[Linganth] AAA CFP: Explorations in the Ethnography of Listening

[James Slotta]

Hi folks,

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas and I are putting together a AAA panel on ling anth
approaches to listening practices (abstract below) and we're looking for a
couple more participants. If you're interested, please reach out to us with
your paper ideas in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks,
James



*Explorations in the Ethnography of Listening*Organizers: Xochitl
Marsilli-Vargas (xochitl.marsilli at emory.edu) and James Slotta (
jslotta at utexas.edu)

Over the past two decades, listening has emerged as an activity of interest
across the humanities and social sciences. Sound studies and the sensory
humanities have explored the auditory experience of everything from music
and noise to the sound of machines and the human body, revealing the rich
and vital role that the sense of listening plays in diverse times and
traditions (Erlmann 2004; Feld 1982; Howes 2005; Lipari 2014; Le Breton
2017 [2006]; Kramer 2018). Political theorists and anthropologists have
highlighted the essential role that listening plays in religious,
political, and cultural contexts ranging from the liberal democratic public
sphere to the Islamic Revival to everyday practices of psychotherapy
(Hirschkind 2006; Inoue 2006; Slotta 2015, 2017, 2023; Marsill-Vargas 2014,
2022). And scholars of media, communication, and rhetoric have turned their
attention to the work of listening as an essential, though too often
overlooked facet of both mass and interpersonal communication (Lacey 2013,
Ratcliff 2005).

Yet among linguistic anthropologists, who have long examined the role of
speech in social life, the idea that listening has the potential of
generating and sustaining social relations has curiously not been explored
in a concerted fashion. In this panel, we bring together linguistic
anthropologists and anthropologists of listening to consider what an
ethnography of listening might look like.

It is now a commonplace among linguistic anthropologists that speaking is a
culturally-informed social activity in which people perform their
identities, build and transform their social worlds, and even construct
reality itself. But what about the other side of the communicative equation?
What sort of social activities are performed in the act of listening? What
sort of cultures and ideologies inform practices of listening? What role do
listeners play in shaping the meaning and effects of communicative events? In
this panel, we consider what the analytics of linguistic anthropology, so
fruitfully developed for the study of speech, have to offer the study of
listening. And at the same time, we consider how centering the activity of
listening challenges the field’s understandings of language and
communication, providing new insights into classic concerns as well as new
avenues for future research.

We welcome papers from anthropologists and those in allied fields who
explore the work of listening, broadly conceived, in an ethnographic
fashion. If you are interested in participating, please reach out to the
panel organizers with your paper ideas by March 8.
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