The course focuses on listening as a transformative capacity and experience. As adrienne maree brown comments, “In my experience, healing happens when a place of trauma or pain is given full attention, really listened to.” Underpinning the course is a concern to elaborate listening methodologies and knowledges, understanding how it lends to a range of creative and critical work. This includes considering key questions, such as: In what ways does listening influence understandings of self and other, bodies and things? If listening acts as a work of attention, how might it contribute to (re)shaping attention economies as well as attending to social repair? Is there a connection between listening and planetarity, and how might we elaborate this connection in terms of nurturing kinships across species? Following these lines of inquiry, listening is emphasized as a means of shifting from production to maintenance, from action to reception, enabling ways of connecting across social, material and spiritual worlds. As Gemma Fiumara argues, listening can assist in shifting our “rational traditions” toward greater ecological, holistic positions and practices.

To explore listening as a practice of radical receptivity, the course is structured around four modalities or figures of listening, including: Inner Listening (self-determination, critical consciousness, and a care of the self), Negative Recognition (listening as an ethics of witnessing), Somatic Listening (therapeutic arts and (re)writing the story of the body), and Planetary Practices (listening as situated ecological attunement). Through theoretical reading and reflection, material work and testing, the course follows listening’s role in cultivating care for oneself and others, and in what way it may critically aid in intervening within dominant systems of power. While listening may appear as rather weak in the face of prevailing struggles, the course considers its profound influence, finally posing listening as a poetic path toward fostering and maintaining authentic connections.

Students will be encouraged to develop creative processes and material work throughout the course, considering how listening may open new approaches within their own practices. We will also listen toward our local environments, reflecting together on existing spaces and situations, and how listening is given room or not within the city. This will lead to exploring what we want to think of as “acoustic performativity”, to consider in what ways social, spatial and institutional arrangements are made to facilitate as well as hinder the work of listening. In addition, we’ll explore a range of artistic examples, considering how these issues are brought forward across the arts. Although struggles for recognition mostly seek to reconfigure the conditions that enable acts of speech, we’re interested to follow acoustic performativity to ultimately map the right to listen as fundamental for reparative action today.