Structured Visions

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 h…

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…

‘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 carb…

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 m…

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 gen…

Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, t…

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 lit…

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 t…

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 thro…

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 exp…

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 outw…

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…

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…

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 sto…

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 th…

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 …

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 …

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 C…

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 w…

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 literal…