Friday, April 13, 2012

Scripts, Smudges, and Static: Materializing a Minority Language of Siberia

The Department of Anthropology, the Department of Central Eurasian Studies, and the International Studies Program present



Scripts, Smudges, and Static: Materializing a Minority Language of Siberia



By Dr. Kathryn Graber



Monday April 16, 4:00pm, IMU Redbud Room



Mass media make fleeting, inchoate language into the tangible “stuff” of daily life, fixing speech into writing, newsprint, airwaves, and binary code. What is enabled and obscured in these semiotic transitions, and how might it matter for minority language revitalization? In this talk, Kathryn Graber will discuss her current research on language, media, and materiality in contemporary Buryatia, an ethnic republic of the Russian Federation.

Dr. Kathryn Graber is a Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Trained as a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist (PhD 2012, University of Michigan), she is broadly interested in language and media and has conducted extensive research on the relationship between mass media and minority language use in the Buryat territories of Russia.

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