Weirding Language - A Glossary of the Strange and Unexpected

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