Culture and
Language

About

This group explores culture and language as soft power for human survival, particularly using and probing the concepts of majority and minority. Russia’s war with Ukraine highlights the complicated history and current situation of cultures and languages in Slavic Eurasia, which cannot be studied separately from contiguous research fields such as politics, international relations, war studies, and others. To better understand and suggest solutions to the most urgent social issues in the contemporary world, we mobilize the knowledge of Russian culture, Slavic linguistics, and Eurasian cultural heritage—the expertise that the SRC has cultivated over the years. In so doing, we interact with other faculty members of Hokkaido University exploring Chinese culture and theater, language contact in Slavic regions, Japanese history of migration, and human mobility and gender in East Asia. By paying keen attention to the diversity in cultures and languages of the Slavic-Eurasian region, we pursue the quest for possible contributions to the understanding of current and future world challenges.