Expands the comprehension and communicative skills of upper-level students and heritage speakers through topics drawn from Hispanic culture and current events. Aligned with CEFR level B1 objectives.
Prerequisite: One of SPAN 207, SPAN 302. Or placement test for heritage speakers.
Language of Instruction: Spanish
SPAN 203 is a 3-credit Intensive Elementary Course that combines learning objectives of two existing courses, SPAN 201 and 202. This course is designed for highly motivated learners with previous experience in Spanish or other Romance languages, and offers the opportunity to review the linguistic, cultural and communicative topics at the elementary level of the language (CEFR A2) at a more appropriate pace.
Throughout the semester, students will demonstrate an ability to listen to, discuss, read and write about personal and society-related topics in the past, present, and future by using simple and complex verb tenses, as well as engage with complex modes of expression in real and hypothetical situations.
Topics covered (science and technology, work and the economy, popular culture and mass and new media, literature and art, and more!) will expose students to ways of thinking and understanding the world that promote intercultural knowledge, and build toward competencies required for upper-level courses in our program through exposure to literature, culture, and media related to the Spanish-speaking world.
The design and structure of the course is founded on adaptive and inclusive principles of teaching and learning that consider the interests and needs of all learners and strive toward greater personalization of learning, flexibility and accessibility for all students, including students with disabilities.
Required texts
The same textbook is used for Spanish 103 and Spanish 203. Students that plan to take both courses, should purchase the 12 month access plan.
Prerequisite: One of SPAN 103, SPAN 102 or placement test for native or near-native speakers of other Romance Languages.
Language of Instruction: Spanish
SPAN 103 is the first of a six-credit sequence of Intensive Spanish offered by the FHIS Department. The course, which is designed for highly motivated learners with previous experience in Spanish (i.e., BC Grade 11 or 12 Spanish) or other Romance languages, reviews the fundamentals of the Spanish language and expands on students’ existing language skills, (inter)cultural knowledge, and communicative capacity through a project-based approach. Throughout the semester, students will demonstrate an ability to listen to, discuss, read and write about everyday activities and plans in the present, past, and future, as well as explore different modes of speech (the imperative, the subjunctive) within the context of common tasks and situations and daily routines.
Language of instruction: Spanish
Prerequisite: Grade 12 Spanish or for native or near-native speakers of other Romance Languages
Student Engagement:
• In-class participation (15%)
Mis enfoques written and oral assignments:
• Listening + Dictation Exercise (10%)
• Proyectos (2 @ 7.5% each) (15%)
• Pair/Small-group Oral Interview (10%)
Course Evaluations:
• Supersite Weekly Assignments (10%)
• Lesson Quizzes (2 @ 7.5% each) (15%)
• Final Exam (in-person) (25%)
Total = 100%
Enfoques Digital eTextbook (6th Edition) and Supersite Plus, José A. Blanco (Vista Higher Learning, 2024).
Please note your Enfoques eTextbook + Supersite Plus code are valid for both SPAN 103 and SPAN 203. It is recommended that students who plan to enroll in both 103 and 203 buy the 12-month access.
Where do you purchase it? The Enfoques eTextbook and Supersite Plus code are available for purchase through the UBC Bookstore’s website.
#IAm132
“We are the 90 percent!”
“Starving is cringe!”
“Education is not for sale!”
What if the classmate sitting next to you today were one of the leaders for change toward a better tomorrow at UBC, in Vancouver, or even around the world? The slogans that open this course description were voiced by student leaders that strove to revolutionize the face of university life and society as a whole in Mexico, Chile, Colombia… and even right here in Vancouver, Canada!
Since the start of the 20th century (and even long before!), student activists from across Latin America have used the university as a space to breed social and political change. Beginning with José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900), which establishes youth as a form of power to be employed toward change, and ending with more recent protests against neo-liberal education practices, this course traverses countries (Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela), spaces (the university, the mountain, the city square, the border, the internet), and genres (diary, testimonial, (graphic) novel, documentary, film, music, new and social media) to evaluate the major concepts, practices, urgencies, and voices that frame student movements in Latin America throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
We will read some of the most impactful works-in-translation on student-driven pathways to change: Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries (2003), Iverna Lockpez’s graphic novel, Cuba: My Revolution (2010), Elena Poniatowska’s collection of testimonies on the 1968 Mexican Student Movement and ensuing massacre, Massacre in Mexico (1971), Omar Cabezas’s account of his time as a student-revolutionary in Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, Fire from the Mountain (1983), and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s depiction of the bogotazo and other violent events in Colombia’s recent history, The Shape of the Ruins (2015), among others. We will also examine manifestos, (new) media, documentaries, and films from and on student voices from Venezuela’s caracazo (1989), the Chilean Winter (2011), and more recent protests in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Colombia, which show why and how issues that impact university life—equal access to education, tuition raises, food insecurity, and safety—are also connected to broader social and political issues and questions of democracy across Latin America and beyond.
Accessibility—in terms of topics addressed and types of works studied, affordability and easy access to materials, and student interests and levels—is a major priority for the instructor.
Required texts
Required texts and supplementary materials will be provided in digital format when possible, and made available to students on Canvas.
Select films and documentaries:
Prerequisite: None
Language of Instruction: English
This course is about language contact and multilingualism in communities where different varieties of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and other Romance-languages are spoken. Since the field of contact linguistics is inherently sociolinguistics, we pay equal attention to the social and linguistic settings of contact, as well as the social and linguistic outcomes of contact. We focus on the theoretical and methodological approaches to study language contact within a multilingual context. We discuss a number of issues related to contact and multilingualism that characterise the Romance-speaking world. Particular attention will be given to speaking minorities (e.g., Romance-based creoles, Chiac, Camfranglais, Santomean Portuguese, Afro-Bolivian Spanish, etc.).
By the end of this course, successful students should be able to:
Prerequisites: No prerequisites
Language of instruction: English
Plate I of Gustave Doré's illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. From Chapter I.
Discover Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote (1605), through close readings covering topics that range from gender, race, translation, economic crises, to religious turmoil and social inequality. By applying an interdisciplinary approach, Cervantes’s works will be discussed in relation to the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain, drawing upon the visual arts, films, music, dance, opera, historical texts and education manuals, while deconstructing the different kinds of fiction — pastoral, picaresque, sentimental Moorish novella, Italian novella, and romances of chivalry — that inhabit this novel.
Special emphasis will be placed on examining the representation of “others,” within the context of the expulsion of Jewish and Moorish minorities. The course will consider “errant” subjects in its two dimensions: as those straying from the accepted course, unacceptable actions; and traveling in search of adventure, a wandering journey.
Attesting to his global reach, Cervantes has been influential to thinkers from Lukács to Foucault to Bakhtin to Girard to the Frankfurt School, and to writers from Nabokov to Borges to Flaubert to García Márquez and beyond. His works have served as inspiration for painters (Goya, Doré, Dalí, Picasso), musicians (Purcell, Telemann, Massenet, Strauss, Falla), cineastes (Pabst, Welles, Gutiérrez Aragón), and critics (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Mann, Marthe Robert). As regards Don Quixote, no other book, with the exception of the Bible, has been translated to more languages, or undergone more editions and reprints. A herald of modernity, Miguel de Cervantes’s works casts a vast influence on Hispanic and World literature as a whole
Required texts:
Prerequisites: No prerequisites
Language of instruction: English
Italy is world-renowned for its food cultures and Italians put great care into food preparation, consumption, and appreciation. It’s no wonder that Italian food-related themes permeate the country’s cultural life and beyond. This course examines cultural representations of Italian or Italian-derived foods and the role that they play in articulating larger social issues in contemporary Italy, including regionalism, anti-globalization, family history, gender and sexual identities, Italian American food, tourism in Italy, and immigration to Italy. Through studying primary texts such as films and literature, students are encouraged to form a complex picture of Italy’s relationships with food cultures in a global context. Oral presentations, as well as a final project (in the format of a critical essay, a short film, a multimedia project, or creative writing), are the main tools of assessment of learning outcomes. Participation in seminar-style, group discussions in class is essential to developing critical and analytical skills for these assessment activities. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Italian. But it requires a passion for Italian food and culture!
The course is particularly recommended to students at 2nd year standing or higher.
Language of instruction: English
Prerequisites: No prerequisites
Final project: 35%
Prospectus: 15%
Four "Culinary Stories" (improvised oral presentations) and written reports: 40%
Class participation, regular attendance, and professionalism: 10%
Coming soon
[Cross-listed with FREN 512B]
Cultural mobility can be defined as mobilities relayed in and of cultural products, events, and phenomena. The concept can be viewed as part of a recent, influential critical movement to foreground mobility in social sciences and in the humanities and arts. According to Tim Cresswell (On the Move, 2006: 2-3), mobility is the effect of movement, meaning, and power. John Urry underscores the necessity to analyze assemblages or interconnections of five interdependent mobilities in social life: the corporeal travel of people; the physical movement of objects; imaginative travel through perusing the media; virtual travel through, for instance, Zoom meetings; and communicative travel using, for example, social media (Mobilities, 2006: 47-8). The mobilities paradigm has been used to explain significant socio-cultural phenomena, ranging from social inequality to global climate change, all of which are related to physical movements in crucial ways.
This course introduces the research field of cultural mobilities in relation to case studies focused on several mobile subjects—namely, merchants, explorers, tourists, colonizers, political pilgrims, migrants, and refugees—within Italian, French, and Chinese contexts. The course is divided into two units. In the first unit, students learn critical frames and tools from social scientific and humanistic inquiries into mobilities. In the second unit, students are encouraged to use these theoretical insights to approach major intercultural events (e.g., the Age of Discovery, the Grand Tour, and migrations) as they are articulated in narratives of diverse types (e.g., novels, journalism, diaries, and films). In particular, we consider authorial intent, knowledge creation, cultural technologies, affects, meaning-meaning, and power dynamics that these narratives help articulate. Through this exercise, toward the end of the semester, we assess how we may contribute to further theorizing cultural mobility analysis
Language of instruction : English
Benito Mussolini's bust carved into a rock in Adwa, Ethiopia.
Often considered the “least of the Great Powers” by its European colonial counterparts, Italy had nurtured expansionist ambitions since its Unification in 1861. At its peak, during fascism, the Italian Empire annexed parts of Libya, Greece, Albania, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, in addition to a concession in Tianjin, China. But soon after the WWII, the Italian public forgot about this history.
It was not until the 1990s when historians began to explore Italy’s colonial past. But so far Italians have not fully incorporated the country’s imperial history and its legacy into public discourse. Why did this amnesia occur? And what implications did it have for today’s multiethnic Italian society, particularly when the country has been experiencing a so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis and a surge of migrant entrepreneurship in its vibrant sector of small- and medium-sized enterprises? In addressing these societal phenomena in relation to primary texts (literature, films, media coverage, visual materials), students will discuss mobility, gender, and race in relation to several specific case studies.
Oral presentations and class debates, as well as a final project (in the format of a critical essay, a short film, a multimedia project, or creative writing), are the main tools of assessment of learning outcomes. Participation in seminar-style, group discussions in class is essential to developing critical and analytical skills for these assessment activities.
Prerequisite: Second-year standing or higher.
Language of instruction: English
Instructor: Marie-Eve Bouchard
Language of instruction: French
This graduate seminar will delve into three critical themes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology: ideology, identity, and power. Its broad objective is to examine how language ideologies are involved in the construction of power structure and social identities. Focusing largely on key articles, this course engages with debates and methods for analysing linguistic evidence pertaining to symbolic power, cultural contact and language shift, migration and mobility, authenticity and identity, resistance, and digital communication. Throughout this seminar, we will explore the social, economic and political consequences of different identification strategies by discussing how people’s beliefs about language reinforce or contest normative power structures and social. All discussions and work submitted in this course will be in French. The class is designed for three main audiences: 1) graduate students in French linguistics, 2) graduate students in the French literature interested in language use, and 3) advanced undergraduate students who have taken sociolinguistics courses at FHIS. All discussions and work submitted in this course will be in French.
Recommended readings: Most readings will be available on Canvas.