Jodie Clark - Podcast Details

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Hosting With HeartJodie McQueen on establishing a serene and sustainable farm stay in the hills of northern TasmaniaMy guest today on Hosting With Heart is Jodie McQueen, owner and operator of Paradise Road Farm, a two-cabin farm stay in Sheffield, the gateway to Tasmania's Cradle Mountain world heritage area. With a diverse professional background including time spent working in Japan and Australia in a variety of communications, tourism and sustainability-focused roles, in 2016 Jodie and her then-partner determined it was time for a tree change and went on to purchase a 100 acre property in Tasmania. By 2019 and then newly single, she embarked on a permanent move to the property and soon after got...2024-06-1351 min

The Heart Helper PodcastSoaring Beyond the Stumble: Life After a DUI with Clark LangEpisode 19 of The Heart Helper Podcast invites you to join a deeply resonant conversation with influencer and inspirational figure, Clark Lang, as he courageously shares his path after a DUI arrest. Clark's authentic story holds the power to spark transformative reflection as he discusses his journey of being arrested for driving under the influence, seeking treatment, and maintaining sobriety for 9 months. Host Jodie Smith, who has also faced a DUI arrest, shares a profound connection with Clark, exploring their mutual experiences of pivotal life changes.This episode covers:- Recognizing signs of a drinking problem 2024-04-0857 min

Structured VisionsGrammar shameWhat’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it. Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a conjunction to more serious and oppressive forms of linguistic prejudice. An example of the latter can be found in Geneva Smitherman’s account of her childhood experiences in her book Talkin That Talk. After her family moved from rural...2023-06-2940 min

Structured VisionsIs nothing sacred?Is nothing sacred? What images or memories does this question conjure for you? Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.) When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge. The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t think of a b...2022-10-2752 min

Structured VisionsPossession, duality and other grammatical mysteriesIn this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy: Human beings are the only living things that experience separation from the rest of the world. What separates us is human language. The experience of separation created by human language is a stage in the Earth’s evolution, the Earth’s next great experiment. And there are mysteries in the structure of language that can help us understand how the separation is shaped. We’ll talk about some of those myst...2022-09-291h 01

Structured VisionsLove, language, music and aliensHave you ever been in love? And if you could send a message to outer space, what message would it be? We’ll use these questions to guide us through an exploration of the evolution of language, music, intimacy and transformation. The book I discuss in this episode is Steven Mithen’s The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body. The story I read in this episode is ‘Messages’, available on grammarfordreamers.com. Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in m...2022-08-311h 00

Structured VisionsThe erotic power of syllablesWhat propels you, what drives you, what directs you in your life? Is it inner guidance? Or is it some external power or sense of exterior obligation? And, on a more light-hearted note, what’s your favourite syllable? In this episode we’re exploring selves, bodies, phonology and phonetics, and Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The erotic as power’. We’re playing with these ideas: Human language gives the human body the experience of existing separately from the rest of the natural world. Human language allows the human body to have a unique and specific...2022-07-281h 08

Structured VisionsQuantum linguisticsWhere do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford. That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which we communicate information or express our needs and desires. In this episode we explore a new way of thinking about language and ideas: Ideas emerge from empty space. Language organises that space to form selves. Selves are the spaces...2022-06-3058 min

Structured VisionsAccidentally born againWhat’s your relationship to religion? This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way. To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question. What’s your most embarrassing religious moment? Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12. In...2022-05-2658 min

Structured VisionsCreate nothingIs there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself? Believe it or not, there is a connection between all these questions. The first question came into the foreground for me when I first moved to Britain to do my PhD and was regularly doling out guidance to my student housemates. One of them was convinced that I ‘got’ her in a way her boyfriend didn’t. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I don’t think...2022-04-2853 min

Structured VisionsThe structure of selfhoodHow is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about. Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite charges attract water molecules to each other (the positive side of one molecule is drawn to the negative side of another). These weak attractive forces are called ‘hydrogen bonds’, and they make it possible for water to remain a liquid at room temp...2022-03-3155 min

Structured VisionsApocalypse fantasiesHave you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language. Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the window to intimacy. But what happens when the amount of language we use increases to the extent that we’ve seen in recent years? The production of selves increases to potentially catastrophic proportions. Here’s the link to Dr Debbie Reese’s excellent critique of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins: https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-critical-loo...2022-02-2454 min

Structured VisionsGood news and bad newsFerdinand 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 heartening – almost magical – but it’s also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news? The story I discuss in this episode is ‘A day at the lake’. Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you: http://bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my freshly minted Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodiec...2022-01-2748 min

Structured VisionsThe meanings of lifeHappy 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 is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find (meaning itself has lots of meanings, as linguist John Lyons points out), and what we’re assuming about life when we ask what it means. Are we asking about the meaning of human life only? If so, are we thinking of human life in terms of a na...2021-12-3035 min

Structured VisionsOur relationship with our world‘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 carbon in our atmosphere.’ That one number, he goes on to say, ‘defines our relationship with our world.’ According to Attenborough’s framing, the story is a mathematical problem, with a mathematical solution. But how often, in your experience, are relationship problems genuinely reducible to mathematical equations? How often are they genuinely ‘solved’ by a number? I’ve often said that my creative and academic work are inspired by ‘the intimac...2021-11-2551 min

Structured VisionsLife, language and other mysteriesIn this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What was did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I’m going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other. I believe that thinking about words will give us a bit of insight about what it was like when life first emerged on the Earth. These two things – life and language – for me share two qualities: that they’re both...2021-10-2846 min

Structured VisionsImperative BlessingsWhen 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 generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us, that are protective, that wish to bless us? Perhaps it’s reckless not to. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘Go’. It’s just been published in the Running Wild Anthology of Stories, vol 5. I learned...2021-09-3050 min

Structured VisionsA more welcoming world Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘The end of language’. The hack I mention for finding the subject and verb of a clause is called the question-tag probe. Here’s a video on how to use it to find the subject, and here’s one on how to find the verb. Have y...2021-08-2647 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 65 Psychedelic linguisticsHave 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 little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language had created. It was trippy. In this episode we’ll discuss the role of language in creating, dissolving and protecting selves. In my academic research I analyse transcripts of conversations to identify the shape of the social structure that emerges from peopl...2021-07-2944 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 64 The intimacy embedded in language 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 the idea that languages are made of words, as does a character in my short story, ‘The words of your language’, which was published in issue 13 of After Happy Hour Review. We play the ‘think of a word’ game, which shows up on pages 7-8 of my screenplay, Grammar for Dreamers (http://eepurl.com/huKgbf). We learn...2021-07-0135 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 63 Original scentHere’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. Find a window and look through it. Focus first on the scene outside the window. Then focus on the windowpane itself. Toggle your attention back forth between the windowpane and the landscape outside. Now think of a word, like cake. Thinking of the meaning of cake is like looking at the scene through the window. Thinking of the form of the word cake (the sounds, if it’s spoken, or the letters, if...2021-06-0430 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 62 Who’s the boss?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 explore performative utterances like ‘You’re the boss’ or ‘You’re in charge’. These are more horrifying than you might think. Often we think of language and power as commodities that can be bestowed on individuals swimming around in the fish tank of social structure. What if instead we thought of language as a sustaining fluid that keeps our social selves safe? The call for all of us then woul...2021-04-1828 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 61 Echos and their othersHow 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 outwit the confines of language. Read my very short story ‘Echos and their others’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers 2021-04-0422 min

Structured VisionsTeaser for Season 2: Grammar for dreamersWhat’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 experiment – combining creative writing with my love of linguistics. Find out more and read ‘Echos and their Others’ at grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I’m so glad you’re here! Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers 2021-04-0208 min

More From LawEp. 53 - Running A Law Firm As A Business: with Jodie Hill of Thrive LawLike any other business, law firms aim to generate profit, build their customer base and remain competitive. After practicing within the world of law, Jodie Hill decided to found her own law firm, Thrive Law. In this episode, I ask Jodie about her approach to law firm management, the importance of junior lawyers appreciating the business side of law and what ultimately inspired her to start her own firm. --- You can keep up to date with everything I'm up to - including my latest resources, events and episodes - by signing up to my newsletter here: https://tinyurl.com...2020-09-1840 min

Entfessle Dein Leben!08 | Finde Deinen Kern und werde frei | Interview Teil 2 mit Jodie ClarkJodie Clark ist deutsche Philanthropin und Keynote Speakerin, die sich für das Wohl der Menschen besonders innerhalb von Partnerschaften einsetzt. Als "Seelenflüsterin" versteht sie es in besonderer Weise, in die Tiefen des Unterbewusstseins eines jeden vorzudringen und damit alte Blockaden und Emotionen aufzulösen. In Teil 2 unseres Interviews erfahren wir Jodies ganz persönliche Geschichte. Sie spricht über den härtesten Rückschlag, den sich ein Mensch vorstellen kann: Eine lebensbedrohliche Krankheit und wie sie es geschafft hat, ins Leben zurück zu kehren und diesen Schicksalsschlag als größtes Geschenk anzunehmen. Ihre Liebe zum Leben und zu den Menschen...2018-12-2936 min

Entfessle Dein Leben!07 | Finde Deinen Kern und werde frei | Interview Teil 1 mit Jodie ClarkJodie Clark ist deutsche Philanthropin und Keynote Speakerin, die sich für das Wohl der Menschen besonders innerhalb von Partnerschaften einsetzt. Als "Seelenflüsterin" versteht sie es in besonderer Weise, in die Tiefen des Unterbewusstseins eines jeden vorzudringen und damit alte Blockaden und Emotionen aufzulösen. In unserem Teil 1 des Interviews spricht Jodie darüber, wie Sie Paaren hilft, die sich voneinander entfernt haben. Wir sprechen darüber, wie wichtig es ist, auch in einer Partnerschaft vor allem auf sich selbst zu schauen und seinen eigenen Kern (neu) zu finden. Ihre Liebe zum Leben und zu den Menschen lässt sie u. a...2018-12-2932 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 60 How linguistics can save the worldWelcome 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 are the things that need rethinking: the inequitable distribution of resources the isolation and marginalisation of difference an impulse toward self-destruction, and a lack of respect for the natural world. We can tackle all of these from a range of different disciplines, but on the Structured Visions podcast, we spend most of our time in the ‘linguistics’ section of the world library. If linguistics is going to change the worl...2018-05-3039 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 59 Enquiry, imagination and actionLinguist, 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 stop there?’ In this episode I address Erika’s question. Spoiler alert: the answer is a resounding YES. And I celebrate the question ‘What is the point?’ Please keep sending me suggestions for podcast topics. I welcome them with an open imagination and a commitment to enquiry and activism.2017-01-2925 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 58 Communities of Sara MillsIn 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 the event, including fellow speakers, Chris Christie, Lucy Jones, Shân Wareing and Karen Grainger. Special thanks to Dave Sayers and Alice Bell for organising such a moving tribute to Sara. Is there something you’d like me to discuss in an upcoming podcast? Get in touch! Click here to access the slides from the talk.2017-01-1430 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 57 Redneck rootsRemember 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 we get introduced to her mom… the redneck. Not that Christina’s embarrassed about that, or anything. Revisiting Christina’s conversation gives me the opportunity to illustrate more specifically how my approach to discourse analysis both draws on and differs from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). (Episodes 55 and 56 provide a bit of background for this discussion, if you’d like to learn more.) Get a copy of the...2016-09-0138 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 56 A story about languageTo engage in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the linguistic methodology I discussed last week, requires understanding language primarily as a form of communication that can be manipulated to represent the world in different ways. Indeed, language is often understood as a form of communication that is unique to human beings, and linguists describe the specific ‘design features’ that make human languages different from forms of animal communication. (See George Yule’s textbook, The Study of Language, for a summary.) I’ve said that my work differs slightly from CDA, one of these differences has to do with my particu...2016-08-0929 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 55 Critical conditionThis 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 CDA that appeals to me most – an aim of most practitioners of CDA is to explore the role language plays in maintaining or challenging social injustices. To give you an idea of how CDA usually works, I analyse a recent news item from Fox News. (Click on the headline below for the full article.) Women train to become prospective firefighters Doing CDA requires being explicit about what c...2016-08-0427 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 54 I was so hungryOur 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 world, but as a social world. I keep drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s image of the blindfolded person who uses a stick to gain perceptual experience of the objects in a darkened room. In today’s episode I play with the idea that it is language, or grammar, that serves as the ‘stick’ by which social bodies move through and perceive the social world. The episode moves from green coffee c...2016-07-1035 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 53 Submerged in the social worldRemember 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 literally – taking seriously Sara Ahmed’s description in her Queer Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, in which ‘bodies are submerged, such that they become the space they inhabit’ (Ahmed 2006, p. 53). Ahmed’s critique encourages us to reorient our phenomenologies, to understand the spaces in terms not only of what is oriented to, but also in terms of what is backgrounded, what is beyond reach for certain bodies. My own perspec...2016-07-0723 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 52 I’m very grateful for you listening todayToday I celebrate 52 weeks of religiously produced Structured Visions episodes! Enjoy a glass of bubbly with me while I share with you some of the motivations behind making the podcast and what I find so enjoyable about it. I also express my gratitude some figures who have been inspirations for me along the way: Tara Mohr, whose work on callings, and whose dedication to promoting women’s Playing Big made me recognise this way of honing my voice, exploring ideas on the public stage and ‘shipping’ my ideas (to use Seth Godin’s term). Elizabeth Gilbert, who...2016-07-0727 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 51 A Message from the Emperor, part 2We return to Kafka’s tale this week – a tale of a distance that can never be breached. What if we understood the ‘you’ in Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ – that lowly subject at the edge of the empire – as a self that’s attached to the social body? And what if the emperor, intent upon sending ‘you’ a message, were the human body? In this episode I invite listeners to imagine that between the social body and the human body is an insurmountable distance. To explore this idea requires us to delve into philosophical inquiry ab...2016-06-3023 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 50 A Message from the Emperor, part 1We’ve been building up to some exciting ideas in these podcasts, many of which came to a head in Episode 47. Here are some of the key points: I’ve been recommending that when we think about social structure we draw upon a different binary than those that are often used. Rather than individual-society, or self-body, I’ve proposed human body and social body. Thinking in terms of these two elements as two types of body makes it possible to explore how they interact with each other. It also enables us to focus in on to what extent thi...2016-06-2333 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 49 Calling all ethnographersWhat 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.2016-06-1631 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 48 The magnificent brother from the new world new worldI 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...2016-06-0923 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 47 The grammatical face of the otherWe 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 in...2016-06-0242 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 46 Middle school, embodiedIn 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 compare middle school to a body. Human bodies are mentioned several times in the show – Alex Blumberg, for ins...2016-05-2634 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 45 Can’t you do something with her?More 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’. As fantastical as that idea seems, it reflects back a commonly held unde...2016-05-1936 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 44 We got everything backToday 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 about it with a spirit of...2016-05-1237 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 43 Bye bye body metaphorThere’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 saying. Can we really assume those terms h...2016-05-0538 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 42 Discipline and Punish, part 3Be 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 thought. Now back to Foucault’s Discipli...2016-04-2841 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 41 Discipline and Punish, part 2We’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 threat is the loss of authority. In a capitalist system, the biggest threat is the loss of...2016-04-2134 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 40 Discipline and Punish, part 1The 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 as in relationship with human bodies. This image has been a s...2016-04-1335 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 39 The path of least relevanceTumble 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?2016-04-0619 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 38 You’re outta the game!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) and inclusion/exclusion (by determining which constituents are in and which are out). Now let’s take this personification and turn it into metaphor. First let’s use the metaphor...2016-03-3138 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 37 Sand in my teethI’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 showing up in these podcasts. Comparing social structure to computer codes and choose-you...2016-03-2429 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 36 Anybody else know her?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.2016-03-1738 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 35 Language and the gendered bodyIn 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 approaches adopt the perspective offered by practice theory, whereby individu...2016-03-1048 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 34 Choose Your Own AdventureI 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’; voiceless (-voice) gives you ‘pat’. These tiny distinctions between phonemes make it possible for the phonemes to recombine in different ways to...2016-03-0235 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 33 The Grammar MatrixM.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 the characters and scenes of the social wo...2016-02-2532 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 32 A thought that thinks more than it thinksLast 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 their desires. Sexual desire became a dividing practice that separated out ga...2016-02-1834 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 31 Figments of society’s imaginationThe 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: 2016-02-1031 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 30 Plastic automatons… and other personifications of social structureMore 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 – anyone interested in pre-ordering?2016-02-0435 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 29 Class(room) struggleIs 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 individual in relation to society. Let’s personify both entities to produce characters in a drama, I say. And let’s...2016-01-2834 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 28 Architects, astronomers and grammariansIn 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, with each new structure emerges a new possibilities for imagining structures – indeed, new ways of thinking about social structure....2016-01-2129 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 27 The battleground, the dojo and the labWhy 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.2016-01-1337 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 26 Bodies and selves and structures, oh my!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 seen as a David figure in relation to the Goliath of society. What if instead we saw society as itself a character in the drama, a character who wants to be transformed? I put forward a new myth of th...2016-01-0727 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 25 It makes my skin crawlHappy 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, social and symbolic. The variety of any language that comes to be un...2015-12-3136 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 24 The GiftA 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 Melanesia. The kula is an elaborate ritualised exchange of two types of object: mwali (carved bracelets) and so...2015-12-2331 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 23 I just don’t enjoy the tasteLast 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’s d...2015-12-1729 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 22 You’d never catch anyoneThis 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 offended, when its face is threatened, when it’s trying to...2015-12-1030 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 21: Where are you? Who are you? 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 unstable, because pronouns are deictic – that is, they change according to their context of use. The pronoun ‘I’ can mean Jodie...2015-12-0400 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 21 Where are you? Who are you?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 unstable, because pronouns are deictic – that is, they change according to their context of use. The pronoun ‘I’ can mean Jodie Clark, Madon...2015-12-0330 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 20 Facing ThanksgivingAs 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 depending unquestioningly upon a ‘Western’ notion of the individual: each individual person has a ‘face’ that can be threatened. Everyday interactio...2015-11-2730 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 19 ParadigmsThe 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 as well. It’s used in relation to the term ‘syntagm’. Syntagms are linear sequences of lan...2015-11-1929 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 18 They lied to usSocial 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 poignant, freeing clarity, like an 8-year-old who learns that her classmates are lying when they tell her she...2015-11-1233 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 17 From paperclips to marshmallows: false promises of individual choiceAll 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 individual has a choice.’ When i...2015-11-0631 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 16 Blank boys and blank girlsI’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 that thinks more than it thinks,’ writes philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, ‘is a desire’. To imagine new possibilities with...2015-10-2931 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 15 The paperclip gameWhen 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 else – compassion, fun, openheartedness, wit – lost their value. The ‘Paperclip Game’ is an illustration of how a closed, o...2015-10-2228 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 14 Liza got hair: thwarting recognisabilityHow 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 social structure that is organised around...2015-10-1330 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 13 Let's danceLast 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.2015-10-0830 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 12 Foucault, the panopticon and the tyranny of cartwheelsWe’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 power of the king. If ever the king’s power was threatened through a usurpation attempt or an enemy in...2015-09-3032 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 11 I’m so fat and so short: the fragmented bodyIf 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 rational and in control, and the body is not always something we...2015-09-2432 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 10 Potties and bodies‘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 foray into a four-year-old’s preoccupation with ‘going potty’ illustrates th...2015-09-1730 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 9 It’s not fair! The rational, disembodied personThis 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 based upon the idea of ‘fairness’? In the classical period, it was the idea of ‘natural o...2015-09-0731 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 8 The Model Person: traffic, politeness, French kissing and fingernailsIn 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 wrong (like slamming my jaw into the cheekbones of complete strangers). Legal sy...2015-09-0231 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 7 I left, like, that night: the isolated individualWith 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 fact, she got out as soon as it was possible for her to leave: 2015-08-2627 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 6: I was one of the those: uniqueness and communityI 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 Wenger say that you learn particular skills by being part of a community committed to a particular activity, like baking or playing...2015-08-1828 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 5 Kill your peas and other stories from alien worldsLast 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 analyses the links between class, gender and language in a high school in the Detroit area. Eckert describes a divide...2015-08-1230 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 4 I’m like, social structure really pisses me off!Linguistic 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 use the word ‘like’ a lot when I talk. Like, what? It turns out that the use of ‘like’ as a quotat...2015-08-0528 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 3 Objective, descriptive and other broken promises in linguisticsWhat 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 logic.* Then in a music class taught by Amzie Parcell, I had a...2015-07-2928 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 2 Chutes and Ladders, or I am being so AmericanIn 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 graded on your level of ‘Americanness’? I talk about my feelings of not measuring up when I lived i...2015-07-2233 min

Structured VisionsEpisode 1 The mystery of the little Black baby dollsWelcome 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 social injustice or are a result of social injustice, then we are also in a position to i...2015-07-1719 min