Personal Information
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Given name: Bettina









Surname: Schwalm









Email: bettina.schwalm@gmail.com









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Your contribution
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Title: Weirding Language - A Glossary of the Strange and Unexpected









Format: Experimental format (4)









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











Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/357/Weirding%20Language.jpg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Julia W. Szagdaj is a speculative designer, design researcher, and linguistic experimenter. A 2021 graduate of the Transdisciplinary Design MFA at Parsons, where she studied with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, her work sits at the intersection of critical design, futuring, and imagination as a tool for systemic change. She is the author of Faroyść – a speculative method presented at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit 2021 – and has published in the peer-reviewed journal Foresight, been a finalist for the YICCA International Art Prize, and collaborated with UNDP as a learning scientist.
  
- Bettina Schwalm is an Experience Designer, Writer, and Researcher whose practice explores future-making as a collective and speculative act in service of society, culture, and the environment. Working at the intersection of science, art, and design, she crafts immersive tools, narratives, and visions that invite organisations and the public to inhabit possible worlds. She is Centre Director at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, affiliated to Konstfack (University of Arts, Crafts, and Design), and a PhD candidate researching the Age of Global Weirding, funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
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Requirements
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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:
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