Summary
‘Worlding the world’ is one of two orientations to reality set out by Carl Mika, Vanessa Andreotti, Garrick Cooper, Cash Ahenakew and Denise Ferreira da Silva in a 2020 article in the journal ‘Language, Discourse & Society’. ‘Wording the world’ treats being as something language and knowledge can capture. Worlding treats language as “one amongst other inter-woven entities” in a world that can never be fully known.
Writing as Indigenous and racialised scholars, they ground the idea in a Māori philosophy of language, in which things are “co-constitutive of each other” and language is itself a living entity. They admit the paradox: writing about worlding is still wording.
Rationale
A caution for a field that works in words. Their worry that naming a reality “cannot do the job” of worlding it finds an echo in Part 2, where ‘Told’ is one zone of four.