Lecture

104 years since the Japanese state formally designated a standard spoken language, Edwin Everhart argues that standardization is still an active process. Focusing on language of the Touhoku region, Everhart describes how some language users resist the hegemony of standard language and the discourse that local dialect is obsolescent, ugly, or backward.

Ever since Deng Xiaoping effectively de-radicalized China in the 1980s, debates have swirled around which path China would follow. Would it democratize? Would it embrace capitalism? Would the Communist Party's rule be able to withstand globalization and the internet? One thing few seriously considered: Mao Zedong would make a political comeback. This live interview with Jude Blanchette will discuss the return of the populist enthusiasm for the Great Helmsman's policies, and what it means for the present and future of Chinese communism.

“Constitutional morality” has become a central term in Indian jurisprudence over the past decade, particularly in
cases involving LGBT rights, naming a distinctive set of constitutional values including tolerance of difference and
respect for pluralism and individual rights. The term was first used in this context by B.R. Ambedkar in 1948, in the
debates over the draft constitution, although he defined it differently: Ambedkar’s constitutional morality was

One of the challenges that language professionals face in our increasingly diverse communities is establishing a balance between diversity and language standards. While Standard Japanese can be considered a common language to interact with the majority of Japanese speakers who may not be accustomed to nonnative speech (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, 2012), the strict requirement to follow the monolingual standard may disregard the legitimacy of multilingual speakers, including nonstandard dialect speakers.

Shortages, bottlenecks, and over-centralization in the Soviet economy made the distribution of goods uneven, limited, and, to some extent, non-existent. But it would be a mistake to see the Soviet economy as only a planned, top-down system. Interwoven within it were shadow economies with illegal schemes that the innovative and corrupt exploited. What do these shadow economies say about Soviet everyday life, informal networks, and corruption, and how did their proliferation reflect and shape the realities of Soviet socialism?

Shortly after independence, Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, embarked on a socialist experiment: the ujamaa, the villagization initiative of 1967-1975. Ujamaa, or "familyhood" in Swahili, both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy by seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal village to achieve national development.

This talk introduces the social scientist and economic philosopher, Wang Yanan, and his 1930s Chinese critique of the Austrian School of Economics. Wang was an original translator of Marx, Smith, and Ricardo, and by the late 1930s, he had turned his attention to the seeming "common sense" of the Austrians in order to thoroughly refute their flat version of the world.

Join Professor Robert Hellyer of Wake Forest University for a discussion on the socio-economic history of green tea in America and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Income inequality and what to do about it is a hot button political issue throughout our world. Much this disparity is the result of how the value of labor is calculated. How much is a worker's labor worth? How is it measured? Namely, how is it commodified? This live interview with Martha Lampland will discuss these questions from an unlikely place--socialist Hungary--to shed light on how economists in a society without a labor market nonetheless determined the value of labor and what this says about socialism and capitalism.

Manipur & Northeast India is a region of immense geo-strategic importance that shares borders with five countries namely Myanmar, Bangladesh, China, Nepal and Bhutan. The region, home to 45 million indigenous people belonging to 272 beautiful ethnic groups has been facing the onslaught of violent conflict for the last 72 years. A martial law called the Armed Forces(Special Power)Act has been imposed in the region for the last 61 years which is a violation of basic fundamental rights.