Structured Visions

‘It’s easy to forget,’ said Sir David Attenborough in his address to COP26, ‘that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number — the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.’ That one number, he goes on to say, ‘defines our relationship with our world.’ According to Attenborough’s framing, the story is a mathematical … Continue reading Episode 69 Our relationship with our world

In this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I’m going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other. … Continue reading Episode 68 Life, language and other mysteries

When did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser … Continue reading Episode 67 Imperative blessings

Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘The end of language’. The hack I mention for finding the subject … Continue reading Episode 66 A more welcoming world

Have you ever repeated a word over and over again to yourself to experience the dissolution of its meaning? What if you were to do that with the word ‘me’? When I was a little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language … Continue reading Episode 65 Psychedelic linguistics

In this episode we explore the idea that intimacy is embedded in the structure of language, and that this same intimacy is embedded in the structure of life. We challenge the idea that languages are made of words, as does a character in my short story, ‘The words of your language’, which was published in … Continue reading Episode 64 The intimacy embedded in language

Here’s how to get fascinated by language if you’re not already. This might even feel a little bit like a transcendent, or mystical experience. Find a window and look through it. Focus first on the scene outside the window. Then focus on the windowpane itself. Toggle your attention back forth between the windowpane and the … Continue reading Episode 63 Original scent

What we think about language reveals what we think about society. Will changing our ideas about language help us create a more welcoming world? In this episode we explore performative utterances like ‘You’re the boss’ or ‘You’re in charge’. These are more horrifying than you might think. Often we think of language and power as … Continue reading Episode 62 Who’s the boss? 

How do we respond to knowing that we’re stuck in a language system that’s built to contradict itself, and a social structure built upon exchange? We have to find ways to outwit the confines of language. Read my very short story ‘Echos and their others’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling And on Instagram: … Continue reading Episode 61: Echos and their others

What’s new in Structured Visions, version 2.0? We’ll still be exploring social structure. We’ll still be geeking out about language. But now I’ll be linking up my discussions to my most recent experiment – combining creative writing with my love of linguistics. Find out more and read ‘Echos and their Others’ at grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I’m so … Continue reading Teaser for Season 2: Grammar for dreamers

Welcome back to the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode we save the world. For me, saving the world means identifying ‘new ways of thinking about social structure’. Here are the things that need rethinking: the inequitable distribution of resources the isolation and marginalisation of difference an impulse toward self-destruction, and a lack of respect … Continue reading Episode 60: How linguistics can save the world

Linguist, communication expert and digital media scholar Erika Darics asks ‘Shouldn’t scholars in Critical Discourse Studies be political activists? What is the point of exposing injustice if we stop there?’ In this episode I address Erika’s question. Spoiler alert: the answer is a resounding YES. And I celebrate the question ‘What is the point?’ Please … Continue reading Episode 59: Enquiry, imagination and action

In this episode I share the talk I gave at the Symposium at Sheffield Hallam University on January 12, 2017, in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement. Many thanks to all who participated in the event, including fellow speakers, Chris Christie, Lucy Jones, Shân Wareing and Karen Grainger. Special thanks to Dave Sayers and Alice … Continue reading Episode 58: Communities of Sara Mills

Remember Christina from Episode 7? She’s the one who spared no time at all in getting as far away from Awayville, USA as she could. This week we return to Christina, and we get introduced to her mom… the redneck. Not that Christina’s embarrassed about that, or anything. Revisiting Christina’s conversation gives me the opportunity … Continue reading Episode 57: Redneck roots

artwork © Nico Vassilakis 2012 To engage in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the linguistic methodology I discussed last week, requires understanding language primarily as a form of communication that can be manipulated to represent the world in different ways. Indeed, language is often understood as a form of communication that is unique to human beings, … Continue reading Episode 56: A story about language

The Oregonian/2003 This week I discuss the branch of linguistics – Critical Discourse Analysis, or CDA – that most informs my approach to grammatically analysing texts. It’s the ‘critical’ part of CDA that appeals to me most – an aim of most practitioners of CDA is to explore the role language plays in maintaining or … Continue reading Episode 55: Critical condition

Our explorations in phenomenology have led us to understand consciousness as submerged in the world of perception. I have made a case for understanding this phenomenological world  not as material world, but as a social world. I keep drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s image of the blindfolded person who uses a stick to gain perceptual experience of … Continue reading Episode 54: I was so hungry

Remember Episode 51, when we made our way, blindfolded, around a room with nothing more than a cardboard tube to guide us? We delve deeper into the depths of phenomenology this week – almost literally – taking seriously Sara Ahmed’s description in her Queer Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, in which ‘bodies are submerged, such that … Continue reading Episode 53: Submerged in the social world

Today I celebrate 52 weeks of religiously produced Structured Visions episodes! Enjoy a glass of bubbly with me while I share with you some of the motivations behind making the podcast and what I find so enjoyable about it. I also express my gratitude some figures who have been inspirations for me along the way: … Continue reading Episode 52: I’m very grateful for you listening today

We return to Kafka’s tale this week – a tale of a distance that can never be breached. What if we understood the ‘you’ in Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ – that lowly subject at the edge of the empire – as a self that’s attached to the social body? And what if the emperor, … Continue reading Episode 51: A Message from the Emperor, Part 2