Dear colleagues,
we are pleased to invite you to three events with Prof. Crispin Thurlow (University of Bern), taking place on December 15-16, 2025.
Please register by October 15, 2025:
https://doodle.com/sign-up-sheet/participate/e34354e4-e877-49c1-a4c9-da8f1452bd4a/select
We look forward to receiving your registrations.
With best wishes,
Iryna Wehr
Event 1: Lecture by Prof. Crispin Thurlow, University of Bern
https://www.crispinthurlow.net/
15.12.2025 at 10:00
Venue: University of Vienna (Lecture Hall 6, the Main Building).
What a Waste? Linguistic Hauntings and the Afterlife of Words
In this talk, I turn to some new ideas taking shape in the context of my work on the sociolinguistics of waste (Thurlow, 2022; Thurlow et al., 2022). While language plays a powerful role in naming, categorizing, and regulating the stuff we throw away, waste also exists beyond words as a fully material, sensorial phenomenon. Having said which, through its constant concealment and displacement, waste is often only knowable by its immaterial traces. It is this last quality which has brought me into contact with hauntology (Derrida, 1993; Deumert, 2018), a perspective which certainly pushes at the boundaries of both language and sociocultural linguistics. Along these lines and orienting to both the (in)tangibility of waste and to “linguistic hauntings”, my talk centers on wasted words: how words, like so much rubbish, are regularly discarded, but also how they linger as uncanny, spectral presences. In reflecting on the afterlife of words and/as things, we are invited to notice them, to rethink their value, and, perhaps, to care for (not about) them in better, more sustainable ways.
Event 2: Workshop by Prof. Crispin Thurlow
15.12.2025 at 14:00
Venue: University of Vienna (Seminar room 15, Kolingasse 14-16, 1090 Vienna).
Messy Methods and/for Rubbish Sociolinguistics
In this creative, hands-on workshop, I will introduce my approach to messy methods (cf. Law, 2004) as a way of doing research which upholds rather than avoids the messiness of everyday life. The specific focus will be on (a) cartographies of (un)knowing, (b) object interviewing, and (c) performative writing. My colleagues and I have found messy methods to be especially useful for grappling with the discursive resonances and semiotic entanglements of waste. So, while exploring novel approaches for both generating and communicating their research, participants will also be invited to consider how their work is structured by waste/wasting.
Event 3: Please see: Individual consultations with Prof. Crispin Thurlow on 16.12.2025
