Liberating Languaging: A Pop-Up Exhibit

Artwork by Cora Foss - NYU Graduate Student in Communicative Sciences and Disorders / With permission

Why Languaging?

Most of us think of language as a system of rules that helps us learn how to speak in ways we are understood, how to write in complete and complex sentences that help us sound smart, and how to read subtitles in foreign films. 

Yet, for something we do virtually every day we exist... isn't it overly simplistic to believe that our language/s are merely objects that we observe, analyze, quantify, rank, critique, judge, and change... 

What's a different way of thinking about it? 

Languaging, or lenguajear, is a term that was introduced by Humberto Maturana, a Chilean biologist and philosopher. But, many other "visionaries," including Suresh Canagarajah, Ph.D., Ofelia Garcia, Ph.D. (and colleagues), Jon Henner, Ph.D. (gone too soon and missed greatly) and Octavian Robinson, Ph.D. have expanded and elaborated on the idea that language is more than a "thought - or speech- bubble" above our heads. 

'Language --> languaging': A Paradigm Shift:

The shifting to language-as-action-in-progress perspective is connected to studies in various fields (e.g., education, sociolinguistics, critical Deaf studies) and it's backed up by knowledge that is usually positioned as less valuable - our lived experiences. What are the main ideas in a languaging perspective about 'language'?

• language parts, like words, are only abstract representations of the objects and concepts that they name, 

• Language borders are made up by humans so language variation can take place beyond and within boundaries of nations, and 

• language is meaningful when partners in an exchange coordinate their understandings and are invested in the collaborative process of shared learning about and from each other. 

A languaging perspective  can add to our own self-understanding and self-appreciation. It can help us realize how our spoken and signed language/s, our regional expressions, our gestures and facial expressions, the ways we move our bodies, and the manner in which we interact with technologies (e.g., emojis, text, gifs, typing) to express ourselves and be understood: 

...live and breathe within our communities 

…are co-built within shared exchanges

....vary within and across ourselves, our families, representing diverse ways of knowing 

...hold our stories and the previous iterations and current -in-motion - versions of ourselves

What Are Our Aims? 

Through exhibits submitted and curated by members of the NYU community, we hope to:

• Challenge ideas that any language and languaging can be more “educated,” “normal,” “competent,” “fluent,” or “good” than another. That means that we will invite exhibits that question “standard language,” “proficient bilingualism,” “assimilation,” and the need to “mask or code-switch” to belong.

• Affirm and celebrate the diversity of communicative expression in communities, which means we will seek art-pieces that center the ways in which languaging is reimagined within households, neighborhoods, generations, through disabled/nondisabled ways of being. 

• Show creative ways of meaning-making as languaging to expand the construction of language use as only existing in the "spoken and written" continuum 

• Invite visitors to contribute their visions for representing liberated languaging in their fields and their lives. 

The museum serves to keep on-going reflective and humanizing conversations such as the transformative social media chat entitled  #LanguageIsAVerb (read more) led by Clara Bauler, Ph.D. and colleagues in 2020.  It will stand as a testament to the ever-evolving and infinitely diverse power of our languaging in telling the story of our lives.