Structured Visions

Is there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself?

Believe it or not, there is a conne…

How is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about.

Think about the structure of a water molecule. It…

Have you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language.

Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the window to i…

Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magi…

Happy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life?

Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and wh…

‘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.’ Tha…

In this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What was did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? An…

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, …

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 welco…

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…

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 a…

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.

1. Find a window and look through it.
2. Focus first on the s…

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…

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 langua…

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 experi…

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 n…

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…

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…

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……

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 repre…