Department: Linguistics Program, English Department, Political Science Department
Web Address: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/linguistics/index.php

Level: PhD

Institution/Organization: University of South Carolina

Duties: Research

Specialty Areas:Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Description:

Call for applications for PhD student participation in the Language Conflict Project:
The Language Conflict Project is an interdisciplinary research collaborative across Political Science, Linguistics, and Digital Humanities that studies the relationship between language difference and human conflict. Prospective students interested in pursuing research in the Language Conflict Project are invited to apply to the University of South Carolina PhD program. Please contact one of the project leaders with any questions.

Departments and Project Leads:
- Linguistics: Stanley Dubinsky, dubinskysc.edu
- English Language and Literature: Michael Gavin, mgavinmailbox.sc.edu
- Political Science: Juan Tellez, tellezjmailbox.sc.edu

Description of the Language Conflict Project:
The Language Conflict Project’s goal is to advance our understanding of the mechanisms by which language-based conflicts cause intrastate ethnic fragmentation, political polarization, and even political violence. Our research questions include:
- What are the politics and societal impacts of language difference?
- Do different kinds of linguistic differences (e.g. phonological, lexical, syntactic, orthographic) have different societal consequences?
- What sorts of language laws, policies, and social conditions ameliorate conflict, and which exacerbate them?
- How do ethnic grievances circulate online, and with what consequences?
- How can computational, text-as-data approaches to the study of politics inform the study of language conflicts in particular?
In addition to an exploration of the research questions outlined above, the Project is also engaged in the construction of the Language Conflict Encyclopedia, a curated digital source of information about ethnolinguistic conflicts and language rights violations around the world, information not readily available elsewhere.

Description of Language Conflict Project Participation:
Opportunities to contribute to the project will be many faceted, and students who are admitted to the PhD program in one of the three relevant fields of study and who are selected to join the project will participate in a variety of ways. In addition to or as part of their regular program of study, graduate students are encouraged to develop and implement their own independent research.

Participation can include:
- Designing and applying data-gathering techniques for investigations into particular conflicts, conflict types, and conflict regions,
- Authoring or co-authoring research papers to emerge from the project, and
- Assisting with researching, writing, and editing entries for the Language Conflict Encyclopedia.

Application and Funding:
Applicants responding to this call must apply and be accepted to the Ph.D. program in one of the three departments listed below. Funding will be provided through the student’s home department according to its standard procedures, which typically involve multi-year packages that require teaching and/or other responsibilities. Participants in this project will be eligible to compete for additional funding through research grants and may occasionally be hired to work on the project for specific tasks. Although we have had, and expect to continue to have, success in securing supplementary funding for student participants, there is no separate funding associated with this invitation.

Graduate Program websites for the three departments:
English: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/english_language_and_literature/study/graduate/index.php

Linguistics: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/linguistics/study/graduate/index.php

Political Science: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/political_science/study/graduate/index.php

Web Address for Applications: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/linguistics/study/graduate/index.php

Contact Information:
        Professor Stanley Dubinsky
        dubinsky@sc.edu