Högre seminarium i nordiska språk: Crispin Thurlow

“ALL THESE WORDS”: THE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND/AS WASTE

Crispin Thurlow, University of Bern, Switzerland

This presentation considers the political ecology of language by pinpointing how words participate in wider regimes of waste. It builds on sociocultural-linguistic approaches to materiality and discard studies’ understanding of wasting as practice. Through four analytic vignettes – word waste, rubbished words, wasteful words, and salvaged words – I trace the lives of words as things (e.g. printed packaging, books, AI-generated copy) and their afterlives or spectral presences (e.g. second-hand texts, marginalia, residual inscriptions). Throughout, the paper is concerned with the ethical and ecological stakes of linguistic excess, arguing for a more care-filled orientation to “all these words”.

Bio: Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He is currently directing a four-year project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation titled Articulating Rubbish: A Sociolinguistic Approach to the “Crisis of Waste”.

More information about his work