Global Humanities

Training objectives The course in "Politics, Institutions and Cultures of Japan": aims to promote critical reasoning over linguistic variability via an implementation of knowledge and understanding of the socio-cultural contest surrounding linguistic phenomena, and it will aim at developing a practical framework for reseearching linguistic minorities; it tackles the study of the cultural assets into which minority discourse is embedded and shows the wide variety of perspectives developed over the field of study, enabling the student to use the critical insight gained with the course in s multi-cultural fashion. Students are expected to extend their interests and abilities to other disciplines and several different chronological and cultural contexts. Overview The course strives to enquiry the political reality of today's Japan by means of a critical rethinking of the intertwining of linguistic variability in Japanese society and the covert nationalistic stances surrounding the soft power-oriented trends in contemporary governmental policies. The course will especially tackle such pivotal issues via a thorough investigation of several examples of linguistic diversity, i.e. languages of minorities in Japan, with a keen eye towards multilingualism and minor-languages groups that have emerged in the last decades under the growing influence of globalizing technological advances.