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Submission Number: 292
Submission ID: 357
Submission UUID: 8be4b58e-5866-4554-9e20-166d5dd31a65
Submission URI: /ga/form/submit-contribution
Cruthaithe: Sun, 1 Mar 2026 - 08:09
Déanta: Sun, 1 Mar 2026 - 08:23
Changed: Wed, 13 May 2026 - 08:24
Remote IP address: 90.130.50.227
Submitted by: Bettina Schwalm
Teanga: English
Is draft: Níl
Current page: webform_confirmation
Flagged: Tá
| Given name | Bettina |
|---|---|
| Surname | Schwalm |
| bettina.schwalm@gmail.com | |
| I understand that by submitting this form, I consent to the use of my data for the purposes of the 2026 Forum on Artistic Research'. | Tá |
| I agree to the terms of service. | Tá |
| Title | Weirding Language - A Glossary of the Strange and Unexpected |
| Format | Experimental format |
| Main language | English |
| Abstract | Language structures our understanding of the world. It can transport us into realities articulated by others, making us feel we belong, or just as forcefully exclude, leaving us outside this particular world-made-with-words. At the same time, language with its rigid black box is a supervillain of the non-binary, the spectral, the moving. What if words could shed skin, become cyclical, morph, and shape-shift as their meanings must? English operates as a compromised global academic language. What is being reduced, lost, untranslated, or dismissed as too strange? As words become colonised, we want to think through their own liberation front. This workshop responds to the epistemic violence embedded in academic English. Where "matter-of-factness dampens intensity" (Massumi, 1995), we treat language itself as a site of intervention. Drawing on feminist epistemologies, pluriversal thinking, and speculative design, we frame language not as something to be mastered but as a material to be reworked, one that was itself "performatively called into being" (Makoni & Pennycook, 2006). We seek meaning "entangled with material and relational ontologies" (Frichot, 2023): language as an active, liberated agent, far beyond the fixed meanings that become shackles of content. Participants bring a key concept from their academic practice in their native language and place it into friction with its English equivalent. Through translation, mistranslation, and speculative recomposition, they generate hybrid terms that exceed both linguistic systems. What fails to translate is treated not as a deficit but as productive knowledge. The workshop culminates in a collective Academic Glossary of the unexpected and weird. Frichot, H. (2023). Dirty materialism: What Jennifer knew. Architectural Theory Review Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2006). Chapter 1: Disinventing and reconstituting languages Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31(2), 83–109 |
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| Previous presentations or iterations of the research | |
| Additional information | Each participant begins with a key concept from their own academic practice — something already formulated, or not yet found in language, perhaps because no expression for it exists. Some bring a term from their native tongue and place it into friction with its English equivalent. Others begin with movement, tracing the body's knowing before reaching for words. Through guided experimentation, translation, and mistranslation, participants generate hybrid terms that exceed both linguistic systems. What fails to translate is treated not as a deficit but as productive knowledge. The workshop culminates in the collective creation of an Academic Glossary of the Weird and Unexpected: an archive of concepts that never quite "made it" into dominant discourse. This glossary expands situated imaginings — the culturally and linguistically bounded frameworks within which one imagines the novel ways the world has worked, works, will work, and must work (Szagdaj et al., 2022). |
| Spatial and technical requirements | Room capacity: 15–20 participants Projector Workshop materials provided by facilitators |
| Potential risks or ethical concerns | - |
| Create a user account for SAR 2026 | Tá |
| Create new user | Bettina Schwalm |
