Structured Visions

In this week’s podcast I’m sharing a talk I gave as part of the English seminar series at the University of Liverpool. Here are the slides if you’d like to follow along. (Slides 17 and 18 were missin…

I move from computer programmes to choose-your-own-adventure novels this week: metaphors abound to explore the idea of language/grammar as a system. Systems can be understood as complex matrices of c…

M.A.K. Halliday has this (and a whole lot more) to say about grammar:

Grammar is the central processing processing unit of language, the powerhouse where meanings are created. (2014, p. 22).

In thi…

Last week I staged a tug-of-war between Society and The Individual, and I let Society win. This week I explain why with reference to a friend’s response to my first book. As I said to my friend, the …

The conceptual tug-of-war between Society and Individual ends in this week’s podcast! The Individual surrenders, leaving Society to dream up and personify possibilities for a world in which individua…

More this week on the idea that social structure might be personified – and embodied. I analyse a conversation between three students whose identities have been challenged in the classroom setting. T…

In this episode I discuss… yup, you guessed it! Structure. I’ve been bandying that word around for quite some time without offering a clear definition. I don’t offer any clear definitions here, eithe…

In this episode I explore the relationship between these sets of concepts: bodies/selves, bodies/souls, selves/individuals, individuals/society. Do we need to understand the self as separate from soc…

Happy New Year from Structured Visions! Today I discuss a grammar meme that my brother pointed out to me – an illustration of a stern old man saying:

When you say ‘I seen,’ I assume you won’t finish…

A story of a Christmas miracle involving a pink Huffy Sweet Thunder bicycle leads to a discussion of whether Santa Claus is a social fact. According to French anthropologists Emile Durkheim and Marce…

Last week I promised I’d explore a paradox in Ally’s comments about the ‘brazen’ women in her halls. To do so, we need the continuation of the transcript of the conversation I discussed in Episode 22…

This week I give some advice about how to control someone: give them an impossible task to do – like keeping an ice cube from melting on a hot, sunny beach. Then make them think it’s actually possibl…

This week I question whether the notion of the ‘self’ is as stable as people seem to want it to be. The instability of the self might be explored in terms of how it is situated within the language sy…

As a great sage (a scriptwriter for Saturday Night Live) once wrote,

Thanksgiving with the family can be hard. Everyone has different opinions and beliefs.

The aftermath of people expressing their …

The notion of the ‘paradigm shift’ originates from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion: if new evidence comes in that ups…

Social structures are like spider webs – interlinked strands of assumptions about the social world that form conceptual networks to support us as we navigate our daily lives. What would be the effect…

All this talk of social structure and how it could be better: does it match your own experience? Last week I talked about a social structure that is divided along gender, and requires boys and men to…

I’ve been talking a lot about recognisability in social structures. Closed social structures divide up the world into particular categories such that it becomes impossible to think outside those cate…