected individuals and needs, updates documenting ongoing financial hardship and experiences in the first few months after the fire and provide insight into the role of community crowdsourced funding in the ongoing recovery.”

Goldfarb began focusing on trauma and storytelling as an undergraduate anthropology and English major at Rice University, where she wrote a thesis on the subject.

“I’ve had a long interest in narrative and storytelling, making meaning out of disruptive situations,” she says.

During graduate school at the University of Chicago, Goldfarb conducted ethnographic research in Japan, where she worked with children and alumni of the country’s child-welfare system to understand how people make sense of disruption and interpersonal trauma in their lives. After graduate school, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University and conducted research with mental health professionals focused on attachment and child welfare.

“People really do make sense of traumatic experiences through talking, narrativizing the past and present and what they think can be their futures,” Goldfarb says. “But it’s not just a cognitive and narrative focus. Creativity is a way of tapping into some things they wouldn’t be able to articulate and express themselves through art and other mediums.”

Hogstad, Goldfarb and the students hope that the grant will help spread the word to encourage anyone affected by the fire—in any way, even as a witness from thousands of miles away—to contribute their story.

Kate Goldfarb (left) and Jason Hogstad (right) are two of the leads for the Marshall Fire Story Project.

So far, the team has observed that people may have a hard time “claiming” their own experience of the fire. It’s easy to feel that others have had a harder time or could share a more noteworthy account, Goldfarb says. But she and Hogstad emphasize that the fire was a community experience, with all stories welcome.

“There’s no bounds on what your story is,” Hogstad says. “People can tell a story about the 24 hours after the fire hit, or two months later, working with FEMA, trying to navigate being underinsured, or four months on, living in a new place.”

As of mid-June, the project had collected 35 stories, with on-site sessions scheduled throughout the summer. Mobile sessions are planned for the fall, where the team will travel to affected communities to ease burdens of participation. The project will continue at least through the anniversary of the fire, Hogstad and Goldfarb say.

While the project is more open-ended than research pursuing a set of specific questions, Hogstad believes it will be no less valuable than quantitative work in the wake of the disaster.

“It creates an archive that can be used across disciplines, across fields in the future. Almost all of the great research into the fire is on the science side, so to have something coming from social science and the humanities is pretty unusual at this stage,” he says.

“I’m blown away by all the support for the project from Kate, the students, from CU. … I’ve worked in a history-related field for 15 years and never been part of something that feels as worthwhile.”

Anyone interested in learning more about the Marshall Fire Story Project is encouraged to reach out to Jason Hogstad, Kate Goldfarb, or the Louisville Historical Museum.

CU Boulder anthropology professor, students collaborate with local museum to preserve narratives from the devastating Marshall Fire.

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Linguist to help guide global English language learning body

Anonymous — Tue, 10 May 2022 21:46:38 +0000

Linguist to help guide global English language learning body Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/10/2022 - 15:46

Cay Leytham-Powell

CU Boulder’s Rai Farrelly hopes to use the board of directors position for TESOL International Organization to make English a more all-encompassing, all-inclusive language

A �鶹��Ƶ linguist has been appointed to the Board of Directors for TESOL International Organization, the organization recently announced.

Rai Farrelly, a teaching professor in linguistics and the coordinator for CU Boulder’s TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program, was selected by her peers to help lead the organization, which is the foremost global authority for teaching English, with more than 11,000 members from 169 countries.

Rai Farrelly, a linguistics teaching professor at CU Boulder, has been appointed to the Board of Directors for TESOL International Organization.

Beyond helping with budgeting and strategic planning, Farrelly hopes to use the position to help define and elevate the organization’s diversity, equity, inclusion and access efforts so that they don’t just stay with the leadership, but rather trickle down in a meaningful way to all the organization’s members. In turn, Farrelly hopes these efforts make English a more all-encompassing, all-inclusive language.

“It’s exciting just to be asked,” remarked Farrelly. “To be elected felt like a good validation for all the time and effort I’ve put into this career and this particular line of work.”

It was a combination of a love of languages and travel that got Farrelly into TESOL after receiving her bachelor’s in Spanish at the University of Utah. For Farrelly, like many who get into the profession, “teaching English was a doorway, a pathway, to get out into the world.”

While getting her PhD in TESOL at the University of Utah, however, Farrelly pivoted from travel and toward teaching educators, a passion spurred in part by working with Burundi refugee women.

These women had no literacy in their home languages, Farrelly said, and so she found herself wanting to know more about their background so she could teach them better. This led her to Tanzania, where she visited a refugee camp, meeting with her students’ families, and made connections in the neighboring village, where she was invited to help build a secondary school.

After coming back and raising money, Farrelly founded a nonprofit and, over the course of a few years, built the school. This project then grew into Project Wezesha, another nonprofit Farrelly founded that elevates educational opportunities for young people in Western Tanzania.

These efforts continue to influence Farrelly’s work and how she teaches future educators, she says.

“I have to remember when I’m preparing (future educators) that they aren’t always going to land in a high-tech classroom. They could end up in parts of the world where I don’t want them to be in the situation I was when I was teaching those Burundi women. I want them to be able to flex a little bit … think of ways where we can modify what we do to fit the teaching context.”

Farrelly went on to be an assistant professor in the MA TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) Program at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan, and an assistant professor in the applied linguistics department and MA TESOL Program at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, before coming to CU Boulder, where she has overseen the TESOL program since 2019.

“It’s really cool to see this program growing and thriving and getting new feet. It’s exciting to be part of,” commented Farrelly.

TESOL is an organization that brings you in and empowers you, and makes you feel like you’re part of something important.”

TESOL is the largest professional organization for teachers of English as a second or foreign language in the world. It provides continued learning opportunities for English language teachers as well as a yearly convention. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization also provided tools for online and remote learning in all parts of the world and assistance in making content accessible.

“The organization unifies all the efforts around the world, and I’m a huge proponent of teachers being a member of a community of practice. I think that’s where we go to learn, to reflect, to share, and so TESOL is a gigantic community of practice that brings a lot of people together,” said Farrelly, adding that TESOL is an organization that “brings you in and empowers you, and makes you feel like you’re part of something important.”

Farrelly will serve on the TESOL board until 2025.

CU Boulder’s Rai Farrelly hopes to use the board of directors position for TESOL International Organization to make English a more all-encompassing, all-inclusive language

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Students, staff, others honored for diversity work

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 20:10:03 +0000

Students, staff, others honored for diversity work Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/14/2022 - 14:10

Recipients, chosen by faculty committee, ‘work tirelessly and most times in the dark’ for diversity and inclusion

Students, employees and a unit are being honored for their efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in the �鶹��Ƶ College of Arts and Sciences.

The winners are the recipients of the second annual awards from ASCEND, or the Arts and Sciences Consortium of Committees on Climate, Equity, Inclusion and Diversity.

The 2022 winners were selected and announced by the Diversity Committee of the Arts and Sciences Council, which is the primary representative body for the college’s faculty.

Celine Dauverd, associate professor of history and diversity-committee member, said the awards aim to acknowledge the “outstanding work of faculty, staff and students who work tirelessly and most times in the dark” in support of diversity and inclusion.

Emily Frazier-Rath

The 2022 faculty winner is Emily Frazier-Rath, a lecturer of German through the Anderson Language and Technology Center (ALTEC). She is an active member of the Coalition of Women in German, the German Studies Association, the forum for Diversity and Decolonization and the German Curriculum, the Modern Language Association, and the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages/American Association of Teachers of German.

Additionally, she is the executive director of the Black German Heritage and Research Association, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and supporting the activities of Black Germans internationally and promoting scholarship relating to the historic and contemporary presence of Black people in Germany, Black Germans in the United States and beyond.

Claudia Numan

The 2022 staff winner is Claudia Numan, whose passion for volunteering is perhaps what best describes her, the committee states. Within a few months of joining CU Boulder as an academic advisor for physics and math students, she volunteered to join the physics department’s Equity, Inclusion and Cookies committee, where she has helped organize many workshops and events designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines.

She has also volunteered her time as an integral member of the CU Boulder Rural Network, which operates with no budget, and where she “put to work her remarkable combination of expertise and approachability to support rural students who often come from very diverse backgrounds,” the committee states.

Irfanul (Irfan) Alam

The graduate-student winner is Irfanul (Irfan) Alam, a PhD student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, who has been instrumental across campus in enhancing equity, diversity and inclusion. Alam has had a particularly large effect in the transformation of curricula, the committee states.

Alam has mentored underrepresented undergraduates through the SMART and the Uplift research program. As the Graduate and Professional Student Government DEI chair, Alam re-designed the DEI award in collaboration with BIPOC students to acknowledge the social-justice efforts taken by students and professionals for their departments.

Alam represented graduate student voices at the IDEA council and was asked by the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance to serve as a stakeholder for the Campus Culture Survey. As the Center for Teaching and Learning’s graduate student lead, Alam served as a pedagogical resource for teaching assistants in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Also, as one of the designers of Center for Teaching and Learning’s Just and Equitable Teaching micro-credential program, Alam established a network of faculty and staff members who will mentor participants undertaking DEI capstone projects.

Jordan Lee

Jordan Lee is this year’s ASCEND undergraduate student winner. Ever since joining CU Boulder in 2019 to study linguistics and geography, she has devoted her boundless energy to the advancement of DEI.

Following the latest wave of violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, she co-founded a group called Unmask the Racism. The impressive work she has done for this student-led initiative includes organizing social media campaigns and workshops designed to raise awareness about the history and contributions of the AAPI community. She has also been a strong advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community.

One of her projects was especially noted by the committee: the Queer Conversations and Cookies event series, which created an empowering space that, in Jordan’s words, “foster vulnerability, authenticity and inclusion.”

At the top of the page and above: Honors Residential Academic Program students in Smith Hall use artwork to demonstrate diversity, inclusivity and community.

The 2022 Departmental DEI Passion Project Winner is the Honors Residential Academic Program (HRAP), which launched a mural project titled "Deeper than Demographics.”

The mural is a visual representation of the HRAP’s goal to depict and integrate the themes of diversity, inclusivity and intersectionality into its community living and learning spaces.

The original concept, which provides the foundation of the mural, is to demonstrate social inclusivity as it is perceived and represented through student voices.

HRAP students participated in focus groups, art workshops and individual interviews to generate information that led to the mural. The mural contains images based on student voices and includes student haikus and framed student artwork, which is updated through an art competition each year.

The Arts and Sciences Council’s ASCEND and Departmental DEI Passion Project Awards are supported by James W.C. White, acting dean, and Patricia Gonzalez, assistant dean of inclusive practice. The diversity committee includes:

Cecilia J. Pang, theatre and dance, chair
Aun H. Ali, religious studies
Celine Dauverd, history
Kieran Marcellin Murphy, French and humanities
Stephanie Su, art and art history
Nicholas Villaneuva, ethnic studies

ASCEND Awards go to faculty, staff, graduate students and undergraduate students who have demonstrated a commitment to the principles and actions of diversity and inclusion in curriculum, creative teaching practice, community building endeavors and/or communication.

Departmental DEI Passion Projects honor a department or unit that has completed a special project that promotes DEI and creates a lasting impact by applying one or more of the following values: creativity, originality, interdisciplinary, social impact and sustainability.

Recipients, chosen by faculty committee, ‘work tirelessly and most times in the dark’ for diversity and inclusion.

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What the Wordle trend can teach us about language and technology

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:43:49 +0000

What the Wordle trend can teach us about language and technology Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/09/2022 - 12:43

Computational linguist Alexis Palmer spoke with CU Boulder Today about the popular online word game, strategies to win and how Wordle offshoots could benefit lesser-known languages.

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