Some people live in the museum of language, curate it in these glass cages. And then they run against those glass cage walls. Because they don't fit to the category they've been sort of put into and that causes pain. So i presented this analogy at a conference where an old white man expressed his discomfort about the way people were talking about old white men.
Language is expressive, a way of opening doors or a tool for creating new dialogue. But a tool so powerful can also take us to unforeseen or unintended places. It can create narratives that become fixed, unhelpful, or exclusionary. Kübra Gümüsay is a writer and activist focusing on social justice and public discourse. Her new book is Speaking and Being, which looks at the power of words, asking whether language creates freeing new spaces or plays a part in walling them off. Our host for the discussion is Danielle Sands, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway University in London, where she works across disciplines bridging philosophy, literary studies and critical theory.
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