PODCAST

Structured Visions

Jodie Clark

Linguist Jodie Clark explores creative ways of imagining social transformation.

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

01:03:17

114 The linguistics of loss

Structured Visions ·

2025/10/30

Join me on a journey from humanism to posthumanism with a focus on how we understand language, more-than-human communication, semiosis and information theory. We discuss Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, specifically his ideas about the Earth's open and emergent semiotic system, of which human meaning-making is a subset. We explore the idea of human language as a unidimensional system for organising information within the multidimensional information systems of the Earth and the cosmos. Inhabiting

48:27

109 What makes you so special?

Structured Visions ·

2025/05/29

The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special. It’s a culture that’s clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence of what makes humans so special. Posthumanism is a movement that challenges this assumption. My position is that language does make humans exceptional,

01:01:48

108 Adulting, and stuff like that

Structured Visions ·

2025/04/30

Conversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing those fears for me was… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was ‘like’ and stuff like that (discourse markers and general extenders). If you’re curious about what made me want to investigate American speakers’ use of like in conversation, have a listen to Episode 86 (Feelings are, like, inside things). In this episode I

53:27

107 Heaven and Earth

Structured Visions ·

2025/03/27

The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct. In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard

01:00:35

106 Prosody and peak experiences

Structured Visions ·

2025/02/27

Have you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice? If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only

32:18

One from the archives: The Gift (Episode 24)

Structured Visions ·

2024/12/27

If you listened to last month’s episode, you’ll know that I’ve taken a short break from podcasting to finish off the book I’m writing. I’m thrilled to tell you that the book is now finished, and I’m very happy with it. I can’t wait to tell you more. (In fact, if you sign up to my newsletter at jodieclark.com/newsletter you’ll hear more sooner!) I’m so excited to get back to podcasting monthly, which I’ll do again at the end of January 2025. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the

39:58

One from the archives: How linguistics can save the...

Structured Visions ·

2024/11/28

I’m taking a short break from podcasting as I finish off the book I’m writing, but I’ll be back in the New Year. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 60, How linguistics can save the world, originally aired on June 1, 2018. This podcast has been an amazing way for me to develop some unusual ideas about language. Recently I was wondering when I first came up with the idea that the Earth has its own language of which human language is one small but

55:43

104 Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie

Structured Visions ·

2024/10/31

Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time. To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre. What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the

53:27

103 Inhabiting language

Structured Visions ·

2024/09/26

In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self). The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it

01:09:41

Episode 102 How to belong

Structured Visions ·

2024/08/29

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be

50:08

Episode 98 Linguistic singularities

Structured Visions ·

2024/04/25

Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so. In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refer to

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