The world of the early twenty-first century is one divided by factionalism and suspicion, and connected by new channels of communication that are uneditable, instantaneous, and anonymous. Therefore the most important thing a modern president must know in order to be effective is how to use language,  both interpretively and actively, both domestically and globally. […]

Foreignness-emotionally charged-is boundless in its capacity to otherize, peripheralize, and silence. It is not limited by the very same boundaries it seeks to draw-the boundaries may be lifted, readjusted, shifted, moved…one can be enforeigned in different ways, through different lenses, lenses that seek to capture the external, in ways that-ironically-internalize the object of foreignizing. We […]

Reading a provocative post entitled The Abortion Amendment by fellow FITizen Prof. Robin Lakoff on the newly started Berkeley Blog, I was reminded of an event that rattled me a few weeks ago on campus. Berkeley Students for Life (BSL) apparently invited the more→

The newly constituted Maharashtra Assembly in India was the site of an eventful brawl when Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers prevented Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Azmi from taking his oath of office in Hindi: as soon as he began taking the oath, the workers snatched his mike and attempted to shred the […]

One of the major news stories doing the rounds of the blogosphere and the “Internets” is the recent Rick Warren interview on CNN’s Larry King Live. The interview yielded answers from Warren that seemed in direct contradiction to his very recent earlier stance on California’s Proposition 8 (aimed at “illegalizing” gay marriage).

Here’s […]

In a recent talk by Claire Kramsch, she said: “Transcultural competence is not the bland coexistence of multiple cultures under the happy banners of diversity. It is the much more risky circulation of values across historical and ideological timescales; the negotiation of non-negotiable identities and beliefs.”  

What does it mean to negotiate the […]

This past Thursday, I attended Language Matters: Strengthening Asian and Pacific Islander Language Education at Berkeley. The stated aim of the event, according to the program brochure, was “to promote the creation of majors and minors for marginalized API languages like Korean, Tagalog, Thai, Tamil, Vietnamese, Khmer, etc, and to promote labor equity for […]