Welcome!
The School of Languages, Cultures, and Race offers exciting opportunities in education, research, study abroad, and community involvement for both undergraduate and graduate students.
Centered on cultivating deep transdisciplinary understanding of linguistic, cultural, national, social, and racial perspectives in a global context, the school provides students with key knowledge, skills, and experience for success in an increasingly diverse and integrated global society.
We invite you to explore our website and to stop by the main office in Thompson Hall, room 110, to say hello. You can also read about the formation of SLCR and the school’s director in the College of Arts & Sciences Story Hub.
Please visit the WSU COVID-19 website for up-to-date information on university operations.
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Statement from the Director (March 18, 2021)
For close to a year, the former US President called COVID-19 the China virus and the Kung Flu. CNN reported that “according to the organization Stop AAPI Hate with a total of 3,795 complaints received over the past year. The majority of these — 68% — were verbal harassment, while 11% involved physical assaults.” The latter ones include murders and beatings. And then, there’s the massacre of multiple massage workers in Atlanta this week. All this recent hateful activity against AAPI communities has a context, a history that includes repeated immigration laws of exclusion (the first as early as 1882), aimed at regulating both migration flow and labor from Asia, laws excluding Asians from owning land (the so-called Alien Land Laws), and citizenship exclusion. There was also that horrific chapter in American history that led the government to send Americans of Japanese descent to internment camps on the U.S. West Coast during WW II.
This is part of the historical backdrop of minimization and exclusion, a general sense that Asians do not belong or are foreign/alien to this country, that allows someone to, one day as if out of the blue and almost casually, gun down Asian women in a U.S. city. The fact that a police officer was willing to describe this atrocious event as someone “having a bad day” is also part of this history of minimizing and excluding Asian lives from the social landscape of the U.S. The loss of 8 lives described as someone having a bad day is a sheer dismissal of lives and the irrevocability of death. You can recover from a bad day, but you cannot bring 8 dead people back.
In the end, the history of AAPI exclusion was deathly manifested in a U.S. city this week. And we all need to learn from that.
Dr. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo
Director, School of Languages, Cultures, and Race
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News!!
CES major Yubi Lojewski won WSU’s Community, Equity, and Social Justice Award for WSU Students. Yubi was the only undergraduate student to win the award.
For a video of the awards, please go here. The award for Lojewski begins at the 3:51 mark. She is introduced by the nominating faculty member, Dr. John Streamas (Associate Professor of CES).
Contratulations, Yubi!
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Convocatoria (Call for Essays)
SLCR’s Spanish Program is organizing a Creative Writing Competition: “Mi ciudad en 100 palabras” (“My City in 100 Words”).
“Mi ciudad en 100 palabras” is an initiative that seeks to promote creative writing among the SLCR students of Spanish across campuses and regardless their level of proficiency. Each learner of Spanish language and cultures –starting at 100 level— can produce texts that go above and beyond the mere instrumental acquisition and use of the language. Each learner of Spanish can create literature.
We invite you to submit a short story written in Spanish, a tale of a maximum of 100 words (not counting the title) that creatively reflects on the town or city where you live or have lived. It is not a description of that place but a personal depiction of a special “corner” of the city in which you experienced or witnessed something that marked you, a space that you miss or reject for some reason, a memory of a “character” from that city that became typical of that place, etc. We are looking for all sorts of stories, styles, and approaches: intimate, political, social, comedy, drama, noir, science fiction, memory tale, biographical, autobiographical, testimonial, among others.
For requirements, details, and instructions, please go here.
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NEWS!!
(January 2021)
Dr. Francisco Arellano Serratos (Spanish, Tri Cities) published his new book El Capitaloceno with Publicaciones Fomento Cultural. Congrats, Francisco! #SLCRFacultyChronicles
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Student Resources
Art for Social Change Competition and Showcase
News & Events
- For five weeks, our students of French listened to French songs while participating in an engaging contest organized by Sabine Davis (Professor, Career Track, French). Dr. Insook Webber (Assistant Professor, Career Track, French) and Dr. Mark Black (Lecturer, French) helped with the voting process. The winners:
• First place: Josh Bruns
• Second place: Jansen Garside
• Tied for third place: Kyle Moon, Reid Brown, and Safiya Bouacheria
Congratulations to all! And thank you to Sabine Davis and the French section for organizing such fun learning opportunity for students.
- Interview with John Streamas about his work in Washington State Magazine.
- Director Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Professor Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo (CES) published an article titled “Narratives of Infectious Threat and Contagion Crises in Contemporary Immigration Rhetoric” in the journal Label Me Latina/o.
- French major Vanessa Giramata was recognized as first Schwarzman distinguished scholarship finalist.
- Get the Scoop on SLCR News here.
SLCR Office
Staff of The School of Languages, Cultures, and Race are currently complying with WSU’s directive to continue to work from home.
However, we are still available through phone, email, and other technology.
Contact Us
509-335-4135
slcr@wsu.edu
Follow us @ WSUslcr on
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