This post was contributed by Hafsa Al-Khudairi, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Contemporary Literature and Culture
Marina Warner opens the event with the definition of a brogue. It is a type of shoe that her father gave her mother, which is popular in England and a symbol of the start of their life in the country. The other meaning is a rustic accent that accompanies rural areas. Though Warner specifically emphasized that it should not be a pejorative word, but an expression of beauty and strength. Brogues at university level is the language people interact with and use to create an environment of integration.
Social Constructions and Burdens in Language:
Maria Aristodemou, who is interested in law, psychoanalysis and society, starts by exploring how alienating language can be for both foreigners and for the native speaker. Humans animals are limited by their use of language to express their desires for not all their wants can be expressed in this manner and they have no other means to do so. This makes all humans immigrants in the house language as even the native speaker has to learn from childhood how to use the language, so they are “doomed” by their restrictions. However, language is also built through a socially-constructed idea of identity that holds the historical and societal desires and expectations.
Language is about Sharing:
Mattia Gallotti, who is working on a project called The Human Mind, where he explores the differences between people of different disciplines, explores the idea that language is about sharing. Specifically sharing minds because it is what philosophers think discussions produce. Sharing minds is most effective when it is produced from sharing stories. There is a power in sharing because it produces difference and power. The more people exchange stories through language, the more they can change the world they live in and empower themselves and others. For him, this helps people create their own sense of self, including identity and culture, wherever they go, producing the feeling of a collective ‘we’.
Photography is a Bridge between Two Languages:
Rut Blees Luxemburg, who is a photographer, used her creative photographs to explore the idea of bridging the gap between the English and the German language. She explored themes of connecting marginality with water, the divine, culture, and poetic meanings. Water is related to how she remembers rivers that can connect places and transfer languages beyond the confines of the arbitrary lines that separate countries. Hence, Brogues is a reference to the ground and the soil, which is an attachment to a nation, but it is a sense of home through language, beyond the actual boundaries of the actual home.
The event ended with a Q&A about identity, the term ‘we’, personality, and strangers in a strange land, and their intersection with language. Identity was clarified as an unappeasable fantasy, but identification is real. Then, how many people associate ‘we’ with negative connotations, however, it does have positive communitive connotations as well. The conversation turned towards personalities and strangers. It was concluded that knowing multiple languages helps create patterns of personalities based on a person’s association with the language. Also, the romance of being a stranger is a privilege for the difference in language capabilities and accents helps categorize people into other beings and it can be detrimental to the sense of belonging. Still knowing different languages can help people communicate and sense a feeling of comradery when people find someone who understands them beyond grammar and syntax.
