On Words and Worlds

Language is truly contested terrain. Through it, meaning is produced, it is weaponized and, at the same time, capable of resistance and creation. In today’s world, algorithmic infrastructures do not simply mediate communication; they filter, shape, and foreclose what can be known, and thus how we organize, relate, and resist.

This talk examines language as technology intimately intertwined with the material, historical, and relational dimensions that underpin the conditions of our everyday life. Drawing from Édouard Glissant’s expansive poetics, I explore language as world-making, something that resists narrow definitions. The contemporary conception of technology is tied to systems of extraction, power, and control, and thus language is reduced to calculable, commodifiable units. To understand and reimagine language as technology is to reclaim its capacity for relation and imagination – essential for any space for collective transformation.