[csaa-forum] Symposium: Listening Futures, Macquarie 7 December

[Tanja Dreher]

*The Listening Project*
*SYMPOSIUM: LISTENING FUTURES*
*Macquarie University*
*7 Decem*ber 2009
*Call for expressions of interest*

This is an invitation to participate in the capstone symposium of The 
Listening Project, a twoyear
program of collaboration funded by ARC Cultural Research Network, that has
generated discussion of and publication about the practices, politics 
and ethics of the cultural
literacy of 'listening'.

We will hold a series of panels over the course of the day that will 
pick up on three key
themes that have been identified by researchers over the last two years. 
Separate panels will
focus on 'Labour and Listening', 'Recognition' and 'Media Practices'.
For this particular event, we have invited Dr. Kate Lacey, from the 
Department of Media and
Film School of Humanities at the University of Sussex to act as a 
discussant for the day.
The meeting will bring together researchers working in this area in a 
major concluding event.
The symposium will enhance the focus of previous workshops by linking 
current research on
media, sound and cultural practices across Australian institutions 
within common
frameworks of inquiry.

By grounding analysis of listening through open panel discussion towards 
a set of key
questions, the symposium will focus on three critical themes of 
analysis: labour, recognition,
and media practice. (See below). An emphasis on discussion rather than 
prepared papers will
provide an opportunity for individual research agendas of participants 
to be articulated with
wider disciplinary and theoretical problematics. Ongoing debates and 
future agendas for
research will be explored.
*
*
*Who can participate?*
The symposium is free, but we only have a limited amount of places 
available due to
constraints on the venue and catering. Please register before the 
closing date to ensure your
place.
*
*
*What do I need to do to attend?*
If you are interested in attending the Symposium, please send a brief 
bio and note (max 1
page) outlining your research interests and how they relate to the topic 
of the symposium.
*
*
*Is there any support available for travel to Sydney?*
There is a small amount of funding available for interstate travel, 
particularly for
postgraduates and early career researchers. The funds will be allocated 
on a competitive
basis. Please indicate in your EOI if you are interested in applying for 
funding.
Deadlines
EOI with ECR/PG funding application to: Jan.Idle at uts.edu.au 
<mailto:Jan.Idle at uts.edu.au> by October 16, 2009.
EOI to attend without funding application to: Jan.Idle at uts.edu.au 
<mailto:Jan.Idle at uts.edu.au> by November 7, 2009
*
*
*The Listening Project*
S*YMPOSIUM: LISTENING FUTURES*
*Macquarie University*
*7 December 2009*
*Convenors:*
*Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd, Penny O'Donnell, Catherine Thill*
/*Invited discussant:*/
*Dr Kate Lacey, University of Sussex, UK*
Structure:
The symposium will present a series of panels on specific aspects of 
listening research. Each
panel will address the key questions via short papers which will be 
circulated beforehand, as
a sample of work-in-progress for discussion and response by participants.
The symposium's major aims are to:
1. profile emerging listening research in Australia;
2. explore theoretical and methodological tools for identifying the 
character of
listening as a component of a mediated political culture and its links with
cultural labour;
3. encourage future research on listening in cross-cultural and 
interinstitutional
contexts.
*
*
*Panel One: The labour of listening*
*Convenors: Justine Lloyd & Devleena Ghosh*
*Panellists (TBC): Justine Lloyd (Macquarie), Jo Tacchi (QUT), Ramaswami 
Harindrath*
*(Melbourne), Aneta Podkalicka (Swinburne)*
Starting out from listening does not so much turn the traditional models 
of media
analysis on their head, as to point towards a much-overdue revisioning 
of the act of
listening as cultural work. This in turn asks how we can approach the 
concrete and
finite constraints on the labour of listening within everyday life. This 
panel will explore
how an analysis of listening could tangle with a range of appropriations,
reinterpretations and amplifications -- that together speaks to the 
dynamics of
conversation -- rather than any simple tasking of the individual subject 
with
'reception'.
This panel seeks to open up listening's collective and democratizing 
energies by
addressing questions of cultural politics and production: What 
disciplines listening?
When is listening just play or for 'pleasure', and when is it 'work'? 
How has listening
been problematised -- at the same time as it has been facilitated in 
terms of techniques,
pedagogies and technologies? How do the sensory extensions and 
amplifications of
media allow us to listen differently to others and the world?
/*Suggested readings:*/
Kate Lacey (2000) 'Towards a periodisation of listening: Radio and 
Modern Life',
/International Journal of Cultural Studies /3(2), pp 279-288.
Paul Gilroy (2003) 'Between the Blues and the Blues Dance: Some 
soundscapes of the
black Atlantic', in /The Auditory Culture Reader/, ed. M. Bull and L. 
Back, Berg,
Oxford, pp. 381-395.

*Panel Two: Listening and the politics of recognition*
*Panellists (TBC): Cate Thill (UNDA), Tanja Dreher (UTS), Rosemary 
Kayess (UNSW), Baden*
*Offord (SCU), Judy Atkinson (SCU), Raewyn Connell (USYD)*

This panel examines the relationship between listening and recognition. 
One of the
central conerns of The Listening project so far has been the ways in 
which listening
might address some of the limitations associated with the politics of 
voice. The
argument is that while voice is a condition of possibility for 
recognition it cannot
guarantee that the speaker will be heard. In the context of media and
communications, for example, attention to listening and recognition 
suggests that a
redistribution of material resources for speaking/voice is inadequate 
unless there is
also a shift in the hierarchies of attention which determine who and 
what can be
heard. What is at stake in shifting attention from the outcome of 
recognition to the
intersubjective process of listening? How does listening reinforce or 
challenge
existing frameworks for thinking about recognition that distinguish the 
symbolic
from the material? What does a focus on listening add to our thinking 
about the
politics of recognition, and vice versa?
*/
/*
/*Suggested readings:*/
Susan Bickford (1996) 'The Genuine Conditions of Our Lives', Chapter 
Five of /The/
/Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship/, Cornell 
University
Press, Ithaca and London.
Axel Honneth (2003) 'Redistribution as recognition: A response to Nancy 
Fraser' in N.
Fraser and A. Honneth's /Redistribution or recognition: A 
political-philosophical/
/exchange/. Verso, London and New York, pp. 110 -- 189.
Nancy Fraser (2008) 'From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of 
Justice in a
"PostSocialist" Age' in /Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates 
Her Critics/,
ed. K Olson, Verso, London and New York, pp. 9 -- 4.
*
*
*Panel Three: Media practice*
Convenor: Penny O'Donnell

The theme of listening has only sporadically emerged in scholarly work 
on media
reform and cultural democracy from the fields of journalism, media and 
cultural
studies. This panel addresses this gap in two ways. It explores media 
practices that
foreground listening as a means of developing new types of mediated 
interactions
across difference and inequality, including encouraging people to move 
outside their
comfort zones, negotiate power differentials, or engage hostile 
perspectives. It then
examines the 'practice' paradigm, with its emphasis on both the 
practical and
symbolic dimensions of media work and use, asking what it offers media 
academics,
practitioners, activists and audiences in terms of shared resources for 
re-thinking and
re-forming social communication.

The panel will explore what it is about media that encourages and/or 
discourages
listening? In what ways, and for what purposes, do media listen as well 
as talk? How
do media practices represent social processes of talking, conversing or 
arguing across
difference and inequality and do these representations promote or 
inhibit dialogue?
How might we develop the concept of journalism as a 'dialogic institution'?
*/
/*
/*Suggested readings:*/
Nick Couldry (2004) 'Theorising media as practice', /Social Semiotics 
/14 (2), pp. 115-
132.
John J. Pauly (2004) 'Media Studies and the dialogue of democracy', in 
eds. Rob
Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter and Kenneth N. Cissna, /Dialogue: Theorizing 
Difference in/
/Communication Studies/, Thousand Oaks, Sage, pp. 243-258.
The Listening Project
*
*
*
*
*SYMPOSIUM: LISTENING FUTURES*
*Macquarie University*
*7 December 2009*
*
*
*BACKGROUND & FURTHER INFORMATION*
*What is The Listening Project?*

The Listening Project is a program of research collaboration that has 
brought together
Australian cultural and media scholars, practitioners and activists 
interested in the theme of
'listening', an emerging international focus in Media Studies and 
citizens' media
interventions. The Project broadly looks at how 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.

Members of the project have developed 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. Workshops have examined the neglected dynamics of 
'listening' in
diverse theoretical and practical contexts.

There is more information about the Listening Project on the web:
http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/news_events/Listening_project.html
We invite you to read the articles included in a recent, special issue 
of /Continuum: Journal of/
/Media & Cultural Studies /(Volume 23, Issue 4), dedicated to the theme 
of Listening.
Who convenes the activities of the Listening Project?

The convenors are Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd, Penny O'Donnell and Cate 
Thill and the
Project Officer is Jan Idle. Juan Valencia is the postgraduate and ECR 
contact. The workshops
have been funded by the ARC's Cultural Research Network and supported by the
Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology 
Sydney and the
Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University.
*
*
*Who can I contact in case I have further questions?*
For more information about the Symposium: Justine.Lloyd at uts.edu.au 
<mailto:Justine.Lloyd at uts.edu.au>
For ECR & Postgraduate information: Juan.Valencia at students.mq.edu.au 
<mailto:Juan.Valencia at students.mq.edu.au>.
Other enquiries: Jan.Idle at uts.edu.au <mailto:Jan.Idle at uts.edu.au>

-- 
Dr Tanja Dreher
ARC Postdoctoral Fellow
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway NSW 2007
Email: tanja.dreher at uts.edu.au
Phone: (02) 9514 1671

UTS CRICOS Provider Code:  00099F
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