In episode six, I spoke with Dr Daniel Finch-Race, a teaching fellow at the University of Bristol and a research fellow at the University of Venice; whose academic work sits at a crossroads between the Environmental Humanities, language and history. He works namely with French and Italian, challenging the idea that the climate crisis is an issue expressed solely in the English language. We examine the role of language in constructing meaning, and more broadly, the narratives that define our place in the world. We explore the arts as a kind of language, and Daniel’s interest in the languages of the visual, of film and paintings, that require attention as their own kind of vital storytelling.
As we converse in English, we reflect on the primacy of the English language, and the politics of translating other languages and worldviews; considering the urgency of a diverse and plural response to a changing global environment.
A principal called linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), holds that language affects the very ways in which its respective speakers conceptualize their entire world, in short their cognitive processes which often inform their actions.
– The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
Thus ways of life are, to a large extent, manifestations of concepts—of the ideas they foster and the possibilities of action.
reading list six: Daniel Finch-Race
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?, James Baldwin |link|
French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century, Daniel Finch-Race & Stephanie Posthumus |link|
Engaging with Cultural Differences: The Strange Case of French écocritique, Stephanie Poshumus |link|
The Language of the Master, Paul Kingsnorth |link|
Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Glenn Albrecht
Toni Morrison on the Power of Language |link|
Earth Does Not Speak In Prose, Paul Kingsnorth |link|
A Life Worthy of Our Breath – The On Being Project with Ocean Vuong |link|
Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem |link|
Relatively speaking: do our words influence how we think? |link|
On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature, Eileen Crist |link|
Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities |link|
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality |link|
Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, FILM : |link|
Engaging with Cultural Differences: The Strange Case of French ecocritique,Stephanie Posthumus |link|
Speaking English with Country: Can the animate world hear us? Can we hear it?, Geoff Berry |link|
Ecolinguistics: the state of the art and future horizons, Sune Vork Steffensen & Alwin Fill |link|
Outro: Excerpt from Donna Haraway , It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories
tales in the anthropocene 