The University of Colorado at Boulder is the home of a new Graduate Certificate Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP). The main concern of the program is to provide an interdisciplinary forum on language and society for CU students and faculty. This is facilitated through regular colloquia on the subject of language and society, as well as through a diverse curriculum of courses offered toward the CLASP Graduate Certificate.

The CLASP program encourages idea-sharing among University of Colorado faculty and graduate students with interrelated research interests in the sociocultural and sociopolitical analysis of language. In particular, the program seeks to provide cohesion to empirical and theoretical research currently being conducted on the CU-Boulder campus in varied analytic traditions that have as their focus the study of culture, language, and social practice. These traditions include the sociology of language, linguistic anthropology, narrative studies, philosophy of language, symbolic interactionism, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, language and cognition, conversation analysis, ethnography of speaking, intercultural communication, second language acquisition, language and literacy, bilingualism and code-switching, and varied forms of socially oriented discourse analysis.

The program currently has twenty-three affiliated faculty members from a variety of departments, among them Anthropology, Communication, Comparative Literature and Humanities, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Education, French and Italian, German and Slavic, Linguistics, Political Science, Spanish and Portuguese, Sociology, and Speech, Language, and Hearing Science.

Participating M.A. and Ph.D. students may earn a Graduate Certificate in Culture, Language, and Social Practice in addition to their primary degree. Students can earn the Certificate while performing the required coursework in their respective departments by completing four courses approved by the CLASP curriculum committee: three courses on the subject of language and society, and one course on either social theory or ethnographic methods that is determined to be relevant to the student’s research goals. Click here for more information on procedural and curricular requirements for the Graduate Certificate.

The CLASP program is supported in part by the University of Colorado Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS).

For more information about the CLASP program, contact Kira Hall, the program director, at kira.hall@colorado.edu.