I am an artist-educator and a researcher, consistently puzzled and fascinated by various questions, problems and tensions around language and expression.

With a particular interest in the unintentional and the accidental aspects of language in the context of social communication, I enjoy tuning into sensory and material qualities of speech and written word, as well as paralinguistics, which are not typically associated with "intelligence," reasoning, control or intent.

Drawing from my background in linguistics, visual communication design and pedagogy, I am inspired to enable their performativity further in speculative, interdisciplinary and usually collaborative ways.

I have been finding that this helps catalyse conversations in engaging ways, especially on challenging topics, have a second go at situations in which established modes of communication don't suffice in capturing states of being, challenge assumptions, and shift hierarchies.

Especially, since human language is commonly taken as a marker for the uniqueness and superiority of the human species (in the soceities I lived), this enquiry becomes pertinent when questioning how this understanding plays out in our perceptions of and engagements with other living forms and more-than-human worlds.

Some recent examples of this enquiry has been through:

Organising an event to translate the nonce word "lifing" from English to Turkish (with the event itself being taken as the translation of the word and its story, p.8-10 on the link above)

Running an online study group that scrutinised the relationship between human exceptionalism and human language, and doing social communication experiments (more info coming soon)