Structured Visions
By Jodie Clark
Categories: Society & Culture, Philosophy, Science, Social Sciences
Linguist Jodie Clark explores creative ways of imagining social transformation.
117 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- 114 The linguistics of loss
Join me on a journey from humanism to posthumanism with a focus on how we understand language, more-than-human communication, semiosis and information theory. We discuss Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, specifically his ideas about the Earth's open and emergent semiotic system, of which human…
- 113 We are all grammatically distant
Join me in the pleasure of observing conversation, particularly times when people report the speech of others. They can do this using direct speech, indirect speech or narrative reports of speech events. Here are examples of all three: Mrs Jenkins told the class shat she was cancelling the field…
- 112 Love language
To what extent is who(m) you're allowed to love analogous to syntactic structure? In this episode I explore the idea that human beings, in initiating themselves into language, surrender the higher consciousness that the rest of the non-human world enjoys. This is a problem when it comes to love…
- 111 The linguistics of tapping
What's your favourite way to alleviate anxiety? Mine is tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Linguistically, tapping is fascinating, because it reveals an inherent contradiction that your body ends up resolving for you. When we tap into (pardon the pun) the world beyond…
- 110 Clap if you believe in fairies
Do you believe in fairies? In his 1911 book, American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises 'tentatively' that the invisible world of fairies should be examined 'just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of…
- 109 What makes you so special?
The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you're supposed to be special and… you're not supposed to be special. It's a culture that's clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest…
- 108 Adulting, and stuff like that
Conversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing those fears for me was… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was 'like' and stuff like that (discourse markers and…
- 107 Heaven and Earth
The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It's rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven't grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything…
- 106 Prosody and peak experiences
Have you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice? If you're a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you're more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according…
- 105 Given, new and the selfless know-it-all
What if you could know everything, but you had to lose your self in the process? We discuss two layered structures in human languages. The first is word order, such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people…
- One from the archives: The Gift (Episode 24)
If you listened to last month's episode, you'll know that I've taken a short break from podcasting to finish off the book I'm writing. I'm thrilled to tell you that the book is now finished, and I'm very happy with it. I can't wait to tell you more. (In fact, if you sign up to my newsletter at…
- One from the archives: How linguistics can save the world (Episode 60)
I'm taking a short break from podcasting as I finish off the book I'm writing, but I'll be back in the New Year. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 60, How linguistics can save the world, originally aired on June 1, 2018. This podcast has been…
- 104 Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie
Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We'll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time. To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as…
- 103 Inhabiting language
In this episode I'll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to…
- Episode 102 How to belong
Have you ever felt like you don't belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically 'detach' from bodies, and the…
- Episode 101 You, me and big egos
What's the difference between me and you? And what's so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud's psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki's explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki's analysis of two…
- Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change
What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish? As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than…
- Episode 99 Linguistics and astrology
What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list? Does astrology count as a language? Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers. But if, as discussed in Episode 96, 'The Earth's language', languages are ways of…
- Episode 98 Linguistic singularities
Counting… that's maths, right? Actually, it's language. And as we'll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, 'count everything you can see'), you can't count anything until you know what 'counts as' a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does…
- Episode 97 The intimacy of denial
What's the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I'm listening) into a negative clause (I'm not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do…
- Episode 96 The Earth's language
We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions: 1. What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language? 2. Where are you? There's an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. 'I am here.' But if you write it on a piece of…
- Episode 95 Your name without language
What would your name be without language? In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege's explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell's claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke's term for proper names, which is…
- Episode 94 Language and the afterlife
What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don't have faith in stories about the afterlife and you've never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this…
- Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?
Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world? Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? What's the meaning of the word 'now'? The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It's a gift because it's fluid. It's more a membrane than a…
- Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions
When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I'm losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We're talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.) I've been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I've…
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