“Listening: Migration, Voice, and Place,” uses “Connected Listening” to question certain “western econom[ies] of voice” (Chouliaraki and Georgiou 2022). “Connected listening” is listening that happens within a matrix of real, virtual, collective, national, and diasporic bodies, which themselves are in constant flux. The listener listens from their body, and this exists within a web of identities, histories, and memories. A theory of “Connected Listening” weaves together ideas from sound studies cultural geography, feminist cultural theories of storytelling and affect to understand the role of listening as imbricated within complex and fluid fields of affective belongings that intersect across space and time.
The talk uses material from Gardner’s 2023 book Listening, Belonging, and Memory, to focus on a two-year pan-European project called Mapping the Music of Migration, where migrants in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, Norway, and the UK shared a story about a song that was important to them. Its aim was to counteract dominant European-wide discourses of the “migrant” through Connected listening exchanges centred on a song. The talk argues that “Connected Listening” and its ability to produce proximity and “affinities” (Stewart 2007) is an affectively powerful mechanism. It can make the silenced subaltern (Spivak 1988), audible and engineer a space for sonic agency for those whose voices have been collapsed into prevailing and pervasive discourses of Otherness, fear, threat, and vulnerability.
Short bio:
Professor Abigail Gardner is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Gloucestershire’s School of Creative Arts. She has written on music, gender and ageing and her latest book Listening, Belonging and Memory (Bloomsbury) was published in August 2023. Other publications include Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (2019), Aging and Popular Music in Europe (2019), PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance (2015) and Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (2012, with Ros Jennings). She is Editor of the IASPM journal, The International Association for the Study of Popular Music and has led European listening projects, such as ‘Mapping the Music of Migration’ www.mamumi.eu, and digital storytelling initiatives as well as producing short documentaries. She is currently PI on a sound, environment and ageing project called ‘SAGE’ which is trialling the use of listening to natural sounds in care homes.
