The talk weaves memories of 1980s Prizren into what I know of language and cognition.
First, I sketch changes in views of mind, languages and cognitive process. Over 40 years, a focus on computation shifted, first, to embodiment and, later, to how languaging rides in tandem with practices. Much depends on imagining the future –how, together with the other, one uses an emplaced moment to call forth the possible.
In addressing Prizren 2024, I draw on the ecolinguistic mission of seeking to enhance life-
sustaining relations. Given where we are coming from, we can act to better living,
enlanguaged place-worlds.
By enacting future making in a familiar thirdspace, we bundle practices to trigger positive outcomes that resonate with living others. Like them, we can change our living and our languaging. In future making, we can release half-forgotten pasts that engender our own half-sensed potential.
More about the guest:
Stephen Cowley is Emeritus Professor of Organizational Cognition at the University of Southern Denmark. His varied career took him to Italy, Sweden, Yugoslavia, South Africa, the UK and Denmark. During the unforgettable years of 1982-1984, he taught in Prizren. Having battled at learning Albanian, but failed with Gheg and Prizren Turkish, he was moved to ask unusual questions. This took him to a transdisciplinary spurred view of languages, mind and, indeed, how being human fits with life itself.
More about the program:
The presentation the first in a series of lectures organized within the project “Permanent Transition” supported by the European Cultural Foundation.
The program brings a set of researchers and practitioners from arts, linguistics, agriculture, economy and other fields, proposing a diverse understanding of the climate crisis and possible courses of action into the future.