Structured Visions
99 episodes - English - Latest episode: 20 days ago -Linguist Jodie Clark explores creative ways of imagining social transformation.
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Episodes
Episode 49 Calling all ethnographers
June 16, 2016 09:09 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBWhat do you do when your social vision doesn’t match that of those around you? Or if you come from a planet where the social world is a lot more harmonious than the one you’re noticing on earth? You could try ethnography. Ethnography and the spirit of exploration in today’s episode.
Episode 48 The magnificent brother from the new world new world
June 09, 2016 20:19 - 23 minutes - 22 MBI reached into my mailbag during today’s podcast and found this letter from a faithful listener. OK, it was my brother. Or, as he likes to call himself, ‘the magnificent brother from the new world’. Jodie, I’m catching up on podcasts and am in the middle of listening to #47. I hope you don’t mind but I have a question. In regards to your concept that we try to figure out the problems by going beyond our own perceptions and experiences to solve social ills which takes a lot of work and...
Episode 47 The grammatical face of the other
June 02, 2016 12:11 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBWe go back to middle school this week, looking once more at the This American Life episode dedicated to the subject, and taking up once again Levinas’s notions of alterity and face. Here’s what I said last week about middle school: Middle school is a social body that has a face. … I want us to be able to look at the face of that social body and see it as something completely other. I also said this: If I can interact with middle school face-to-face, then I have the possibility for opening...
Episode 46 Middle school, embodied
May 26, 2016 13:20 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBIn an episode of This American Life, 14-year-old Annie relates middle school to a ‘whitewashed, brick-walled, iron-gated prison’ that she finally escapes from. Annie’s description gives us a good excuse to revisit the use of prison metaphors to describe oppressive social structures. Foucault’s Panopticon will spring to mind for many Structured Visions listeners, but we don’t have to rely upon French social theory to find prison imagery applied to the social world. What Annie doesn’t do is ...
Episode 45 Can’t you do something with her?
May 19, 2016 12:50 - 36 minutes - 33.1 MBMore this week on the human body and the social body. What about the self? In this episode I go against the idea that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the self and the human body – that each time we see a human body there’s a singular self/mind/consciousness that is attached to/merged with/inhabiting it. Did you ever read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? The characters in Pullman’s worlds each have a ‘daimon’ – an animal form that represents the character’s ‘self’. A...
Episode 44 We got everything back
May 12, 2016 10:52 - 37 minutes - 33.9 MBToday I explore in a bit more detail these two potentially provocative premises: that the social body is real, and that it hasn’t yet been formed. Let’s take them each in turn: The social body is real. We can spend all day under the influence of our favourite substances (beer, wine, Haribo sweets) what it means for something to be ‘real’, but for my purposes ‘real’ is useful. If I decide the social body is something that’s real, that I don’t know much about yet, then I get to do research a...
Episode 43 Bye bye body metaphor
May 05, 2016 07:49 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MBThere’s a new binary opposition in town! Instead of thinking, as we have been in Structured Visions, about the individual in relation to society, I’ve proposed we begin to think in terms of two types of body. The human body and the social body. The self, as I said in Episode 42, attaches to one or the other of these bodies. More often than not, in my experience analysing conversational data, it attaches to the social body, and the human body ends up oppressed. Hold on! I can hear you sayin...
Episode 42 Discipline and Punish, part 3
April 28, 2016 12:10 - 41 minutes - 37.8 MBBe prepared in this episode for a bit of dramatic irony – a term I learned when I read Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘Charles’. A little boy, Laurie, comes home every day from kindergarten with stories about a classroom bully named Charles. At the end of the book the parents find out that it’s Laurie who’s the bully; there’s no child named ‘Charles’ in the class. Another way of putting it is to say that Laurie has attached his ‘self’ to a bullying character called ‘Charles’. Hold that th...
Episode 41 Discipline and Punish, part 2
April 21, 2016 12:07 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBWe’re still on Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish: what kinds of punitive techniques are needed to keep in place different social structures? I use the Penelope Soto story to illustrate Foucault’s comments about punishment under a feudal system. And reflections on Wal-Mart and shoplifting give us insights about punishment under a capitalist system. The image we’re working with is of a social body that bullies human bodies in order to keep threats at bay. In a feudal system, a big ...
Episode 40 Discipline and Punish, part 1
April 13, 2016 11:14 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBThe first few pages of Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish, describe (in gory detail) a ritual execution from pre-Revolutionary France. I tend to be very squeamish about these things, so it’s a miracle I kept reading. Somehow I did, and in this episode I describe what it is in this book that inspires me. It’s not just that Foucault uses what has become my favourite metaphor – the image of social structure as a body – but also that he makes it possible to conceive of the social body...
Episode 39 The path of least relevance
April 06, 2016 12:39 - 19 minutes - 17.7 MBTumble dryers, the musical beat, computers, bodies, black holes, hairy black holes, information, desire, French laundromats, homeless soothsayers and Maya Angelou. Welcoming, adapting, embodied social structures. What more could you want from a Structured Visions podcast?
Episode 38 You’re outta the game!
March 31, 2016 11:38 - 38 minutes - 35.3 MBPicture the scene: my nephew, Lane, at four years old, at Christmas, playing with his new racetrack, shouting ‘You’re outta the game!’ to anyone whose car comes off the track. Now let’s imagine that Lane is the personification of a social structure. He is, in fact, doing what social structures seem to do – classifying (by setting up a binary opposition between in the game and out of the game) and inclusion/exclusion (by determining which constituents are in and which are out). Now let’s ta...
Episode 37 Sand in my teeth
March 24, 2016 21:11 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBI’m still dreaming, in this episode, of a society in which unique selves are possible. Such a dream goes beyond ideas about social inclusion. Inclusion is about fitting in to a pre-existing system – with all the rules and prescriptions such a system holds. My vision is of a social structure that welcomes uniqueness, indeed, one that expects uniqueness, that allows itself to be transformed by each expression of a unique self. Such a vision makes me dubious about all the imagery that’s been ...
Episode 36 Anybody else know her?
March 17, 2016 09:34 - 38 minutes - 34.8 MBMore about how social structures close down any notion of the unique, transformative individual. When openings occur, they show up as disruptions, problems or embarrassments, as I explain in my analysis of two accounts of walking into a lecture room. Here’s the transcript: My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.
Episode 35 Language and the gendered body
March 10, 2016 21:17 - 48 minutes - 44.2 MBIn 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 missing from the original presentation, so you’ll hear me stumbling a little as I try to sort that out.) Here’s the abstract of the talk: Many strands of research in linguistics – including critical discursive and feminist approaches – orient toward social critique and social change. Most of these ...
Episode 34 Choose Your Own Adventure
March 02, 2016 20:03 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBI 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 choices at various levels of complexity. At the phonological level of a language, you can understand the difference between the words pat and bat in terms of whether your vocal cords vibrate when you pronounce the first consonant in each word. If you choose voiced (+voice), you get ‘bat’; voiceles...
Episode 33 The Grammar Matrix
February 25, 2016 20:27 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MBM.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 this episode I take the CPU metaphor to new extremes. I claim I’m able to converse with society because I’m just like one of those computer hackers from The Matrix. (‘I don’t even see the code.’) The characters and scenes in The Matrix were formed out of bits of computer code – can we also imagine t...
Episode 32 A thought that thinks more than it thinks
February 18, 2016 15:07 - 34 minutes - 32 MBLast 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 book analyses homophobic attitudes in a women’s university field hockey club. I told him one of the things I commented on in the book was that the team members I spoke to depicted their lesbian acquaintances as expressing sexual desire. Their straight teammates were never described in terms of th...
Episode 31 Figments of society’s imagination
February 10, 2016 14:56 - 31 minutes - 28.5 MBThe 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 individual might be possible. Watch what happens when Society dreams up a Hollie Phillips:
Episode 30 Plastic automatons… and other personifications of social structure
February 04, 2016 13:50 - 35 minutes - 32.8 MBMore 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. Their discussion with me reveals that the relationship between individual and society might be seen in a new way. Specifically, how easy does a given social structure make it for an individual to exist as a unique person? The conversation is here: And I also discuss it in my forthcoming book – ...
Episode 29 Class(room) struggle
January 28, 2016 22:08 - 34 minutes - 31.2 MBIs the individual determined by society? Or is the individual an autonomous actor, making the most of structural resources to navigate through society? These questions are familiar to Structured Visions listeners, but this week I attempt to make the debate a little less abstract. I replace the notion of ‘society’ with the image of the classroom, and the ‘individual’ with anyone who’s ever told a story about entering into one. I use these stories to suggest a third way of understanding the in...
Episode 28 Architects, astronomers and grammarians
January 21, 2016 12:07 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBIn 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, either, but I do make some associations. Does the word ‘structure’ conjure up ideas about stability, regularity, consistency permanence? I suggest today that we can study social structure while at the same time allowing for the idea that structures are variable, fluid and multitudinous. What’s more, w...
Episode 27 The battleground, the dojo and the lab
January 13, 2016 20:16 - 37 minutes - 34.4 MBWhy am I so fascinated by social structure? Perhaps because it helps me to articulate my experience of the world. In this episode I share some of my experiences from my career in higher education in France and Britain. I discuss some students’ responses to Mary Bucholtz’s sociolinguistic research on nerds.
Episode 26 Bodies and selves and structures, oh my!
January 07, 2016 13:08 - 27 minutes - 25.6 MBIn 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 society – as autonomous – in order to be imagine social change? I review the work of two different theorists’ perspectives on these concepts: Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Often the individual is seen as a David figure in relation to the Goliath of society. What if instead we saw society as...
Episode 25 It makes my skin crawl
December 31, 2015 16:32 - 36 minutes - 33.8 MBHappy 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 that sentence with ‘the inside of a book.’ I draw once more upon Pierre Bourdieu’s work, this time his book, Language and Symbolic Power. Bourdieu’s image of social structure is one in which individual agents negotiate their worlds by drawing upon different types of capital – economic, cultural...
Episode 24 The Gift
December 23, 2015 12:16 - 31 minutes - 28.4 MBA 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 Marcel Mauss, ‘social facts’ are those forces that maintain the integrity of societies – forces that transcend the needs and desires of the individual and require people to support the collective. One of Mauss’s examples in his essay, The Gift, is of the kula of the peoples of the Trobriand Islands in...
Episode 23 I just don’t enjoy the taste
December 17, 2015 19:38 - 29 minutes - 26.6 MBLast 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: (Clark 2011, p. 129-30) Here’s the contradiction: at one point, Ally says drinking pints is wrong because you’d never catch any of her friends doing it. These are her friends down south. If a girls was caught drinking a pint of lager, all the boys would just be like ‘What are you doing?’ She...
Episode 22 You’d never catch anyone
December 10, 2015 21:55 - 30 minutes - 28.2 MBThis 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 possible to do that task, and make sure they’re invested in doing it. The ‘impossible task’ I’m talking about is maintaining the consistency of the self. Why is that so impossible? Because, I argue, the concept of the self can only exist within a particular social structure. When the self gets offende...
Episode 21 Where are you? Who are you?
December 03, 2015 20:45 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBThis 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 system. What words do you use to refer to your self? You might use a pronoun, but which one? Me, I, my, mine, myself? It all depends on its position in the sentence. Also, using a pronoun is always unstable, because pronouns are deictic – that is, they change according to their context of use. The ...
Episode 20 Facing Thanksgiving
November 26, 2015 23:18 - 30 minutes - 28.2 MBAs 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 different opinions and beliefs at a family meal is beautifully parodied in the sketch, A Thanksgiving Miracle. In Politeness Theory, personal offence is understood as resulting from a ‘face-threatening act’ that wasn’t appropriately attenuated. The notion of ‘face’ has been criticised for depen...
Episode 19 Paradigms
November 19, 2015 21:19 - 29 minutes - 26.7 MBThe 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 upsets an established paradigm, it is described as an anomaly and often explained away as human error or flawed research design. When enough new evidence comes in – that is, too much to be explained away – a crisis ensues and a new paradigm emerges. ‘Paradigm’ is a word that’s used in linguistics ...
Episode 18 They lied to us
November 12, 2015 16:54 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MBSocial 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 of exposing social structures as oppressive or unjust? On the one hand, we might feel completely unsupported and ungrounded, like Boris the spider probably felt when I ripped through his carefully crafted web-home in the corner of the living room. On the other hand, we might feel a moment of poi...
Episode 17 From paperclips to marshmallows: false promises of individual choice
November 05, 2015 23:03 - 31 minutes - 36.2 MBAll 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 behave in one way and girls and women to behave in a different way. But I can hear you saying: ‘But Jodie, I never felt constrained in that way! I was a girl and always wanted to roughhouse with the boys.’ Or: ‘I was a boy and liked to paint my fingernails.’ ‘It was never a problem. Every indivi...
Episode 16 Blank boys and blank girls
October 29, 2015 22:23 - 31 minutes - 35.9 MBI’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 categories. What doesn’t ‘fit’ within those categories, or identities, or ways of being, or ways of feeling are rejected, ignored or simply not allowed to exist. How might it become possible to think beyond the structures that structure thought? We’d have to think more than we can think. ‘A thought...
Episode 15 The paperclip game
October 22, 2015 19:30 - 28 minutes - 32.6 MBWhen I was teaching conversation classes in France I invented a game designed to encourage students to speak more English to each other. Each player started with 12 paperclips, and they’d have to forfeit one each time another player caught them speaking a language other than English. The goal was to acquire as many paperclips as possible by catching out fellow players. The response to the game was devastating. The students became so obsessed with accumulating paperclips that everything els...
Episode 14 Liza got hair: thwarting recognisability
October 13, 2015 20:00 - 30 minutes - 35.4 MBHow do you know if a social structure is having an impact on you? Have a look around and notice if there’s anything you recognise. If you’re using language to label the things in the room, for instance, you’re participating in a linguistic structure. A language structure is a social structure inasmuch as it is designed by and for the community that uses it. Also: how well do you recognise the people on the bus? If you can refer to ‘the old man’ or ‘the smelly woman’, you’re drawing upon a so...
Episode 13 Let's dance
October 08, 2015 05:36 - 30 minutes - 35 MBLast week I talked about how bodies are disciplined to conform to societal norms. This week I discuss the pressure to conform to a consistent identity. I explore this idea in relation to two renowned scholarly figures – Michel Foucault and Monica from Friends. I get curious about how the enjoyment of the body might have the power to challenge or change social structures. And a young woman named Maryam takes to the dance floor to challenge narrow perceptions of identity.
Episode 12 Foucault, the panopticon and the tyranny of cartwheels
September 30, 2015 12:33 - 32 minutes - 37 MBWe’re still talking about bodies but this week the focus is on how they’re disciplined. I explain some of the ideas in Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish. An important component of Foucault’s work is the mechanisms that keep societal structures in place. In a feudal society, structured hierarchically according to the birthright of the royalty and the landed gentry (and the lack of birthright of the peasantry), social structures stayed in place through a collective belief in the pow...
Episode 11 I’m so fat and so short: the fragmented body
September 24, 2015 18:05 - 32 minutes - 37.5 MBIf you were in a position to make a judgement about someone – in a job interview, for instance – would you take into account what their body looked like? One widespread societal message is that the uniqueness, the individuality, the ‘personhood’ of a person has nothing to do with what their body looks like. Why is the idea that the ‘person’ or the ‘self’ is separate from the body so prevalent in our society? In this episode I put forward three possible reasons: We want to see the ‘self’ as ...
Episode 10 Potties and bodies
September 17, 2015 05:44 - 30 minutes - 34.6 MB‘Fairness’ and ‘equality’ are at the heart of the modern justice system, as I explained in last week’s episode. This week’s idea is that basing notions of justice on fairness and equality will never work. Why not? Because such a justice system requires us to think in terms of disembodied individuals – and we simply can’t keep the body from showing up, sometimes in embarrassing ways. When society tries to erase the body, it ends up being fetishised. One way this shows up is in taboos. A for...
Episode 9 It’s not fair! The rational, disembodied person
September 07, 2015 11:59 - 31 minutes - 36 MBThis week I turn to the concept of individual that’s produced by the legal system: the ‘rational person’. The rational person is a disembodied individual, who is stripped away of all uniqueness, embodiment, emotion and desire. It turns out that a justice system, like the modern one, based upon the idea of ‘fairness’ requires us to think of other people as rational, with exactly the same needs and entitlements as every other ‘rational person’. What would a legal system look like if not base...
Episode 8 The Model Person: traffic, politeness, French kissing and fingernails
September 02, 2015 17:21 - 31 minutes - 35.8 MBIn the past two episodes, I’ve been talking about how society needs to be structured in order for particular types of individuality to exist. In this episode I discuss two types of social structure: the system of traffic laws and culturally specific politeness norms. My interest in traffic laws comes from spending lots of time as a young girl annoying my parents while they were driving. My interest in politeness comes from having lived in a few different cultures and getting things very very...
Episode 7 I left, like, that night: the isolated individual
August 26, 2015 11:21 - 27 minutes - 31.2 MBWith each new story is a different – but familiar – way of understanding how different types of social structure produce different types of individual. Mary’s story, in last week’s episode, illustrated the notion of the individual as a token of a particular, recognisable type: ‘I was one of those…’ This week we hear from Christina, who tells a story in two parts. The first part is about the economic downturn of her hometown, Awayville. The second part is about how she got out of there. In fa...
Episode 6: I was one of the those: uniqueness and community
August 18, 2015 07:02 - 28 minutes - 32.8 MBI tell more stories about my experiences in Strasbourg and American students doing their best to fit in. Often fitting in to aspects of French culture, and learning French, was made difficult because of how much they enjoyed being in the company of other English-language speakers. Thinking about them as a ‘community of practice’ – a term coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation – helps us to understand that better. Lave and ...
Episode 5 Kill your peas and other stories from alien worlds
August 12, 2015 09:58 - 30 minutes - 35.3 MBLast week I said I hated social structure? I need an attitude adjustment. When is thinking about social structure fun for me? When we’re imagining new ones: flower worlds, sock worlds, bubble words, underground worlds, for instance. I discuss the work of two sociolinguists, Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz, who did ethnographic work in the alien world of the American high school. Eckert’s book, Language Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High a...
Episode 4 I’m like, social structure really pisses me off!
August 05, 2015 11:48 - 28 minutes - 33.1 MBLinguistic description gets messy. The scientific description of language starts from the idea that no one variety is intrinsically better than any other variety, then why do linguists always only use the Standard to describe other varieties? Well, not every linguist. In her book, Talking that Talk, Geneva Smitherman upsets the apple cart by using African American Vernacular English (AAVE) forms in academic contexts. I get called out of my scientific linguist mode when someone tells me I u...
Episode 3 Objective, descriptive and other broken promises in linguistics
July 29, 2015 10:13 - 28 minutes - 32.9 MBWhat comes to mind when you hear the word ‘grammar’? Red pen marks all over your assignments? Being told there’s something wrong with the way you speak or write? A disgruntled feeling when you see a misplaced apostrophe? My love of grammar has never been about recognising ‘errors’ in speech or writing. For me it’s a fascination with the beauty of structure. When I was an undergraduate at Washington College I got to play with structure regularly as part of Bob Anderson’s class in symbolic l...
Episode 2 Chutes and Ladders, or I am being so American
July 22, 2015 09:47 - 33 minutes - 38.2 MBIn this episode I talk about the experience of internalising a judgmental, hierarchical social structure. In my case it was like living by the rules of Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders). Some arbitrary set of characteristics is graded on a scale of 1 to 100 and you find yourself landed on one of the numbered grids. What if ‘whiteness’ was the thing you were being graded on? (This is the question Cheryl Harris discusses in her article, ‘Whiteness as property’.) What if it you were grade...
Episode 1 The mystery of the little Black baby dolls
July 17, 2015 10:49 - 19 minutes - 22.5 MBWelcome to the very first episode of the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode I look at aspects of racial injustice. I share some perspectives from my five-year-old self to show how certain logical structures enabled me to cope when I first noticed racial inequality. I talk more about what it means to understand racism, or any other form of social injustice, as structured. I invite listeners to start imagining new structures. If we can start noticing social structures that lead to so...