Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate professor of linguistics at BGSU. She discusses her research project “Imagining Life on Other Planets,”which she worked on during her time as an ICS Faculty Fellow in Spring 2018. Dr. Wells-Jensen's research on xenolinguistics (the study of alien languages) aims to have people question commonly held beliefs about able-bodied and disabled people in our society.

Transcript:

Jolie Sheffer:                          Welcome to the BG Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, an associate professor of English and American Culture Studies and the director of ICS.

Jolie Sheffer:                          This is the first of several episodes featuring the ICS' Spring 2018 faculty fellows. ICS is proud to sponsor fellowships to promote the research and creative work of faculty here at BGSU. Those who receive awards are freed from one semester of teaching and service to devote unimpeded time to the projects they have proposed. These projects must be of both intellectual significance and social relevance in hopes that their work will generate conversations across disciplines and engage both academic and broader community audiences.

Jolie Sheffer:                          Today we are joined by Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, associate professor of English. Dr. Wells-Jensen holds a PhD in linguistics from the State University of New York, University of Buffalo, and her academic interests include phonetics, psycholinguistics, speech production language preservation, Braille, and xenolinguistics. She's also a member of the Advisory Board of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence International and has given papers on the relationship between intelligence, perception, and language at the SETI Institute and the International Space Development Conference.

Jolie Sheffer:                          We intend to focus today on Dr. Wells-Jensen's current project entitled Imagining Life on Other Planets, Reimagining Life on Earth. In this research, Dr. Wells-Jensen explores how an intelligent blind alien race would survive and function, as well as the implications of blindness on their civilization and our ability to find and communicate with them. Her work interrogates our socially-constructed assumptions about ability and disability and questions the limits we place on one another. I'm very please to welcome Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen to the program as one of ICS' spring 2018 faculty fellows. Thanks for joining me, Sheri.

Dr. Wells-Jensen: Thanks. I'm happy to be here.

Jolie Sheffer:                          We're very excited to have you as one of our fellows. Can you start by telling us a bit more about the project you're working on right now?

Dr. Wells-Jensen: I came to this project through a weaving path. It wasn't a natural outgrowth of anything, I don't think. I was invited in fabulous tribute to my 12-year-old nerdy self as sort of a fantasy come true. I was invited to give a paper about language and thought at the SETI Institute. In a desperate attempt to seem like I knew what I was talking about before that talk, I read everything I could get my hands on about SETI and what their research ... what they were doing lately. One of the assumptions that I came upon in a lot of their work is that any extraterrestrial civilization capable of building a telescope so that we could contact them would necessarily have some analog of human vision. I thought, "Wow, really? Really? Really?" It seemed like that was a box that we didn't need to be in. So I put together a paper doing exactly what you might expect, so explaining how an alien race with more or less the abilities that we have as humans except that they can't see would put together a technological civilization. I gave th