Second-year of study M.A. supplementary seminars (2MA SUP) for summer term 2024–2025 (Full-time programmes)

What is this list?

This is a list of supplementary seminars we intend to launch in the summer term (February–June) in our full-time M.A. programme in English philology (Filologia angielska) whose second year of study is the academic year 2024–2025. This list is intended for:

  1. Students at the Faculty of English who are about to enter the second term of the second year of their full-time M.A. programme: this is your reference point before your enrolment into supplementary seminars;
  2. Candidates for our full-time programmes: this list gives you a snapshot of what supplementary seminars were on offer for the study cycle that started in 2023.

How to navigate the list?

The list is sorted by name of the teacher. The format is as follows: the title of the supplementary seminar, the name of the teacher, and the description of the supplementary seminar.

Media ecology: Insights into media as environments

prof. UAM dr hab. Janusz Kaźmierczak

It is tempting to think of media simply as technologies, or, in other contexts, as the institutions that use and control these technologies. However, media can be regarded as so much more: they can be seen as environments which, through their capacities and constraints, enable the development of human society and culture. This was so at the time when the printing press was invented, and this is certainly so today, in the era of digital media. Referring back to the contributions of the pioneers of this approach, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, the seminar focuses on the ways in which digital media impact present-day society and culture, from everyday interactions to literary, artistic and scientific pursuits. In this way, the seminar can offer additional insights for students working on a variety of MA projects in both literary studies and linguistics. Assessment will be based on the quality of participation in class discussions, as well as the preparation of a short project.

Language and Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

prof. UAM dr hab. Ronald Kim

Sociolinguistics deals with all aspects of language in its social setting, including variation within and among speakers, contact among speakers of different dialects or languages, and the spread of changes in time and space. In addition to what is traditionally called “the sociology of language”, modern “variationist sociolinguistics” is concerned with the quantitative study of linguistic variation with respect to factors such as socioeconomic class, age, gender, and ethnicity.

This course surveys the main findings of sociolinguistic research, from the pioneering studies of William Labov the 1960s to the growing body of scholarship today. We will address contemporary debates on topics such as variation and change at the individual and community level, social stratification and social networks, style shifting and code switching, the complex roles of gender and class, ethnic and racial variation, and different types of dialect and language contact and their consequences.

By the end of the semester, you should have an appreciation for the importance of socially conditioned variation at all levels of linguistic structure, and the need to consider language from the perspective of the speech community: the people who speak the languages we study. You will also have the opportunity to do you own fieldwork!

Bibliography

  • Mesthrie, Rajend, Joan Swann, Ana Deumert, and William L. Leap. 2009. Introducing Sociolinguistics. Second edition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2011. Introducing Sociolinguistics. Second edition. London/New York: Routledge.
  • Trudgill, Peter. 2000. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. Fourth edition. London: Penguin.
  • Van Herk, Gerard. 2018. What Is Sociolinguistics? Second edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

Language in selected (inter-/trans-)disciplinary perspectives

prof. UAM dr hab. Elżbieta Wąsik

During the seminar, the students will broaden and systematize their knowledge about the diversity of approaches to language as an abstract system of arbitrary signs serving as a means of human signification and communication. Starting from recalling the traditionally distinguished aspects of linguistic research as resulting from the theoretical, descriptive, comparative and applied as well as synchronic and diachronic points of view, we will differentiate between the isolationist and integrationist positions in the study of language. Accordingly, we will pay attention to the forms of manifestation and modes of existence of language as an object of study of linguists and a relational property of objects of study of representatives of other disciplines. Understanding why, apart from linguistics, non-linguistic sciences are interested in particular languages in their social environments will be possible by defining language in terms of sets of extra-organismal and intra-organismal properties of its speakers and by recognizing the difference between systemic and non-systemic facts of language. For our discussions, we will introduce the distinction between interdisciplinarity (as the application of one perspective to many investigative objects) and transdisciplinarity (as the study of an investigative object from many disciplinary perspectives) for researching the complexity of language in its environmental conditions.