[csaa-forum] THE LISTENING PROJECT, Call for Expressions of Interest

[Catherine Thill]

THE LISTENING PROJECT

Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd and Penny O'Donnell, Project Conveners

The Listening Project is a program of collaboration that will  
generate sustained discussion and publication around the politics,  
technologies and practices of the cultural literacy of  
‘listening’. The project develops a new area of study through an  
innovative model of networking, bringing together researchers across  
a range of disciplines as well as media and cultural producers. The  
program will examine the neglected dynamics of ‘listening’, an  
emerging focus in Media Studies and citizens’ media interventions.  
Habitual critiques of representation and the politics of  
‘speaking’ (or giving voice to the voiceless) are giving way to  
investigation of more active possibilities for social inclusion and  
change based on recognition, dialogic engagement and acceptance.

ROUNDTABLE WORKSHOPS
Five afternoon tea workshops will be held in 2008, leading to a multi- 
authored publication around the theme of ‘listening’ in 2009. For  
each workshop, the convenors and 2 – 3 invited participants will be  
asked to prepare a brief and informal discussion starter, which might  
take the form of a commentary on existing literature or research, or  
a discussion of a particular project, research methodology etc. The  
discussion will be structured to lead to the identification of  
potential collaborative projects and papers for publication.


MEDIA & THE POLITICS OF LISTENING IN MULTICULTURAL SOCIETIES
16 April 2008, UNSW
Tanja Dreher (UTS) and Gay Hawkins (UNSW)

DISABILITY, DEMOCRACY, MEDIA & LISTENING
13 August 2008, UNSW
Gerard Goggin (UNSW) and Christopher Newell (UTas)

TECHNOLOGIES OF LISTENING
August 2008, UTS
Justine Lloyd (Macq) and Kate Crawford (UNSW)

CONFLICT, DEMOCRACY & LISTENING
26 September 2008, Monash
Mark Gibson (Monash)

LISTENING PRACTICES
17 October 2008, Usyd
Penny O'Donnell (Usyd) and Juan Salazar (UWS)

PUBLICATION WORKSHOP
14 November 2008, UTS


If you wish to participate in The Listening Project, email Cate Thill  
(Catherine.Thill at uts.edu.au). If you would like to attend a workshop,  
please send a statement indicating in 200 words or less why you are  
interested in a specific workshop topic and whether or not you are  
doing related research, as well as a short CV (4 page max).  
Alternatively, if you are interested in contributing to a proposed  
publication on the theme of listening, please send a short abstract  
and outline of a paper on one of the workshop topics. The deadline  
for expressions of interest in workshops and the publication is 29  
February 2008.

Early career, regional and rural researchers are strongly encouraged  
to apply.

There is a small amount of funding available for interstate travel to  
the workshops that will be allocated on a competitive basis. Please  
indicate in your application if you are interested in applying for  
funding.

The Listening Project is supported by the Australian Research  
Council’s Cultural Research Network and the Trans/forming Cultures  
Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney




WORKSHOPS

MEDIA & THE POLITICS OF LISTENING IN MULTICULTURAL SOCIETIES
16 April 2008, UNSW
Tanja Dreher (UTS) and Gay Hawkins (UNSW)

This workshop will focus on the ethics and politics of listening in  
order to develop innovative approaches to thinking about media and  
multiculturalism. To date both research and policy on media and  
cultural diversity have emphasised questions of speaking, whether in  
mainstream, community or diaspora media. There is also a vast  
literature examining questions of representation including  
stereotyping, racialisation, hybridisation and self-representations.  
This workshop extends these discussions to focus on questions of  
listening. Sociologist Charles Husband has long argued that the  
'right to be understood' and an ethics of listening are as important  
as the 'right to communicate' in developing a multi-ethnic public  
sphere. Susan Bickford suggests that 'just as speakers must reflect  
on how to speak (and what to say), listeners must be self-conscious  
about how they listen (and what they hear). Taking responsibility for  
listening, as an active and creative process, might serve to  
undermine certain hierarchies of language and voice'.
Attention to listening provokes important questions about media and  
multiculturalism: How do media enable or constrain listening across  
difference? What is the role of mediation in the politics of  
listening? How can a diversity of voices be heard in the media? How  
are new modes of listening developed or learned (by media producers  
and by media audiences)? How can media researchers, producers and  
policymakers best address these questions?

By bringing together  researchers, media workers and policy makers we  
aim to start a conversation on new ways of understanding the dynamics  
and importance of listening in multicultural societies.



DISABILITY, DEMOCRACY, MEDIA & LISTENING
13 August 2008, UNSW
Gerard Goggin (UNSW) and Christopher Newell (UTas)

In rich and suggestive senses, listening has emerged as a pivotal  
theme in contemporary, critical understandings of disability.  
Accordingly this workshop seeks to explore the practices, ethics and  
politics of listening from the perspective of critical disability  
studies, new social forms and relations of disability, the reshaping  
of disability institutions, and the movements around disability.  
Thinking about disability and listening has much potential to open up  
fertile new ways to conceive democracy and media -- and to challenge,  
and cross-fertilize, discussions of recognition, inclusion, social  
change, power, citizenship, culture, and indeed the nature of what is  
to be human.


TECHNOLOGIES OF LISTENING
August 2008, UTS
Justine Lloyd (Macq) and Kate Crawford (UNSW)

This workshop will allow for the investigation of the crucial role of  
technology in listening. The focus will be on the cultural forms of  
listening that bring together material objects with social practices,  
collective formations and subjectivities. The emphasis on listening  
will allow participants to explore common themes and problems: to  
what extent have technologies embodied already existing modes of  
listening and to what extent do they produce new ones? What sonic  
networks and flows do contemporary material cultures reinforce, and  
how do local sound cultures redraw and reconstitute themselves in a  
digital environment? What is the function of shared spaces of  
listening in relation to individual environments, such as MP3 players  
and mobile phones?


CONFLICT, DEMOCRACY & LISTENING
26 September 2008, Monash
Mark Gibson (Monash)

It is difficult to conceive of democracy without a belief in the  
possibility of listening. But over the last twenty years, the theme  
of listening has increasingly been displaced by those of power and  
conflict. While the latter are often associated with the left, they  
have also been taken up by the right, resulting in interesting  
resonances between cultural studies analyses of ‘discursive  
strategies’ and conservative campaigns against political  
correctness. This workshop considers the prospects for restoring a  
place for listening in the wake of the culture wars. Has the  
displacement of listening been a temporary phenomenon or does it have  
structural roots? Are ‘conflict’ and ‘listening’ really  
mutually exclusive themes? What are the most promising sites for new  
models of listening? To what extent might they be generalised?


LISTENING PRACTICES
17 October 2008, Usyd
Penny O'Donnell (Usyd) and Juan Salazar (UWS)

This workshop will examine different listening practices with the aim  
of developing our capacity to both experience and theorise more open  
forms of communication. It will provide a space and time for  
listening. Participants will be encouraged to collaborate in the  
development of a shared archive of listening practices by bringing  
along exemplars of things people do and say in relation to media and  
listening.
Listening, speaking, practice, recognition, agency and justice are  
key categories in this workshop. It is concerned with the  
significance of listening in media culture: What type of things do  
people do in relation to media and listening? What do media  
practitioners do? What is media-oriented listening, and what are  
people listening for? What types of things do people say in relation  
to media and listening? What do media practioners say? Is listening  
displacing speaking/voice as the metaphor for ‘democratic’ media  
participation and reform? If, as we suspect, listening is emerging as  
a distinctive media-oriented activity then we should be able to find  
observable examples of it; examples that provide a means for thinking  
about and evaluating the realities, rationales, rules and  
significance of listening practices.

The global political context provides an interesting reference point  
for this exercise. Media sociologist Nick Couldry (2006) suggests the  
global media system is an ‘institutionalised injustice’,  
generating an important, shared public space but only at the cost of  
fomenting conflicts born of the system’s characteristic and profound  
inequalities in the distribution of symbolic resources and media  
power. In the face of this injustice, media presence has become a  
primary means by which states, groups and individuals seek and  
achieve recognition and agency, that is, ways of ‘speaking out’  
or ‘speaking back’ to the system. Yet, one way or another, the  
broader aim is justice rather than just increasing media flow/volume  
and, hence, the risk of cacophony. This raises the interesting  
question of whether media-oriented listening offers a stronger path  
not only to recognition and agency but also to justice?



 

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