Slavic and East European Languages
2024 Streams
Beyond Horizon: Alternatives and Transgressions in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Polish Culture
Corpus-Based Investigations of Russian to Inform Pedagogical Practices
Death and Dying in Eurasian Culture
Decolonizing the Russian Classics
Reimagining the Teaching of Slavic and East European Literatures and Cultures
Subversive Sexualities in Slavic, Eastern European, and Central Asian Literatures and Cultures
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Translation in the Teaching and Learning of Slavic Languages and Cultures
Organizers: Shannon Quinn (Michigan State University), Liudmila Klimanova (University of Arizona)
This stream will focus on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine translation (MT) in the teaching, learning, and research of Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures. Machine translators, such as Google Translate, have been available to students and researchers for over fifteen years. Their output has improved to the point that in many cases it has become impossible to tell that it was done by a machine. Similarly, ChatGPT, a language model that uses artificial intelligence to produce text, burst onto the scene in late 2022 and is prompting many discussions about how it and other AI tools may support or disrupt education. This stream will examine several angles of some of the issues and opportunities facing us from AI and MT. Some of the issues under consideration will be the impact of AI/MT availability on student perceptions of language learning; suggestions for policies regarding AI/MT; strategies for teaching students to use AI/MT tools responsibly; dealing with AI tools in content courses like literature that are often assessed based on student writing; strategies for using AI/MT tools in our own teaching and research.
Beyond Horizon: Alternatives and Transgressions in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Polish Culture
Organizers: Łukasz Siciński (Indiana University Bloomington) and Łukasz Wodzyński (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
The concept of horizon evokes a feeling of openness and an air of potentiality – a sense of wonder that invites us to explore the unknown. At the same time, we always perceive the horizon from a particular vantage point, which means it is anchored in and inseparable from a specific context. This context determines our vision, imposing confines on what we can see and, by extension, what we know or even think as possible.
Our three-panel stream seeks to investigate how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish culture explores this tension between openness and closure, aiming to address the theme of “opening horizons” from multiple theoretical perspectives and across disciplinary lines. We are especially interested in papers that explore productive engagements with existing cultural models and innovative attempts to go beyond established paradigms.
Corpus-Based Investigations of Russian to Inform Pedagogical Practices
Organizers: Olesya Kisselev (University of South Carolina), Mikhail Kopotev (University of Helsinki), Aleksey Novikov (Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center)
With the increase in availability and improved user experience of Russian language corpora and corpus-analytic instruments, the field of Russian language learning and teaching has begun to widely employ corpus linguistics tools with the goal of informing the language curriculum and language teaching approaches. For example, several scholars have successfully implemented corpus-based methodologies to analyze language learner development through the study of linguistic complexity (e.g., Kisselev & Alsufieva, 2017; Kisselev et al., 2022a, Kisselev et al. 2022b; Novikov, 2021), vocabulary (Comer, 2023), phraseology (Kopotev et al., 2020; Kopotev et al, forthcoming), specific grammatical constructions (Apresjian, 2017; Peirce, 2018), and genre (Kostina & Bar-Asher Siegal, forthcoming). Another line of research (Katinskaia et al., 2018; Novikov & Vinokurova, 2022) explores the use of corpora in the development of teaching materials and tasks.
The proposed Stream is an opportunity to capitalize on the recent progress by bringing together scholars working in the field of corpus-based research and Russian language practitioners. The Stream, organized in two panels plus a practical workshop, will provide an opportunity to Russian language scholars and practitioners to learn more about the advancements of corpus-based research and its pedagogical implications, as well as about implementation of corpus tools in the language classroom.
References:
Apresjan, V. (2017). Russkie possessivnye konstrukcii s nulevym i vyraženynnym glagolom: pravila i ošibki. Russkij jazyk v naučnom osvesčenii, 33, 86-116.
Katinskaia, A., Nouri, J., & Yangarber, R. (2018). Revita: a language-learning platform at the intersection of ITS and CALL. In Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Kisselev, O., & Alsufieva, A. (2017). The development of syntactic complexity in the writing of Russian language learners: a longitudinal corpus study. Russian Language Journal, 67, 27-53.
Kisselev, O. (2019). Word order patterns in the writing of Heritage and Second language learners of Russian. Russian Language Journal, 69, 149-174.
Kisselev, O., Kopotev, M., & Klimov, A. (2021). Syntactic complexity measures as indices of language proficiency in writing: Focus on heritage learners of Russian. Heritage Language Journal, Special issue on Complexity in Heritage Languages, 18, 1-30.
Kisselev, O., Soyan, R., Pastushenkov D., & Merrill, J. (2022). Measuring writing development and proficiency gains using indices of lexical and syntactic complexity: Evidence from longitudinal Russian learner corpus data. Modern Language Journal. 1-20.
Kopotev, M., Kisselev, O., & Polinsky, M. (2020). Collocations in heritage Russian: Lexical strategies of heritage speakers of Russian. International Journal of Bilingualism, Special issue on the Effects of Limited Input, 1-28.
Kopotev, M., Klimov, A., & Kisselev, O. (in press). Phraseological complexity in L2 Russian: Focus on collocations. In I. Hennecke, E. Wiesenger, & T. Perevozchikova (Eds.). International Journal of Bilingualism, Special Issue on Multilingual Units in Multilinguals Speakers.
Novikov, A., & Vinokurova, V. (2022). Learner corpus as a medium for tasks. In Task-Based Instruction for Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language (pp. 47-64). Routledge.
Peirce, G. (2018). Representational and processing constraints on the acquisition of case and
gender by Heritage and L2 Learners of Russian: A corpus study. Heritage Language Journal, 15(1), 95-111, 2018.
Death and Dying in Eurasian Culture
Organizers: Erica Camisa Morale (University of Southern California), Simon Garibyan (University of Southern California), Kate Tomashevskaya (University of Southern California)
As medical advances increase human longevity and innovative technologies promise to replace the human body with incorruptible silicon vehicles for consciousness, cultural responses to mortality and death acquire a special topicality. While finitude is part of the shared human condition, attitudes toward and beliefs about it vary widely across time and space. This stream aims to examine how death—simultaneously clear in its finality and baffling in its mysteriousness—has been conceptualized in the Eurasian world, and how ideas about it are mediated in words and images. Our stream aims to continue the reflection on the meaning of death in the Eurasian world—understood here within a transnational framework—by challenging our current understanding of how distinct media conceptualize death. We would like to bring together scholars problematizing the issue of death—both physical and metaphorical—today. Three panels will examine the interplay between death and the media of literature, visual arts, and cinema within Eurasian culture, with a particular attention on how one shapes the other. We welcome papers from scholars specializing in different fields—including but not limited to literary and visual studies, anthropology, and sociology—in order to broaden the field of thanatology in Eurasian culture.
Decolonizing the Russian Classics
Organizers: Susan McReynolds (Northwestern University), Alexander Burry (The Ohio State University)
The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has prompted renewed attention to Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation as colonizing powers. One important area of inquiry is the extent to which Russian/Soviet colonialism has shaped Russophone literature and the various national literatures produced within the borders of Russia. “Decolonizing Russophone Literature” will provide a needed forum for the growing field of anti-Colonialist Slavic literary studies. We envision a stream of three panels; depending on the submissions we receive, they could be organized by period—potentially spanning the 18th through 21st centuries—or themes, such as images of cultural, ethnic, and religious others in Russophone literature, or images of Russian power in literature produced by authors from minority cultures within the empire. Perspectives on Russia as empire from literatures beyond imperial borders are also welcome. These panels will highlight the work of scholars who are opening new perspectives on Russophone literature, exploring the complex ways this diverse body of texts questions and/or participates in Russian imperial discourse.
Reimagining the Teaching of Slavic and East European Literatures and Cultures
Organizer: David S. Danaher (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
The stream's goal is to generate discussion—and offer concrete models—regarding how we might reimagine the teaching of Slavic literatures and cultures to students in the third decade of the 21st century. Possible topics include but are not limited to: rethinking assumptions about the literary/cultural canon, putting the study of Slavic languages and cultures in conversation with other Humanities disciplines, refreshing the teaching of survey courses, applying scholarly discourse devoted to the teaching of literature and culture to specific texts or authors. The stream is ideally envisioned as consisting of two panels plus a roundtable with the roundtable aimed at workshopping and promoting contributions to a planned volume titled Cultural Texts and Significant Learning Experiences (Academic Studies Press).
Subversive Sexualities in Slavic, Eastern European, and Central Asian Literatures and Cultures
Organizer: Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS)
The Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) would like to organize a stream on subversive sexualities in Slavic, Eastern European, and Central Asian Literatures and Cultures. This stream of panels will interrogate how writers and artists from this area of the world have constructed alternate creative realities that go against prevailing norms of gender and sexuality. All time periods are welcome, as are interdisciplinary topics. Topics under discussion will include: attachment and community in and beyond romantic relationships; surviving gender-related trauma and sexual violence; non-normative mothers, fathers, and parents; censorship and other challenges non-normative authors face in publishing their work and building and maintaining readership. Additionally, the panel will also consider ways in which we can include subversive themes, works, and authors in more mainstream classes and scholarly studies.
We encourage presentations focusing on creative production that feature subversive or deviant representations of gender, sexuality, and personal identity, the relationship of gender to state and political power, and representations of masculinity, femininity, queerness, transgender, and intersex identity.