This edition of The Listening Academy aims to bring together participating scholars, researchers and artists, to share knowledge, practices, and research activities, and to collectively investigate creative and critical questions of listening. Listening is emphasized here as a transdisciplinary subject, one that moves across the humanities and society, and which contributes to fostering interpersonal and community relations. Listening is more than the hearing of audible signals; rather, listening supports a range of relevant processes and projects, including emotional growth, social recognition, attunement across human and more-than-human worlds, co-learning, and decolonial, eco-feminist initiatives. This is not to overlook the violations listening can equally cause; rather, it becomes imperative to consider the extent to which listening heals as well as harms, supports as well as captures, thereby requiring greater critical and creative inquiry and sensitivity. How might we think further about listening as a critical, discursive field or modality? What forms of emergent practices can be developed and deployed by way of listening, which may impact onto current social, planetary challenges? What potentialities and limitations does listening carry, and what might an acoustic literacy offer in terms of contending with the ongoingness of colonial (epistemic) violence?
The Listening Academy wishes to draw out these critical perspectives through an transdisciplinary gathering of views from across the arts and humanities, as well as from a diversity of communities. Integrating individual presentation, lectures and collective group work with invited guests, listening sessions and creative methods, the Academy adopts a collaborative and collective approach, supporting a transversal sharing of knowledge across theory and practice, thinking and doing. Through individual and group reflection, the Academy will capture key perspectives while opening toward areas of future work and collaboration.
We invite participants to submit letters of interest to contribute to the Academy. Please include a CV and a brief overview of your research interests and / or ways of practicing. Letters of interest should be sent by June 10, 2022, to: [email protected]
Convenors and organizers of The Listening Academy, London:
Lucia Farinati, curator, researcher and writer, co-author of The Force of Listening (2017), and curatorial advisor for The Listening Academy
Brandon LaBelle, artist, writer and theorist, author of Acoustic Justice: Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation (2021), and artistic director of The Listening Biennial
With contributions from invited guests including Leah Bassel, Arendse Krabbe, Kate Lacey, Bhavisha Panchia, Blanc Sceol, among others, including participants from past editions of the Academy.
The Listening Academy will be held at Iklectik, a creative platform and space dedicated to experimental music and sound practices. Iklectik is located in South London, as part of a compound of creative studios and labs, allowing for a diversity of indoor and outdoor locations for gathering and working together.
