ResearchWorks (in person): How Institutions (Should) Listen

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The metaphor of listening has become ubiquitous in the world of politics. Margaret Thatcher declared her candidacy in 1979 with a promise to do it, Tony Blair said he wouldn’t have won a third term without it. Politicians often resort to listening tours when their electoral prospects look shaky (think of Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 presidential campaign or Emmanuel Macron when threatened by the gilets jaunts movement). And in the UK, the current Labour leadership has revived the obsession with policymaking by focus group. Participatory forms of democracy, such as citizens’ assemblies, have captured the imagination of academics, policy wonks, and arts practitioners alike. Listening, though, has an intriguing status as a putative political concept: richly polysemous, it is at the same time not a contested concept like democracy. It is used widely to mean many different things to different people from across political spectrum in different contexts, and yet there is surprisingly no struggle to question its meaning or challenge its largely positive evaluation. Naomi Waltham-Smith's hypothesis is that listening trips off the tongue to no small degree because as a metaphor, it is translated from a familiar interpersonal setting to the abstract level of democratic institutions. This talk with grapple with this challenge: What does it mean for a government or a state to listen? What kinds of listening do universities foster? How do we dismantle and rebuild democratic institutions that have stopped listening?

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton College. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of philosophy with music and sound studies, she is the author of Music and Belonging between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017)), Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021)), Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Free Listening (Nebraska UP, 2024). She has won research fellowships at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Penn Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and is currently embarking up a project tackling the criminalization of drill music in collaboration with JUSTICE and United Borders funded by the AHRC Locally Unlocking Culture through Inclusive Access (LUCIA) scheme. The work presented in this talk has been funded in part by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.