Social Networking Approach to Japanese Language Teaching

The intersection of Language and Culture in the Digital Age

Edited by: Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Fumiko Nazikian, Jisuk Park

This book is rooted in the workshop “Working at the Intersection of Language and Culture in the Digital Age: Social Network Approaches (SNA) to the Pedagogy of Language Teaching,” held at Columbia University of New York in October 2018. The workshop was funded by the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, National Research Centers of US Department of Education, and the Language Resource Center of Columbia University (LRC), the department of East Asian Studies and Languages (EALAC) and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University. The book outlines an innovative approach to language instruction that goes beyond the communicative approach and encourages a global view of language education and curriculum development through the use of social networking.

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Zhongqi Shi elected to the Board of Directors of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA)

CLTA, established in 1962, is the largest and most influential professional organization devoted exclusively to the study of Chinese language, culture, and pedagogy in the USA. At CLTA, he will be in charge of the Committee of Publicity and Media. To learn more about the CLTA, please visit their website (https://clta-us.org).

Recovering Histories: 

Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China

Nicholas Bartlett

(University of California Press and Columbia Weatherhead Series, 2020)

Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicholas Bartlett is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese at Barnard College. Please visit the Weatherhead East Asian Institute website for the WEAI Author Q&A: Nicholas Bartlett’s Recovering Histories.

For additional information and to purchase, please visit University of California Press.