Structured Visions

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? Download Episode 39: The path of least relevance

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 … Continue reading Episode 38: You’re outta 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, … Continue reading Episode 37: Sand in my teeth

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: … Continue reading Episode 36: Anybody else kn...

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.) … Continue reading Episode 35: Language and the gendered body

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 … Continue reading Episode 34: Choose You...

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 … Continue reading Episode 33: The Grammar Matrix

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 … Continue reading Episode 32: A Thought That Thinks More Than It Thinks

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: Download Episode 31: Figments of Society’s Imagination.

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 … Continue reading Episode 30: Plastic Automatons… a...

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 … Continue reading Episode 29: Class(room)...

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 … Continue reading Episode 28: Architects,...

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. Download Episode 27: The … Continue reading Episode 27: The battleground, the dojo and...

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 individua...

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 … Continue reading Episode 25: It makes my skin crawl

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 … Continue reading Episode 24: The Gift

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 … Continue reading Episode 23: I just don’t enjoy the taste

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 … Continue reading Episode 22: You’d never catch anyone

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, … Continue reading Episode 21: Where are you? Who are you?

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 … Continue reading Episode 20: Fa...

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 … Continue reading Episode 19: Paradigms

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 … Continue reading Episode 18: They Lied to&#16...

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 behave in one way and girls and women to behave in a different way. But I can hear … Continue reading From Paperclips to Marshmallows: False Promises of Individual Choice

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 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. … Continue reading Blank Boys and Bla...