Academy - London

August 29 - September 4, 2022: 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 a 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.

Contributing researchers, practitioners and organizers: Allyn Aglaia, Ain Bailey, Leah Bassel, Blanc Sceol, Dominique Baron-Bonarjee, Ben Byrne, Wanda Canton, Maureen de Jager, Kate Donovan, Esi Eshun, Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Simon Fleury, Iris Garrelfs, Amanda Gutierrez, Lisa Hall, Christina Hazboun, Claire Holdsworth, Martine Huvenne, Chris Jones, Stina Marie Hasse Jorgensen, Hannah Kemp-Welch, Roshanak Kheshti, Ash Kilmartin, Arendse Krabbe, Kate Lacey, Louise Mackenzie, Salar Mameni, Ernst Maréchal, Timothy Maxymenko, Nele Möller, Margarita Novikova, Alisa Oleva, Bhavisha Panchia, Morten Poulsen, Pablo José Ramirez, Miriam Schickler, Rajni Shah, Hoda Siahtiri, Sound Camp, Francis Sosta, Iury Salustiano Trojaborg, anna sherbany, Anna Walker

Convenors / 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, and 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.