Structured Visions

More 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?

Download Episode 30: Plastic Automatons… and Other Personifications of Social Structure

Is 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 see these characters as co-constituting, co-creating reality. Better yet, let’s envisage this relationship through the metaphor of a bar magnet surrounding by iron filings. The individual ‘magnetises’ the components of social structure, such that they form a pattern around the individual. How about that for a promising metaphor?

Download Episode 29: Class(room) struggle.

In 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.

I often claim I’m using grammar to identify possibilities for social structure. It would be more accurate to say that I’m using the principles of grammar (specifically, M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar) to identify the structural properties of texts. Halliday defines ‘text’ as ‘any instance of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who knows the language’ (Halliday 2014, p. 3) Studying texts allows me to stop time, and to explore the structural properties of conversations about or descriptions of the social world.

The conversational text I discuss in this episode is one in which Ally, a first-year university student, is talking about her course, which she’s not enjoying very much:

I explore what’s called the ‘thematic structure’ of the text. That means looking at each of the clauses, and identifying the ‘Themes’. A Theme is a point of departure – the first element of the clause, which sets the stage (as it were) for the message. The Theme of each clause is indicated in bold, below:

The thematic organisation of this text presents a particular shape of a particular social world, one comprised of two entities: a unnamed, generic, unindividuated self (you) and a nameless lecturer. Reminds me of the scenario I painted last week of what it felt like to give lectures at the beginning of my teaching career! Next week I’d like to share some other structured images of classroom settings that emerge from other conversations with students. Is it really the case that each new structure presents new possibilities for transformation? Let’s see if I can convince you of that in Episode 29.

Download Episode 28: Architects, Astronomers and Grammarians.

Why 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.

Download Episode 27: The battleground, the dojo and the lab.

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 the relationship between the individual and society, where society wants to transform itself, and it sees possibilities for doing so by becoming embodied.

Download Episode 26: Bodies and selves and structures, oh my!