Children acquire their native language without explicit instruction. Students explore the stages of language acquisition and the challenges that children face in terms of their socioeconomic environment and their genetics. The course covers language acquisition stages for all linguistic levels with focus on crosslinguistic differences. We present behavioral methods related to studying language development in young children and key theoretical questions linking language and cognition. A significant focus is on language/literacy disorders developing in early childhood.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union laid claim to a landmass encompassing much of Eastern Europe, the circumpolar Arctic, and Central Asia. In engaging the populations that occupied this stretch of Eurasia, Soviet power observed a twofold approach: promoting ethnic minorities' and Indigenous peoples' national cultures, while simultaneously centering Russian as the shared tongue of an international socialist project.

Bayesian statistics refers to a statistical paradigm that has its roots in Bayes' theorem, where prior belief and data can be combined to update our understanding of a particular problem in what is known as the posterior. In this class, you can expect to combine your knowledge of probability and statistics to develop and apply Bayesian thinking to statistical modeling. Possible topics include conjugate families, posterior simulation, regression and classification, and hierarchical modeling. R statistical software will be used.

"Money makes the world go round." "Money talks." "Time is money." Money permeates our lives. We engage in economic transactions, relations, and markets on a daily basis; yet, we rarely think about the social bases of economic life. What is money? Are we driven by rationality or morality? How are different markets structured? What explains growing inequality and indebtedness? This course applies the theoretical and empirical tools of sociology to study economic behavior.

Who are you? This course asks: how have the 20th and 21st-century social sciences constructed the self, and what are the consequences of these understandings? Topics will include the major shifts in historical understandings of the self in the West, including the growth of "identity;" the development and impact of medicalization and scientization in the social sciences; the competing theoretical traditions of the self in sociology; cultural meanings and stigma; and how dominant Western constructions of the self influence global understandings.

This course situates ethnography as an engaged practice, and asks, how can scholars turn community engagement into formal research? With an emphasis on observation and community-based learning, this course requires time spent off campus in a domain of community-recognized need. Using a grounded theoretical perspective cultivated across the semester, students will build an actualizable research proposal as a final course product.

Marxist social theory has been and continues to be a powerful intellectual influence throughout the globe. Yet Marxist social theory is far from unified, as it has proliferated into a bewildering number of perspectives that are sometimes at odds with each other. This course will explore some of these different versions of Marxism. We will begin with brief excerpts from the revolutionary writings of Lenin and Mao, and then examine examples from Black Marxism, Marxist feminism, the Frankfurt School, critiques of capitalist realism, and degrowth communism, among other perspectives.

The concept of linguistic justice refers to the right to communicate and engage in the language and variety in which one feels more comfortable and powerful, as the foundation of equitable access to social and political life. Under this framework, this course examines the role of language in promoting or denying social justice. We will explore languaging -- language as a social practice related to constructing meaning and knowledge -- in areas such as education, law, immigration, health care, artificial intelligence, race and ethnicity ideologies, among others.

An introduction to the history and vocabulary of West African dance, emphasizing the central role that dance plays in African cultures. This class will introduce students to movements from traditional concepts to neo-traditional West African dance forms and the African Diaspora. Students will learn to identify the aesthetic principles and develop physical and artistic skills such as explicit sound, music, and movement connection; call and response; body isolation; and the individuality of movement expressions.

"Die before dying." "Set fire to heaven, and douse the fires of hell." "Be consumed by Love, until only the Beloved exists and you don't." "The perceptible world is like a mirage, veiling and disclosing the presence of the imperceptible Real." These are some of the aphorisms of Sufi Muslims who have sought a deeper relationship with the Divine or ultimate Reality. This course explores the contemplative, ascetic, and ecstatic practices through which Sufis pursued this goal and the philosophical, visionary, and poetical writings through which they expressed their devotion and speculation.