Podcast appearances and mentions of sheri wells jensen

NASA tells In Touch about a condition that affects the vision of around 70% of their astronauts. It is called SANS and although the space agency aren't currently seeing hugely negative affects to their astronaut's vision upon returning to Earth, they are concerned about what could happen once we begin longer-term space exploration, with this being considered a 'red risk' of reaching Mars. Dr Sheri Wells-Jensen is a huge space enthusiast and within her role as a Linguistics professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, her focus is on welcoming disability as necessary part of future space exploration and potential occupation. Sheri describes the concept of her work and also shares her experience of flying in micro-gravity. Presenter: Peter White Producer: Beth Hemmings Production Coordinator: Jack Thomason Website image description: Peter White sits smiling in the centre of the image and he is wearing a dark green jumper. Above Peter's head is the BBC logo (three separate white squares house each of the three letters). Bottom centre and overlaying the image are the words "In Touch" and the Radio 4 logo (the word ‘radio' in a bold white font, with the number 4 inside of a white circle). The background is a bright mid-blue with two rectangles angled diagonally to the right. Both are behind Peter, one is a darker blue and the other is a lighter blue.

Built around a game of Braille Scrabble, Emma Tracey presents a celebration of Braille, 200 years after it was invented. Emma, who's been blind since birth, talks to others who love the six tiny dots: Geerat Vermeij, one of the world's leading experts in molluscs; Yetnebersh Nigussie, an Ethiopian lawyer, who describes her blindness as ‘a lottery I won at the age of 5'; Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor who's been a linguistic consultant on Star Trek and is on the US advisory board for messaging extra-terrestrial intelligence; Japanese concert pianist, Nobuyuki Tsujii, who learnt to play using Braille music; and Emma's friend and Scrabble partner, Ellie. And there's a chance encounter with the most famous Braille user of them all, Stevie Wonder. But can Braille survive with the ever-increasing supply of tech that allows blind people to listen to, rather than feel, information? Presenter: Emma Tracey Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound design: Steve Brooke Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Scientists have been searching for aliens for decades. But if we ever do get a signal someday, how will we communicate back? And will anyone out there be able to understand us? Guests: Doug Vakoch, president of METI, and Sheri Wells-Jensen, linguist at Bowling Green State University For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! unexplainable@vox.com We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does it feel like to be in space? That's what Elijah wants to know. So we're taking off on a zero-gravity flight to find out! Guest reporter Jason Strother shares the story of Sheri Wells-Jensen, a blind scientist who is paving the way for people with disabilities to go to space.  This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number # 2148711 - Engaging Blind, Visually Impaired, and Sighted Students in STEM with Storytelling through Podcasts.  Learn more about Sheri on the bonus interview episode on our Patreon, at patreon.com/tumblepodcast.  Check out the blog on sciencepodcastforkids.com for more info!

“Every time I look at you, I go blind.” Solar eclipse, 2024 and the big topic around it all was eye protection. Thus the above lyrics from the Canadian band 54-40 song to start off the show. It's another Kerry Connection this week on Outlook as we look back on last week's eclipse with Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, Associate Professor of linguistics at Bowling Green State University. As the 2023 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/LOC Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation, we wanted to get her thoughts on, and her experience with the eclipse. We also talked being blind and her philosophy with it, being a kid, and being curious about science, and being steered away from the sciences as a blind student. Co-host Kerry, as a young girl, watched Bill Nye the Science Guy and was fascinated by and drawn in by outer space. Sheri now works to make it more accessible for people of all abilities in space with her featured story on the Radiolab podcast, experiencing zero gravity and recording the findings of that experiment. Going from not wanting to make a fuss to advocating, for the next generation - we talk possibility, perspective, and wonder, as we agree, it would be fun to be able to fly, but with all the things, that's what space can provide. Check out Sheri's official website: http://sheriwellsjensen.com Find the Radiolab episode “The Right Stuff” featuring Sheri here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpe6azxvQpM And give a listen to the quartet Grande Royale Ükulelists of the Black Swamp she plays with and their covers on this YouTube playlist relating to the recent eclipse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UksPZJJ9JY&list=PL_FJ_lKHsX5ENvB3uCIKZ1kPeAuJ7eBDf

Intuitive Machine's Odysseus recently completed the U.S.'s first moon landing in 50 years. As we continue to explore the “final frontier,” how can we leverage disability's practical, creative, and ingenuous problem-solving skills – and contingency plans – to better prepare for bold new adventures? And how do these noble pursuits help us build better communities here on Earth? Dr. Sheri Wells-Jenson, associate professor of linguistics at BGSU and the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation commands this mission.

Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, BGSU professor of linguistics and the 2023 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA / Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation, explains how the future of science and space exploration means including those with disabilities in crucial roles. Listeners can learn more about Astro Access by visiting their website at astroaccess.org to keep up with ICS happenings. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at icsbgsu, and on our Facebook and YouTube pages. We are also now on LinkedIn. Big Ideas is available wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. For more information, you can visit bgsu.edu/bgideas. Sound engineering for this episode was provided by Caitlyn Herman, Brenden Accettura, and Marco Mendoza. Research for this episode was done by Carrie Hanlon and Joe El

This week we're talking to Dr Sheri Wells Jensen about her incredible work to make space a more accessible place, plus Hubert is along with a demo of accessibility features of the Samsung smart TV. You can listen to the show live in the UK every Tuesday at 1pm on Freeview Channel 730, online at RNIB Connect Radio | RNIB , or on your smart speaker. You'll hear new episodes of the Tech Talk Podcast every Friday so make sure you're subscribed to never miss an episode. We'd love to hear your thoughts on accessible technology, drop us an email at techtalk@rnib.org.uk 

Since the beginning of the space program, we've expected astronauts to be fully-abled athletic overachievers—one-part science geeks, two-part triathletes—a mix the writer Tom Wolfe called “the right stuff.” But what if, this whole time, we've had it wrong? In this episode from 2022, reporter Andrew Leland joins blind Linguistics Professor Sheri Wells-Jensen and a crew of 11 other disabled people. They embark on a mission to prove not just that they have what it takes to go to space, but that disability gives them an edge. On Mission AstroAccess, the crew members hop on an airplane to take a zero-gravity flight—the same NASA uses to train astronauts. With them, we learn that the challenges to making space accessible may not be the ones we thought. And Andrew, who is legally blind, confronts unexpected conclusions of his own. By the way, Andrew's new book is out. In The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (https://zpr.io/nLZ8H), Andrew recounts his transition from sighted to blind. Suspended between anxiety and anticipation, he also begins to explore the many facets of blindness as a culture. It's well worth a read.  Read the article by Sheri Wells-Jensen, published in The Scientific American in 2018. “The Case for Disabled Astronaut” (https://zpr.io/nLZ8H).  This episode was reported by Andrew Leland and produced by María Paz Gutiérrez, Matt Kielty and Pat Walters. Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design. Production sound recording by Dan McCoy.Special thanks to William Pomerantz, Sheyna Gifford, Jim Vanderploeg, Tim Bailey, and Bill Barry Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.   Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.orgLeadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

As we finish off one year and head off onto another, we dove into the archive to update this past ep. This was the first launch of this program that is being discussed, and it is to our understanding that the second launch of this kind has now happened.   Click here to see the transcript...   Will blind people ever live and work in space? This week, on the Penny Forward Podcast, Sheri Wells-Jensen will tell us why she, and Mission: AstroAccess believe that it's critical that even an environment as hostile as space must be accessible to everyone. We'll also learn how it feels to experience zero gravity and how you can get involved with Mission: AstroAccess and their on-going research into accessibility's final frontier.   Show Notes... astroaccess.org Sheri mentioned... one of her bands grubsmusic.com: Grand Royale ukuleists of the Black Swamp books mentioned Becky Chambers "Wayfarer" series Hineline's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."   Listen Below...

Guest: Prof. Sheri Wells-Jensen In Part 2 of a conversation with Professor Sheri Wells-Jensen, we learn about Dr. Wells-Jensen's academic work on disability and inclusion in space exploration: why there should be blind astronauts, how disability can be a model for first contact, and portrayals of disability in Star Trek. "The Case for Disabled Astronauts" by Sheri Wells-Jensen: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-case-for-disabled-astronauts/ "Models of Disability as Models of First Contact" by Wells-Jensen & Zuber (2020): https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11120676 "An alternate vision for colonization" by Wells-Jensen et al. (2019): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.02.012 Follow us on Twitter! Mike: https://twitter.com/miquai Strange New Worlds: https://twitter.com/scienceoftrek

Faculty that fit the cultural stereotype of a white male professor are often presumed authority figures in the classroom. Faculty that do not conform to this stereotype can face challenges in acquiring student acceptance of their expertise. In this episode, Sheri Wells-Jensen and Emily K. Michael join us to discuss the role the first day of class can play in addressing these challenges. Sheri is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Bowling Green State University. Emily is a poet, musician, and writing teacher and is the poetry editor for Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature at Syracuse University. Sheri and Emily co-authored with Mona Makara a chapter in Picture a Professor entitled “How Blind Professors Win the First Day: Setting Yourselves Up for Success.” A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Since the beginning of the space program, we've always expected astronauts to be fully abled athletic overachievers who are one-part science-geek, two-parts triathlete – a mix the writer Tom Wolfe famously called “the right stuff.” But what if, this whole time, we've had it all wrong? In this episode, reporter Andrew Leland joins a blind linguistics professor named Sheri Wells-Jensen and a crew of eleven other disabled people on a mission to prove that disabled people have what it takes to go to space. And not only that, but that they may have an edge over non-disabled people. We follow the Mission AstroAccess crew members to Long Beach, California, where they hop on an airplane to take an electrifying flight that simulates zero-gravity – a method used by NASA to train astronauts – and afterwards learn that the biggest challenges to a future where space is accessible to all people may not be where they expected to find them. And our reporter Andrew, who is legally blind himself, confronts some unexpected conclusions of his own.This episode was reported by Andrew Leland and produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Matt Kielty and Pat Walters. Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design. Production sound recording by Dan McCoy.Special thanks to William Pomerantz, Sheyna Gifford, Jim Vanderploeg, Tim Bailey, and Bill Barry Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.     Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe! DOWNLOAD BRAILLE READY FILE HERE (https://zpr.io/vWtJYGLn6UXm)Citations in this episode Multimedia:Sheri Wells-Jensen's SETI Institute presentationLearn more about Mission AstroAccessOther work by Andrew Leland Articles:Sheri Wells-Jensen's, “The Case for Disabled Astronauts,” Scientific American

Will blind people ever live and work in space? This week, on the Penny Forward Podcast, Sheri Wells-Jensen will tell us why she, and Mission: AstroAccess believe that it's critical that even an environment as hostile as space must be accessible to everyone. We'll also learn how it feels to experience zero gravity and how you can get involved with Mission: AstroAccess and their on-going research into accessibility's final frontier.   A full text transcript of this episode can be found at http://pennyforward.com/penny-forward-podcast-s2022e3-accessibilitys-final-fronteer/   The Penny Forward podcast is about blind people building bright futures one penny at a time. Subscribe by searching for “Penny Forward” using your favorite podcast app, ask your smart speaker to play the podcast, “Penny Forward”, check out the Penny Forward YouTube channel, or listen to all of our past episodes and read full text transcripts at pennyforward.com/podcast.

Sheri Wells-Jensen of Mission AstroAccess was one of several people with disabilities aboard a recent zero-gravity flight mimicking space travel. She discusses her experiences and the implications of disability-inclusive space travel. This is the January 8, 2022 episode.

On this very special episode of Talking Space, we discuss something very few people have ever experienced, Zero Gravity. However, 12 Zero-G flyers just made history. 12 ambassadors for "Mission: Astro Access" completed the first ever microgravity flight for people with disabilities. That includes people who are deaf/hard of hearing, blind/low vision, and have mobility disabilities. Among the flyers is our own host, Sawyer Rosenstein. He invited some of the participants onto the show to discuss the mission. The flight itself involves 15 parabolas aboard a Zero Gravity Corporation plane with one Martian, two Lunar and 12 "Zero-G" parabolas. That includes the selection process, the training before flight, and the objectives during the flight. We find out what worked, what didn't, and the simple modifications that can be made to make spaceflight accessible to so many more people. We also discuss the future, where we hope this program goes in the future, and the changes we all hope to see as a result of this historic first mission. To learn more about AstroAccess and to consider donating to help fund a second flight, visit https://astroaccess.org/ To read Sawyer's full recount of the flight, check out the article by clicking here. Host: Sawyer Rosenstein Panelists: Gene Mikulka, Mark Ratterman, and special guests Dana Bolles and Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen

Ray came out in 2004 to accolades and, eventually, after the passing of the real Ray Charles that same year, took home Oscars for best film, best director, best actor and more. But what does Ray get right, and wrong, about what it's like to be blind? As one of the most famous portrayals of blindness, this is a pressing question, and so we invited back our blind film club – Sheri Wells-Jensen, Andrew Leland and Byron Harden – to help unpack it.

Will technology make Braille obsolete as the primary reading tool for blind people? Will talking apps and audiobooks win out over embossed dots? Braille has been written off before; each time it has come back stronger. We trace Braille from its beginnings in Napoleon's France, through the "War of the Dots" in the early 20th century to the age of the smart phone, and beyond. Photo by Brickset. Music in the episode from Marcel, Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, Cuicuitte and gargle. More on contributors Sheri Wells-Jensen here, Joshua Miele here and Chancey Fleet here. Read a transcript of this episode here.

Will technology make Braille obsolete as the primary reading tool for blind people? Will talking apps and audiobooks win out over embossed dots? Braille has been written off before; each time it has come back stronger. We trace Braille from its beginnings in Napoleon's France, through the "War of the Dots" in the early 20th century to the age of the smart phone, and beyond. Photo by Brickset. Music in the episode from Marcel, Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, Cuicuitte and gargle. More on contributors Sheri Wells-Jensen here, Joshua Miele here and Chancey Fleet here. Read a transcript of this episode here.

Will Butler, Andrew Leland, Sheri Wells-Jensen, and Byron Harden join forces for the premiere of Season 3 to review the Oscar-winning drama, Scent of a Woman. The film starred Al Pacino as an infamous, grumpy blind man set against the world and starring alongside a young Chris O'Donnell. The question remains: How did Al Pacino do in portraying blindness, both in terms of autenticity and entertainment value?

From Victorian novels to the latest Hollywood blockbusters, sci-fi regularly returns to the theme of blindness. Peter White, who was heavily influenced as a child by one of the classics, sets out to explore the impact of these explorations of sight on blind and visually impaired people. He believes a scene in The Day pf the Triffids by John Wyndham imbued him with a strange confidence - and he considers the power of science fiction to present an alternative reality for blind readers precisely at a time when lockdown and social distancing has seen visually impaired people marginalised. He talks to technology producer Dave Williams about Star Trek The Next Generation's Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge, Dr Sheri Wells-Jensen talks about Birdbox and world-building from a blind point of view in James L Cambias's A Darkling Sea. Professor Hannah Thompson of Royal Holloway University of London takes us back to 1910 to consider The Blue Peril - a novel which in some ways is more forward thinking in its depiction of blindness than Hollywood now. And Doctor Who actor Ellie Wallwork gives us her take on why blindness is so fascinating to the creators of science fiction. Presenter: Peter White Producer: Kevin Core

In this second episode dedicated to tactile learning, Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen of Bowling Green State University points out the advantages of tactile exploration, not just for the Blind but for everyone. She also discusses the cultural barriers that get between the Blind and their right to explore their world. Finally, she finishes up with a book recommendation--because apparently several writers have tried to create a "blind alien," but not all of them have done it well.Photo credit for Sheri's portrait: Kate Kamphuis1:00 – Sheri reveals that one of her interests is understanding cognition, intelligence and language. She also wonders, if we met another species, what would their thinking and language be like?2:00 – There is a level of public misunderstanding about what blind people do and do not know about the world. For example, they would understand that a cathedral is large and impressive, but a 3D model could help them distinguish one cathedral from another.5:45 – Looking at objects does have disadvantages, compared to feeling them. For example, it doesn’t work well in low light. 9:00 – Tactile exploration can help people understand more—not just for the Blind but for everyone. However, more and more learning is shifting to digital, which does not translate to tactile information well.10:50 – Geerat Vermeij at UC Davis is a blind scientist who has expanded the world’s understanding of mollusks through his own tactile exploration.11:30 – Sighted children are shown how to explore visually from the beginning, but too often blind children are told, “Don’t touch." 13:30 – 3D models can help communicate what a constellation is like, much more quickly than a description.15:48 – Models can help you recall what an object is like, even if you have seen it before but haven’t seen it in a while 16:50 – Sheri takes on the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s a terrible story that shows the blind men were not allowed to fully explore an elephant. But in her experience, it is very exciting to explore a live elephant—so much so that it’s hard to remember any data after the exploration is done. Models can help with that.19:00 – Statues and kids’ toys often misrepresent the object they depict.19:45 – One of the challenges of making a 3D model is deciding what is prototypical.21:39 – Should a 3D model communicate color differences on a penguin that is otherwise tactilely uniform? 23:30 – A cat’s fur can vary a lot over its body. This can be tricky to represent in a model.24:35 – Our cultural idea of touching something has limits; often the sighted person’s hand directs a child’s hands when they are touching an object.26:00 – Does a blind child have the permission to touch an object with the same freedom that a sighted child is allowed to look at it?28:00 – 3D models don’t just allow a detailed exploration, they also allow privacy. They let the explorer look at something for as long as they’d like, without worrying that other people are waiting.29:30 – The idea that touch is destructive is another barrier to learning.30:00 – A 3D printed object will have its own texture, not necessarily the texture of the thing it represents.31:12 – So far, model technology doesn’t usually give us a 100 percent accurate picture of an item. But Sheri argues that it’s not a question of whether we can produce the models, but whether we will. 32:00 – Sheri leaves us will a book recommendation for a well-written, “blind alien” book: The Darkling Sea by James Cambias.

In this episode, we meet Caroline Karbowski, founder of See3D, an organization that manages the printing and distribution of 3D models for the Blind. 1:00 - Caroline Karbowski tells how she started See3D, which began as a way to create models from unused 3D printer filament. It is now a 501C3 nonprofit.4:40 - Caroline talks about the number of models she has printed (more than 800 at the time of this recording).5:12 - Ohio Braille Challenge, a braille reading contest, is a big requester of models. The latest one was space-themed, with a lot of constellations.5:45 - Caroline describes who does the printing, including her, her friends, educators and volunteers. 7:18 - She is hoping to expand her network. Files are being shared on Thingiverse.11:25 - Heiley Thurston talks about her experience with tactile learning. She used one to better understand a fly.12:09 - Bugs are popular requests.12:33 -Lindsay Yazzolino, a tactile designer from the Boston area, talks about making hand-catching experiences--including a giant model of the human brain.14:36 - Rachel Hage, a certified assistive technology instruction specialist, used a 3D printed model of an eye to help her in her studies16:25 - 3D models are a serious way to learn.18:20 - 3D models of mummies allow people to explore a mummy without damaging it.19:00 - Rachel used a 3D printed iPhone to help students understand how to use one.24:55 - Caroline would love to connect with more people and inspire more creators. Maybe people who have to do a model for homework can do an assignment that would help people better understand the things around them.26:05 - Lindsay argues against the notion that being blind means being deprived of sensory experience. Tactile models can help people experience those things.27:05 - The next episode will explore the concept of tactile learning in more depth, featuring an interview with Sheri Wells-Jensen. Watch for it on September 2!

What would happen if we found a message from a civilization on another planet? Chances are, they won’t be speaking English. We can’t talk to dolphins, dogs, or trees. What makes us think we ever would able to understand a message from not only another species, but from another planet? How would we go about […] The post Ep 68: They’re Not Speaking English – Decoding a Message from ET – with guest Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen appeared first on SparkDialog.

Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate professor of linguistics at BGSU. She discusses her research project “Imagining Life on Other Planets,”which she worked on during her time as an ICS Faculty Fellow in Spring 2018. Dr. Wells-Jensen's research on xenolinguistics (the study of alien languages) aims to have people question commonly held beliefs about able-bodied and disabled people in our society.   Transcript:     Jolie Sheffer:                          Welcome to the BG Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, an associate professor of English and American Culture Studies and the director of ICS. Jolie Sheffer:                          This is the first of several episodes featuring the ICS' Spring 2018 faculty fellows. ICS is proud to sponsor fellowships to promote the research and creative work of faculty here at BGSU. Those who receive awards are freed from one semester of teaching and service to devote unimpeded time to the projects they have proposed. These projects must be of both intellectual significance and social relevance in hopes that their work will generate conversations across disciplines and engage both academic and broader community audiences. Jolie Sheffer:                          Today we are joined by Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, associate professor of English. Dr. Wells-Jensen holds a PhD in linguistics from the State University of New York, University of Buffalo, and her academic interests include phonetics, psycholinguistics, speech production language preservation, Braille, and xenolinguistics. She's also a member of the Advisory Board of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence International and has given papers on the relationship between intelligence, perception, and language at the SETI Institute and the International Space Development Conference. Jolie Sheffer:                          We intend to focus today on Dr. Wells-Jensen's current project entitled Imagining Life on Other Planets, Reimagining Life on Earth. In this research, Dr. Wells-Jensen explores how an intelligent blind alien race would survive and function, as well as the implications of blindness on their civilization and our ability to find and communicate with them. Her work interrogates our socially-constructed assumptions about ability and disability and questions the limits we place on one another. I'm very please to welcome Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen to the program as one of ICS' spring 2018 faculty fellows. Thanks for joining me, Sheri. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Thanks. I'm happy to be here. Jolie Sheffer:                          We're very excited to have you as one of our fellows. Can you start by telling us a bit more about the project you're working on right now? Dr. Wells-Jensen: I came to this project through a weaving path. It wasn't a natural outgrowth of anything, I don't think. I was invited in fabulous tribute to my 12-year-old nerdy self as sort of a fantasy come true. I was invited to give a paper about language and thought at the SETI Institute. In a desperate attempt to seem like I knew what I was talking about before that talk, I read everything I could get my hands on about SETI and what their research ... what they were doing lately. One of the assumptions that I came upon in a lot of their work is that any extraterrestrial civilization capable of building a telescope so that we could contact them would necessarily have some analog of human vision. I thought, "Wow, really? Really? Really?" It seemed like that was a box that we didn't need to be in. So I put together a paper doing exactly what you might expect, so explaining how an alien race with more or less the abilities that we have as humans except that they can't see would put together a technological civilization. I gave the paper and we had a fun time. We talked about it. We debated a few of the points and we went back and forth. When I got done, I stepped away from the podium and it's important to mention here that I'm blind also, along with my aliens. I stepped away from the podium and some fellow rushed up to me to grab my arm to help me down the stairs. I thought, "Doggone it. What have we just done here? We spent the last 20 minutes and change talking about how the blind aliens are capable of all these ordinary things and some slightly extraordinary things and you have not been able to transfer that knowledge to the person standing right in front of you. You're willing to grant that my blind aliens can smelt metals and build a radio telescope, but I cannot walk down the stairs." I thought, "Isn't this odd, demoralizing, fascinating, and odd that the person could not make the jump between this intellectual fun time we were having to the person standing right in front of them?" That's how I ended up in this weird little area where disability studies and astrobiology and linguistics all come joyfully together. Jolie Sheffer:                          Well, you raise so many interesting issues. I've got lots of different questions. But maybe immediately to follow up on the last thing you said which is the way you're bringing together these fields that maybe normally don't have much to do with each other. Part of what ICS is interested in is fostering collaboration and interdisciplinary conversation. What's interesting, you're talking directly to scientific audiences with some of these conversations, but your background is linguistics and English education. Can you talk a bit about the experiences of translating your work for two different audiences and what are the ways in which that has expanded your thinking about your home subject areas, as well as maybe challenge those disciplines? Dr. Wells-Jensen: Interesting. I think in the hard sciences if they talk to disability studies people at all, it's, "How am I going to make my classroom accessible?" That is done on a continuum of joyfully willing to super-reluctant to, "I'm not doing it," or, "It's impossible." So I think it's a bit of a startlement to hard sciences to have somebody come in from a linguistics background or from a disability studies background and start asking them basic questions about things that they've assumed for a really long time. Largely, they're very willing and we have great conversations. And then from the other end, talking to disability studies people about the hard sciences, again, most of our interface has been, "Well, how do I get into these classes? How do we get more disabled folk into the hard sciences, into the STEM areas?" So talking to them about, "Well, how would you smelt metal? Wouldn't that be fun? You want to smelt some metal?" I think is kind of a glorious startlement to them too. My work in disability studies has been now focused on how do we increase people's sense of agency and their willingness and eagerness to do things that maybe they would not ordinarily have assumed that they had the right to do? So affirming people's rights to explore the world around them and what would that mean. What would it mean if all of a sudden a whole bunch of disabled people came storming into the STEM fields? Wouldn't that be great? It'd be great. I think it'd be wonderful. We think of science as a very objective thing, but we also have to realize that the way you do science is a reflection of who you are. In the hard sciences still, we tend to find what we're looking for. That's one of the things that Niels Bohr and Heisenberg talked about a lot. It isn't just a straightforward, we seek knowledge thing. It's about who we are. Science is a lot about who we are and what we decide to look for. I'm not sure if I answered your question at all. Jolie Sheffer:                          No, I think you did. I think it's so interesting though, what you're doing is really asking us to rethink the categories of ability and disability and how we read them and the ways in which we find it incredibly difficult to get out of those familiar ways of thinking. What's particularly interesting to me is I think we tend to think about disability studies as it's the larger social ways that are limiting, but if you get to know someone one-on-one, then your mind will be expanded. But the example you gave at the SETI Conference is that intellectually in the abstract everyone was on board, but then in the immediate present they defaulted to feeling like you needed help as opposed to directly translating. So I don't know if you have any thoughts about how do we get from those abstractions to making them more manifest in the material world? Dr. Wells-Jensen: If I had the answer to that, but I mean it takes a lot of curiosity and humility and courage to bust down ways that you've always thought about things, especially people, because we like people in their little boxes so we can try to understand them, so that we feel safe. This isn't just an abled person, disabled person thing. This goes across race and gender. Certainly it goes all the disabled people I know grew up in an abled culture, so we have it in our heads too that, "Oh well, we can't really do that," or, "This is how we have to live," or, "These are the things that we have agreed to. If I wanted to go get something right now, would I get up and go get it or would I ask someone to help me? Well, I'm perfectly capable of going to get it, but am I willing to do that? Both am I willing to expend the energy and am I willing to deal with able-bodied people around me going, "Oh wait, no. Wait, no." I think it just takes a lot of courage on both sides to bust out of those constraints. We don't know what the world would look like. What would it look like? I don't think we know that, if all of a sudden everyone was treated with the same ... had the same rights and had the same sense of agency. Jolie Sheffer:                          I'm wondering if you see analogs with or expressions of this in language, because what you're talking about is categories we put people in, is the human ... We're built for pattern recognition. So we sort things that we see all the time. Does our language work that way? Are there different, in your work in studying so many different languages and kinds of languages, are there different ways of thinking about categories that we might learn from other languages? Dr. Wells-Jensen: Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think that categorization thing is underneath all of the languages. I mean it's a survival advantage. You recognize a snake and it might bite you, so you need to be able to recognize all the snakes, all the categories of snake. You don't want to have to, "That's a snake. Doggone it. It bit me. Oh wait. That's a snake too. Oh rats." You need to be able to form categories and group things together to survive. So that's really hardwired in. Those things, I think, are underneath all languages. Although different languages might tinker a little bit with the details of those things, I think that they're all kind of wired in there the same. I think it's decoration. The little differences between languages are more decoration than strongly prescriptive limits on how we perceive things. I don't know. If I knew the answer to that also, again. Jolie Sheffer:                          Your work challenges assumptions about ability and disability in part by considering what life might look like on other planets. What are some of these particular assumptions and how can thinking about aliens help to deconstruct them? Dr. Wells-Jensen: That's an interesting question. I think we have rules. We have social rules about who's in charge and who does things and who is not in charge and who has things done for them. This is a continuum. Again, it's not just about ability and disability. It's about how men and women behave, how people with different gender identities are expected to behave. This idea of who gets to do stuff and who should wait and have stuff done for them and what service are you providing to community as a person that has stuff done for them. Am I supposed to be people's good deed for the day? What am I supposed to be? Am I supposed to be people's inspiration? All of those roles that people play interact and intersect with one another and fit together in various ways. If we don't like that, if we want to disrupt that, it's going to ... You can't just step quietly out. It's going to be a disruption. It's going to upset people. It's going to make people angry or sad or make them feel afraid. So if I lay out a world where sightedness isn't even a thing, then I get to redesign all the roles. So there isn't anybody looking and anybody not looking. We're all equal in that respect. If we can make the jump, if we can make the intellectual jump from that to our context, then I think maybe we've done a thing that would be useful. At least I hope so, that's why I'm doing this. Jolie Sheffer:                          Absolutely. Dr. Wells-Jensen: I hope that we can use the power of imagination or the power of, call it whatever you want, whatever you need to call it when you construct a whole world. If we could use that, insights from that situation to question what it is we do and why we do it, that would be a start. It would be a start to the revolution. If we're going to have a revolution, which we might as well, it's a Thursday. We might as well have a revolution. It's all about imagination. It's about willingness to risk imagining something audacious and the willingness to bring that audacious thing home with you and not just treat it like a casual plaything, but have the courage to take this casual plaything and bring it alive in your life and think the audacious thoughts while having supper. Think the audacious thoughts while walking to work, while brushing your teeth. Give yourself permission to think about how things could really be different. Jolie Sheffer:                          It's so interesting to think about you having that conversation at SETI, which I think of as being completely audacious and doing things began as something deemed impossible or ridiculous or audacious, and yet they can do that in some ways. Yet you confronted them with the ways in which they had such narrow-minded thinking about other aspects. Dr. Wells-Jensen: The thing that gets me about ... Well, there's many things. I was furious. I had just the storm of emotions. Here I am preaching audaciousness, telling people, "Step outside. Believe. Grow. Think. Play." And you know what I did when he took my arm and helped me down off the stage? I put my head down. I walked with him. I let him find my chair for me. I couldn't do it. I don't know what it was. I was afraid that I might burst into tears. I was afraid I might shout at him. I was afraid ... I was afraid. I was afraid in that moment after being the person who said, "Let's do this wondrous thing together, shall we?" When they all said no afterward, when they all said, "Yeah, but you're still the little blind chick and we're going to help you back to your chair," I did not have a throw-down. I said, "Okay." All of this political stuff is also personal. I'm still seeking that way of digging in my heels and saying, "No. No, darlings. This is not what we're doing. We're not playing this game any more." I think that's such a ... That move, that social move is really personal and it's really scary, not just abstractly, but personally. Jolie Sheffer:                          Yeah. I mean I think I imagine if you were brought back to give a talk again in that role as the expert, you feel totally confident. And then you've got into that moment, they switched your hats from being the expert to being someone they were responsible for in some way. How do you reassert your expertise when you're being treated as someone to be taken care of? It's hard to have the presence of mind to figure out how to make that move back. Dr. Wells-Jensen: And the willingness to disrupt. I mean I think that's a lot of it. Well, again, I talk about this from the viewpoint of disability because that's the hat that I wear. But I mean every day you have be make those calls. I'm walking across campus and someone says something ridiculous to me or grabs my arm when I'm crossing the street. I have the whole set of choices. Do I go along quietly and everybody has a normal day and I just suck it up emotionally? Do I stop and force the person to go through a little educational moment with me, which I don't think helps, to be honest? Do I totally disrupt? My fantasy is that when I'm crossing the street and someone grabs my arm that I'll just throw myself on the ground and scream my head off because maybe that's the only way. I don't know. Because if you're walking across the street and somebody grabs you, your first thought is, "I'm being assaulted." It's not allowed. You don't touch me. My body. No touching. Don't touch me. But people touch me all the time constantly. They're always grabbing me when I walk across the street. The reaction that I deserve to give as an adult woman in this society is to call it an assault, to scream, "Don't you touch me. You have no right to touch me." That reaction from disable people is really rare because it's such a disruption, and then we become the bitchy disabled people. They go, "I just tried to help." That range of responses is always there and which choice do we make? Which indignity do we call out and confront and which do we let go? So it's not just about what the world is and what they're imagining, it's what we're imagining as disabled people. What do we imagine that our rights are? What do we think we're supposed to be allowed to do? How much energy do we have to make that happen? Jolie Sheffer:                          At your talk, imagination was one of the key words. Now you're talking about disruption, so I feel like imagination and disruption, we could do a lot worse than urging folks to have more of each of those. I'm going to shift gears. Pop culture portrayals of contact with aliens range from ridiculous to sentimental to darkly serious. Recently in the film, Arrival, that addressed xenolinguistics as a field of knowledge. I know you have talked about that film. What do you think portrayals such as these get right, and what do you think they're still missing or retreading in older models? Dr. Wells-Jensen: Okay. First off, they're probably not coming because there is this whole speed of light thing. So sorry, but they're probably not coming. They're not going to show up in orbit around Jupiter. That's what we all want. Well, we say we want that. I'm not sure that we actually do. So we're probably just going to get a message, which could come. It could be showing up now. I don't really know. It could happen any moment or maybe it will never happen. I don't know. But if we get a message, honestly, I think probably if we get a message from ET we will be transformed for about a week and a half and then somebody in, I don't know, the president of the United States will tweet something and we'll be like, "We'll pay attention to that now." I don't think that the message will transform us as much as we hope/fear that it will. But you can't make a movie about that. "We got a message and then we forgot about it and then we went back to eating cheeseburgers and everything was the same." Pretend like the speed of light isn't a thing for a minute. Jolie Sheffer:                          Bracket that. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Yeah, yeah. Okay. The Arrival was actually a really good depiction of what that would be like. I think Ted Chang is the guy who wrote the story on which the movie was based, is I think pretty savvy. The thing that Arrival got wrong was, well, two things. First off, she got successful way faster than she would. Even just among Earth languages when you try to do that monolingual field methods thing that she was doing, learning a language with no translation, there's a whole heck of a lot more misunderstanding. We do this in my interlinguistics class a lot. We bring in a speaker of a language that I don't speak and we bring in some props, kind of like she did. We point and gesture and carry on. About 20 minutes, we get to sentences like, "I throw the rock. I drop the rock. I throw two rocks." We can get that far. But the reason we can get that far is that we share an awful lot of assumptions about what's going on and what the goal of that is. We share a lot of cultural stuff, like if I hold up a rock and make an inquiring face at you, first off, you know that my inquiring face means inquiring. Second off, you understand that because we are who we are and we're doing what we're doing, this isn't a threat. This isn't a marriage proposal. This isn't a challenge to wrestle. This is me asking you the word and you assume that there's a word and I assume that there's a word for rock and you give it to me. So there's so much. There's so much cultural stuff layered into learning one another's languages and even the idea that that's what we're doing. So they got that. I suppose they just sped that up for effect, right? We don't want to watch her be- Jolie Sheffer:                          Time lapse. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Yeah. If it'd gone on for a year, I don't know. And then the idea that a language can change your perception of time is, as far as I know, crazy. Give us 20, 30 years and we'll know if life exists on other planets in our solar system and maybe we'll be able to detect oxygen in atmospheres of planets, extra solar planets, and that might give us some idea if there's life there. 20, 30 years we'll know if there's microbes out there, which I feel very confident of that. But whether we'll know that there's intelligent life, I don't know. How that life will have organized itself or if it has organized itself culturally, socially between planets, I just don't ... I mean there's so much that we don't have any idea about. That's kind of the great thing and that's kind of the struggle. For me, that's part of the struggle is getting people to drop what they think. Stop thinking that you know what life on other planets culturally, physiologically is going to be like because we don't. Jolie Sheffer:                          Simultaneously to relieve, get rid of some expectations while also unharnessing the imagination to imagine beyond the Star Trek versions of alien life that we've seen. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Right. So unthink yourself. Get out of your box. I try to do that with the blind aliens. That's one of the ways that I'm trying to systematically step outside of our assumptions while still remaining grounded in physics and chemistry because there still are going to be physics and chemistry. In our universe, we're going to all obey the laws of physics and we're all going to be made of chemicals. That's all going to still be happening. So there are limits, but within those limits all kinds of marvelous things can happen. We are one way that intelligence has manifested. So we get to thinking that that's the way it's going to be. But that's just one way. There's all kinds of ways it could happen. Jolie Sheffer:                          What are you working on next in xenolinguistics? Dr. Wells-Jensen: Okay. Taking a step back, we don't really know where language came from on Earth. It pains me to say it. You think you'd know that, right? But no, we don't know that. Whether somewhere roughly maybe 50,000, maybe 150,000 years ago was there some kind of abrupt mutation that made both complex thought and language possible or just language possible? Or is language emergent from culture, the combination of culture and the bodies we have and the needs we have? We don't know really where language came from. So given that minor problem that we don't know where our thing even came from, if we ... My next playground is xenolinguistics in the area of would we be able to learn a language from another planet? If they are, I don't know, three-headed lizards, just to pick a thing, would the fact that they're three-headed lizards make the structure of their language different enough that we really couldn't learn it? So we've got quite a bit of linguistic diversity on Earth, but you can learn any language you want to, I mean if you want to put in the time. We could learn. The average human brain can learn about eight languages fluently, which makes me think I've been wasting a lot of time because I don't speak any languages. Jolie Sheffer:                          Yeah. Boy, me too. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Okay. So anyway, some of them are more difficult than others but that just has to do with your starting place. I could learn Danish faster than I can learn Japanese because I'm an English speaker. But would the three-headed lizard, would their language and the way that they constructed their culture and the exigencies of living on whatever planet they live on, would that make their language so different from ours that we couldn't learn it? Or is there something about hierarchically structured complex thought that would mean that our languages would be similar-ish to each other so we could learn them? I want to write the chapter and I want to call it something like Could the Walrus Really Talk to the carpenter because the walrus and the carpenter have very different body shapes, and theoretically walrus culture is really different than carpenter language. So could they talk to one another? Jolie Sheffer:                          Fascinating. So once again, this is a kind of thought experiment. Are you going to try and figure out what those stages of development would be similar to how you thought through how a blind race would learn to make a radio telescope? Dr. Wells-Jensen: I don't know. I'll probably just lay out the possibilities because it's really in some ways this is all completely silly because we don't have any alien languages, so what am I even doing? But on the moment when the radio signal comes, then everything is going to get real really fast. If we haven't thought about these things, if we haven't tried to think through how languages could be different, and I don't know how capable my brain is of thinking up walrus ... I mean I could make up what walrus language would be like, but it would be me starting from my understanding and my intelligence and probably the languages that I speak and all that. But I think it's really important to spread out some of the possibilities in front of us so that if we ever need them, we've done some of that work already. We're not suddenly trying to invent all these ideas when the message from the stars is in our hands and we're already too excited and maybe a little panicked, so that we've got some groundwork laid. Jolie Sheffer:                          You were talking on the way over that you're also doing some work or talking about the history of Braille as a language. So could you tell us a little bit about some of those other projects you're working on. Dr. Wells-Jensen: It's nice to have the ... Thank you, thank you, thank you ICS. It's nice to have the time to spread out a little bit. I've always been interested in Braille because I read it. The history is so interesting. Braille's a writing system and any language in the world can be written in Braille. It's not phonetic. It's just a representation of letters. So English Braille is a representation of the Roman alphabet. Japanese Braille is a representation of the Japanese syllabary system. I've been lucky to attend an international Braille research symposium put on by some folks at Rice University and they do a marvelous job. We had researchers from all around the world. There's been a lot of work done on print reading and writing, just tons. There's journals and journals and books and books. You could read your whole life and never get done with the research on reading and writing print. But Braille was only finalized and adopted in the US in 1932. It was only invented a century before that and not much science has gone into the process of reading, how people move their two hands. When they're moving two hands on the page, what are the patterns that they make? Do they read with one hand then the other? What's the best recommended way of teaching reading? How reading is processed, so there's really interesting research doing brain scans of people while they're reading Braille. So if you are a native reader of Braille, meaning that that was your first orthographic experience, your first writing system, we know that blind people who read Braille use visual cortex because that's not doing anything else. We use visual cortex both to read Braille and to process some aspects of syntax, of complex syntax. When I read this research in I guess it was the late '90s when this stuff came out, a bunch of my friends offered to whack me on the back of the head to see if I felt dots instead of seeing stars. But I have friends like that. They're lovely. But what does that mean about how we should teach Braille, and what are the limits of what you can do with Braille? What does that say about brain plasticity and what's possible for human beings? If this whole chunk of your brain that is normally used for processing vision, what does that mean now that is used for processing Braille? It's not used for processing other ... It's not like it just becomes the tactile center because your tactile stuff is still processed in the ordinary places. It's just reading. Why? Why does that happen? And what does it mean? Jolie Sheffer:                          That's really interesting. I mean it strikes me in talking to you about this that linguistics as a field is already at the intersection of many different disciplines because you're talking about neuroscience as well as thinking about language and imagination and expression. The creative expression is, in some ways, contingent on what are the language structures in that particular language. You're really well-placed to be thinking interdisciplinarily since your home discipline touches on so many different things. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Linguistics is really big. We always say that whatever you're doing, if there's language in it, it's actually linguistics. So y'all are just subdisciplines of ... Astrobiology, subdiscipline of linguistics. Culture, anthropology, subdiscipline of linguistics. Jolie Sheffer:                          Well, and you're also talking about culture too because you were saying that part of ... One of the things you're going to be talking about on NPR has to do with the history of resistance to Braille. So you've talked about the language and how that is learned in the brain and what that might mean. But what about for how culturally we have understood new languages or new written forms and what that might say about us as a culture or a society? Dr. Wells-Jensen: It's all tied up. Blind people didn't generally even go to school until ... Maybe some of us got to go to school in the 19th century, a few, not many. It was all residential, special schools. That's a whole nother rabbit hole we could go down, but let's try not to. Before there was Braille in these schools, blind people were taught to read by feeling raised representations of Roman letters, so a nice sign that has stand-up letters or door numbers sometimes are embossed. You can trace those with your fingers and read them. You can read that. I can read that, but it's not super fast and you can't write it. I think it's meaningful in a way that sort of makes my skin crawl and makes me angry. It's meaningful that the primary reading system for blind people was something they could read but had no control over writing. Who's got the power there? Let's stop and think about that for a second. A variety of other kinds of writing systems came, arose roughly at the same time so that a literate blind person who wanted to read everything there was to read at, say, the early part of the 20th century had to know at least three different kinds of raised-dot systems, which was a pain in the neck. I'll tell you what, you had to be ... It's like you had to be able to read in the Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet and Japanese Kana all at once. But when these raised-dot systems, in particular Braille, was introduced, the people at the schools didn't like it because the sighted teachers, and they were all sighted teachers, the sighted teachers couldn't read it. So they didn't like the idea at all of these blind people doing this thing that they couldn't read and understand. They could have learned to read it, let's just be clear. They just didn't want to. They didn't want to put the energy into it. It was much easier to make the blind people learn this awkward, difficult, raised-line script. But with Braille, the blind people could not only read faster, but they could write because the mechanisms for writing Braille, you just need something to punch holes through paper. So there was a great deal of resistance and the head of the school where Louis Braille went to school and where he invented the system, actually at one point had a book burning. They went through the school. They searched the students' rooms. They pulled out anything that the students had written in Braille. They actually had transliterated books into Braille, pulled it out into the courtyard and had a book burning just to show them that we weren't going to have that. The beginning of the invention of Braille was in the early 19th century and it took 100 years before it began to be widely used. The resistance started melting in the late 1900s, but it took a long time. Jolie Sheffer:                          What you're really talking about that reaction is how disruptive it is to not just develop new tools, but to develop tools that shift that power balance and shift people out of those roles. If all of a sudden the sighted teachers are the ones who have to learn this new thing and if the students are able to write and read themselves, that disrupts things. Dr. Wells-Jensen: You've got the real power of literacy there. Not only can you read back loyally what a sighted person has written for you, but now you can write your own stuff. You can pass notes. You can make lists. You can write your thoughts down. You get that freedom that comes from literacy, that power that comes from literacy. Did they want blind people to have that? Uh-uh (negative). No, they should didn't. Jolie Sheffer:                          I have one last question for you. As you know, I see us as deeply interested in fostering conversations outside of academia as well as across departments in BGSU. What are the larger questions you're hoping to raise with your work? What is the relevance to the broader community? Dr. Wells-Jensen: Let me do the broader community one first. You can remind me about the other one in a second. Jolie Sheffer:                          Okay. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Lots of people are disabled and nobody signs up for that willingly. Everyone would go to a certain amount of energy to avoid it. I think that one of the things that I want to say to people is that this can be a way of living that is still joyful and powerful. If you can pause the fear for a moment and think about how you are still you no matter what your body shape is, that can be very freeing. As you get older, you know that your body will change. There are accidents that can happen. There's illnesses that can happen. But everyone, as we get older, our bodies change, our abilities change. Sometimes so unfortunately, tragically, our sense of who we are we allow to change with that. We allow to begin to think of ourselves as less valuable, less powerful. Our happiness fades. It can anyway. We begin to live with a lot of regret because in the change in the way that our bodies are functioning. It doesn't have to be that way. We can continue to live full and joyful and meaningful lives no matter what our sensory inputs or what our body is capable of doing. I think that's one of the things that I wish that I would like to be able to communicate to people. With that understanding would come all kinds of social change, which would be marvelous. So that's kind of the outside picture. Let's see, within the disciplines- Jolie Sheffer:                          Oh yeah. What are some of the maybe more intellectual questions you'd like your work to help raise? Dr. Wells-Jensen: Let's see. I'm kind of on the path with these. What else can you imagine? How else could a civilization form itself and how does that inform what we are doing now? What choices would we like to make? What changes would we like to make if we could make some changes? Also from the accessibility side, if we believe this and we say we do. We say we believe that everyone is equal. Well, if we take that seriously, then how does that inform accessibility for disabled students into all kinds of different classes? We have the advocacy part for students. I think in general just questions about what is the relationship between language and thought and culture? That's the big question. That's always the big question. How does our culture construct and inform language? We know that you can say anything you want to say in any of the languages on Earth. But what pieces of that are from our culture? If we manipulate it, in thinking from xenolinguistics perspective, if we had some other language on some other planet how would it be different? Those are some of the big questions. Jolie Sheffer:                          Again, imagination and disruption. Let us all be more disruptive and more imaginative in the ways we go about the world. Thank you so much, Sheri. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Thank you. This was fun. Jolie Sheffer:                          Great to hear about your work and I'm glad that you could be here with us today to talk a little bit more about it. Jolie Sheffer:                          Our producer today is Chris Cavera. Special thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences and the BGSU Planetarium where Sheri was able to give her talk. Thank you very much.

Americans haven’t always loved whales and dolphins. In the 1950s, the average American thought of whales as the floating raw materials for margarine, animal feed, and fertilizer—if they thought about whales at all. But twenty-five years later, things had changed for cetaceans in a big way. Whales had become the poster-animal for a new environmental movement, and cries of “save the whales!” echoed from the halls of government to the whaling grounds of the Pacific. What happened? Annie and Elah meet the unconventional scientists who forever changed our view of whales by making the case that a series of surreal bleats and moans were “song.” GUESTS D. Graham Burnett, professor of history, Princeton University, author, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the 20th Century Scott McVay, former executive director, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, author, Surprise Encounters Roger Payne, biologist, author, Among Whales Sheri Wells-Jensen, associate professor of linguistics, Bowling Green State University FOOTNOTES Read Roger and Scott’s landmark Science paper on whale song. (The paper includes great pics of the spectrograms Scott and Roger analyzed.) Listen to Roger’s record, Songs of the Humpback Whale. Listen to more humpback whale recordings (and dolphin tapes too!) courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Read D. Graham Burnett’s essay on John C. Lilly in Orion. (It’s a great teaser for the rest of his book.) Read a paper Dr. Lilly published in Science, based in part on Scott McVay’s work with Elvar the dolphin. Read the essay that inspired Scott: Loren Eiseley’s “The Long Loneliness: Man and Porpoise: Two Solitary Destinies” CREDITS This episode of Undiscovered was produced by Elah Feder and Annie Minoff  Our senior editor is Christopher Intagliata, our composer is Daniel Peterschmidt, and our intern is Kaitlyn Schwalje. Our theme music is by I Am Robot And Proud. We had fact checking help from Michelle Harris. Thanks, as always, to the entire Science Friday staff, and the folks at WNYC Studios. Special thanks this week to Jack Horowitz, Katie Lupica, and to the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.  

Americans haven’t always loved whales and dolphins. In the 1950s, the average American thought of whales as the floating raw materials for margarine, animal feed, and fertilizer—if they thought about whales at all. But twenty-five years later, things had changed for cetaceans in a big way. Whales had become the poster-animal for a new environmental movement, and cries of “save the whales!” echoed from the halls of government to the whaling grounds of the Pacific. What happened? Annie and Elah meet the unconventional scientists who forever changed our view of whales by making the case that a series of surreal bleats and moans were “song.” GUESTS D. Graham Burnett, professor of history, Princeton University, author, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the 20th Century Scott McVay, former executive director, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, author, Surprise Encounters Roger Payne, biologist, author, Among Whales Sheri Wells-Jensen, associate professor of linguistics, Bowling Green State University FOOTNOTES Read Roger and Scott’s landmark Science paper on whale song. (The paper includes great pics of the spectrograms Scott and Roger analyzed.) Listen to Roger’s record, Songs of the Humpback Whale. Listen to more humpback whale recordings (and dolphin tapes too!) courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Read D. Graham Burnett’s essay on John C. Lilly in Orion. (It’s a great teaser for the rest of his book.) Read a paper Dr. Lilly published in Science, based in part on Scott McVay’s work with Elvar the dolphin. Read the essay that inspired Scott: Loren Eiseley’s “The Long Loneliness: Man and Porpoise: Two Solitary Destinies” CREDITS This episode of Undiscovered was produced by Elah Feder and Annie Minoff  Our senior editor is Christopher Intagliata, our composer is Daniel Peterschmidt, and our intern is Kaitlyn Schwalje. Our theme music is by I Am Robot And Proud. We had fact checking help from Michelle Harris. Thanks, as always, to the entire Science Friday staff, and the folks at WNYC Studios. Special thanks this week to Jack Horowitz, Katie Lupica, and to the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.  

SpecGram Suzie!; by Psammeticus Entertainment; From Volume CLIII, Number 4, of Speculative Grammarian, March 2008 — Psammeticus Entertainment proudly presents... SpecGram Suzie! (Read by Trey Jones and Sheri Wells-Jensen.)

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XXII — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined yet again by Sheri Wells-Jensen. After some Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, they discuss whether linguists make grammaticality judgements like "normal people", and confess more of their prescriptive tendencies.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XXI — The SpecGram LingNerds are joined by returning guest Sheri Wells-Jensen for Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics, and she sticks around for the rest of the show. They discuss the "reading level" of US Congressional speeches, and then they discuss the ins and outs of teaching linguistics at university.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XII — The SpecGram LingNerds discuss goat and other mammalian accents, and liberal vs. conservative linguistics. They also investigate more Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics with repeat guest Sheri Wells-Jensen, and have another visit with Mr. Linguist.

Language Made Difficult, Vol. XI — The SpecGram LingNerds discuss how vowels control your brain, and whether toddlers listen to themselves, or are just stupid. They also investigate more Lies, Damned Lies, and Linguistics with guest Sheri Wells-Jensen, and discuss their futurological visions for English.

George says: check out the LCS Podcast interview of Sheri Wells-Jensen.  Meanwhile, on this side of the conlanging podosphere (literally, the other side, there are only two podcasts), we talk a little about how you can fill out that lexicon with words.  And after that we talk about a language whose creator apparantly decided not... Read more »

David and Sai interview Sheri Wells-Jensen about her work in the world of conlanging, and her work as a linguist at Bowling Green State University. .mp3 recording | Dr. Wells-Jensen’s Webpage Talk about a really, really good idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could google a person and hear what they sounded like? Ooh! Or even […]

The Braille Song; by Innocuous Mustard; Music and Lyrics by Sheri Wells-Jensen, Sam Herrington, and Jason Wells-Jensen; From Volume CLVIII, Number 1 of Speculative Grammarian, January 2010. — You can read it in the sunshine, / Standin’ in the lunch line, / Under cover after bedtime: Braille, Braille, Braille.