Distinguished Lecture Series 26-27: Public Lecture by Prof Crispin Thurlow

Public Lecture: “All These Words”: On the Weight and Afterlife of Language

Speaker: Crispin Thurlow, Professor, University of Bern

4:00PM November 5, 2026 (Thu)

Abstract

Taking seriously the ethical and ecological stakes of words, this lecture considers the weight and afterlife of language. Often treated as primarily symbolic or discursive, words are things: they take up space, consume resources, and circulate through systems of production and disposal. They also persist long after their apparent disappearance. Building on my work in “rubbish sociolinguistics,” this lecture returns to questions first posed in a 2021 keynote at HKU concerning how language is implicated in wider regimes of waste. Whether printed on packaging, bound in books, or generated as digital data, words carry weight; in their endless displacement and concealment they also exist as residual or spectral presences. Words are therefore matters of both political economy and political ecology. In this regard, and following the lead of poet A.R. Ammons, I ask how we reckon with the polluting effects of “all these words” and whether we might learn to care for our words – rather than about them – in more sustainable ways.

Biography

Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he is also Affiliate Professor in the Center for the Study of Language and Society. He is an Associate Researcher in the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. For more information, visit www.crispinthurlow.net.

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