Structured Visions

Be 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...

We'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...

The 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...

Tumble 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?

Picture 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)...

I'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 e...

More 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 .

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 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 discur...

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 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 pr...

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 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 char...

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 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 acqua...

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 individual might be possible. Watch what happens when Society dreams up a Hollie Phillips:

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. 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...

Is 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...

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, 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...

Why 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 .

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 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 s...

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 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 individu...

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 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...

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 : ( 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...

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 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 conce...

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 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 unsta...

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 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...

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 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 awa...

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 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 cra...