Online Eduatinment Videos - Recontextualizing and Reconceptualizing Expert Discourse in a Participatory Web-culture

The online world is becoming more and more edutainment, where learning, getting informed and entertained seem to be part of one and the same activity. As a result of this current fascination, people are drawn increasingly towards a new genre, i.e. free online 20-minute long lectures that borrow from film and storytelling techniques, that are offering an engaging series of speeches and even courses in many different scientific subjects. Though English as a lingua franca is still the dominant language of the internet, as a result of a growing new trend, namely crowdsourcing translation, knowledge dissemination is further enhanced and is now reaching further into many different cultures, allowing even the so-called minor languages to regain dignity and circulate, by engaging native speakers from different cultural backgrounds. This paper offers an overview on the phenomenon of online edutainment considering the role played by collaborative users who not only enjoy but also create and translate content. In addition, a case study focused on TED Talks allows a more in depth analysis of the new genre and the increasing need for subtitling scripts

Very nice! How Kazakhstan uses nation branding for external legitimization

https://www.ester.ee/record=b5407008*es

Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL)

The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL) was founded in 2014 at Indiana University by Dr. Öner Özçelik, the residing director of the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR). As the nation’s sole U.S. Department of Education funded Language Resource Center focusing on the languages of the Central Asian Region, CeLCAR’s main mission is to strengthen and improve the nation’s capacity for teaching and learning Central Asian languages through teacher training, research, materials development projects, and dissemination. As part of this mission, CeLCAR has an ultimate goal to unify and fortify the Central Asian language learning community by facilitating networking between linguists and language educators, encouraging research projects that will inform language instruction, and provide opportunities for professionals in the field to both showcase their work and receive feedback from their peers. Thus ConCALL was established to be the first international academic conference to bring together linguists and language educators in the languages of the Central Asian region, including both the Altaic and Eastern Indo-European languages spoken in the region, to focus on research into how these specific languages are represented formally, as well as acquired by second/foreign language learners, and also to present research driven teaching methods. Languages served by ConCALL include, but are not limited to: Azerbaijani, Dari, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Lokaabharan, Mari, Mongolian, Pamiri, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Shughnani, Tajiki, Tibetan, Tofalar, Tungusic, Turkish, Tuvan, Uyghur, Uzbek, Wakhi and more!The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics held at Indiana University on 16-17 May 1014 was made possible through the generosity of our sponsors: Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR), Ostrom Grant Programs, IU's College of Arts and Humanities Center (CAHI), Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center (IAUNRC), IU's School of Global and International Studies (SGIS), IU's College of Arts and Sciences, Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (SRIFIAS), IU's Department of Central Eurasian Studies (CEUS), and IU's Department of Linguistics

Body, Personhood and Privacy: Perspectives on the Cultural Other and Human Experience

This book studies how the concepts of body, personhood and privacy can be expanded across disciplinary borders. Notwithstanding the diversity of empirical material and theoretical frameworks, the chapters suggest innovative tools for common key issues: dialogue with the cultural Other, the appropriation of space, and personality. Human embodiment and ethical aspects of representing and regulating cultural practices are a major focus through much of the volume. The book is illustrated with some of the finest examples of Tartu street art

Ethical Management of Speech among Kazak Nomads in the Chinese Altai

Grappling with cultural conceptions of what makes a good person and a bad person, this dissertation examines how one’s moral character is communicated through speech and other signs in everyday interaction among the Altai Kazaks. In particular, I highlight the Kazak nomads’ honorific speech as a powerful means through which they can invoke the morally loaded ideal of modesty and other related ethical categories. Relying primarily on participant observation, I conducted my fieldwork among Kazak nomads in the Altai Mountains of Xinjiang, China between 2012 and 2014. I analyzed the use of honorific/non-honorific alternants in varying contexts, together with their uptake or other consequences in discourse, as well as evaluative commentaries upon them. My analysis of the everyday interaction among the Altai Kazaks resulted in several findings. First, Kazak social relations are classed into those that require the use of honorifics and those that require non-honorific expressions; however, there are many “middle-range” relations in which both styles of communication are considered appropriate, allowing variation (by personality, mood, and social strategy) among different speakers in their use of deferential styles. These different types of social relations appear to be modeled on the traditional Kazak kinship structure, in which relative age, as well as the distinction between joking and avoidance relations, plays a significant role. Second, such stylistic variation is understood to be indicative of one’s ethical qualities, rather than reflecting one’s social-structural position. Perhaps due to the relatively simple grammatical paradigm of Kazak honorifics, the speaker’s use of honorific forms can reveal little about his or her sociological background. On the contrary, knowledge of all the grammatical forms in Kazak honorifics is considered to be attainable for every adult. Because everyone is supposed to know and control all the required linguistic forms, the speaker is held responsible for his or her linguistic choices, and thus subject to others’ evaluations with powerful moral loadings, such as “overbearing,” “humble”, “sycophantic,” “considerate,” “childish,” “patient,” “lacking discipline,” and the like. Moreover, this ethical dimension of one’s linguistic (and non-linguistic) choices becomes all the more apparent in the aforementioned middle-range relations, where the speaker has a choice between multiple pragmatically possible options. In my research, I found ample evidence of discourse that evaluates the agentive choices made through particular linguistic (and non-linguistic) forms in particular contexts. Among Kazak nomads in the Chinese Altai, the communicative style one chooses to use in various social contexts, especially in the middle-range relations, is viewed in moral, rather than sociological, terms. Third, underlying the Altai Kazaks’ variation in their communicative style and the evaluative discourse about it is the ethics of modesty. While studies of many other better known honorific systems have shown that the choice of “courteous” linguistic forms is often seen to reflect the speaker’s aristocratic ancestry or affinity with the royal court, my ethnographic research finds that in Altai Kazaks’ language ideology, the dominant cultural image of honorific speech is self-lowering ‘modesty,’ which includes such qualities as mildness, smallness, quietness, slowness, and maturity, while non-honorific speech is understood to express self-lifting ‘arrogance,’ which consists of harshness, largeness loudness, rapidity, and immaturity. I argue that the individual’s ethical concern in Altai Kazak honorific speech is focused on displaying the image of the modest person at the moment of interaction, rather than on merely fulfilling certain sociologically prescribed obligations.PHDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144066/1/ujinkim_1.pd

A linguistic ethnographic perspective on Kazakhstan’s trinity of languages: language ideologies and identities in a multilingual university community

This thesis presents a linguistic ethnographic study of language ideologies and identities in a multilingual, university community in Kazakhstan: a university aspiring to put Kazakhstan’s ‘Trinity of Languages’ project, aimed at developing societal tri-lingualism in Kazakh, Russian and English, into practice. Data was collected at a Kazakhstani university from 2012 to 2013, combining participant-observation and fieldnotes, audio recordings and interviews. Drawing on the concept of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981), the research investigates how young people draw on ideologies of separate and flexible multilingualism (Blackledge and Creese 2010) and on the often contested indexicalities of Kazakh, Russian and English linguistic resources to negotiate identities as multilingual people in Kazakhstan, particularly in contexts of performance, and stance-taking. Consideration of these ideological and linguistic resources also sheds light on Kazakhstan’s wider ‘processes of ideological transformation’ (Smagulova 2008:195) and their real-life implications for multilingual people. Furthermore, the analysis highlights how participants construct stances towards translanguaging (Garcia 2009) and suggests that acts of contextualisation, which frame interactions as being more or less ‘on-stage’ or ‘off-stage’, shape the way that speakers draw on linguistic resources and their indexical meanings, and how these contexts can afford or constrain speaker agency in the negotiation of identities

An analysis of the roles and activities of stakeholders in reviving and promoting the disrupted traditional cultural heritage of the Kazakh people

ABSTRACT Following the dissolution of the USSR (1988-1991), all Central Asian countries proclaimed their independence including Kazakhstan in 1991. With great freedom came great responsibility as the newly emerged countries had to rebuild and reinvent themselves to regain their political sovereignty and cultural identities. While much of the research into the role of cultural heritage in the postcolonial revival has been undertaken in the Africa and Commonwealth countries, comparatively little investigation has been carried out on the area of Central Asia. Representative of the region, Kazakhstan with its multifaceted history, intricate geopolitical position, disrupted heritage and contested demographics, is worthy of particular attention. Before the Russian expansion (1731) the Kazakh people were nomads who peregrinated to the north in the summer and to the south in the winter with their herds of domesticated animals. However, Russian colonial and Soviet collectivisation policy disrupted not only the Kazakh nomadic lifestyle but also their traditional cultural heritage. In order to deepen understanding of this history of cultural loss, reconstruction and preservation, this research examines the main features of the nomadic cultural heritage of the Kazakh people before and after the Russian/Soviet rule. Two aims direct this research: to assess the impact of the Russian colonisation of the Kazakh steppe on the traditional nomadic cultural heritage of the Kazakh people, and to analyse the roles and activities of identified stakeholders in reviving, preserving and promoting this heritage. Efforts to protect and promote cultural heritage require the engagement of various stakeholders. However, no extensive research has concentrated on the role and activities of stakeholders in the preservation of cultural heritage in postcolonial ii countries. Therefore, this research aims to examine the perceived roles of the government, international organisations (UNESCO), and non-governmental organisations in the protection of the cultural heritage of the Kazakh people. These stakeholders have significant but different perspectives concerning cultural heritage. The research shows that main motivation for the Government of Kazakhstan to revive and preserve its traditional cultural heritage is to build a national identity. The demographic composition of Kazakhstan posed a dilemma as the countryʼs government had to choose how to ethnically, culturally and ethnolinguistically define Kazakh identity as paramount without alienating other ethnic groups living in Kazakhstan. This research adopts a qualitative method. Interviews and textual analysis are the main data sources, to which thematic analysis has been applied in order to identity common themes and concerns. A multi-sited ethnographic research takes place in Qyzylorda, Oral, Almaty and Astana/Nur-Sultan cities where the researcher includes representatives from practitioners, governmental organisations, international organisations and non-governmental organisations responsible for the development and preservation of the cultural heritage of the Kazakh people. The present research applies several conceptual frameworks including Said's "Orientalism" (1978), collective memory, and Nora's (1989) concept of "sites of memory”. This research contributes to the academic literature associated with the future work and policies of international organisations, NGOs and government authorities in developing mechanisms and frameworks to support the revival and development of identities and cultural heritage in Kazakhstan