First Edition – New Book Seminar | Listening, Belonging, and Memory: Silence, Witnessing and Connected Listening Event

This public online event will take place on Microsoft Teams. If you are not a staff or student at University of Southampton and would like to join us, please contact Nyle Bevan-Clarke: n.bevan-clark@soton.ac.uk, or Erin Johnson Williams (if you would like a Teams invitation) e.johnson-williams@soton.ac.uk.

Listening, Belonging, and Memory: Silence, Witnessing and Connected Listening 

This is a talk about [i]Listening, Belonging, and Memory/i, a book about listening to voices. Sometimes these voices tell stories about themselves, or about the music they like, sometimes these voices come across the radio, or are archived in national sound collections. Sometimes the voices tell stories about their pasts, sometimes images tell stories about the past because the voices are gone. Sometimes you have to strain to hear the voices through swathes of silence and story. And it is these two, silence and story, that lie at the heart of the book, how they interweave, how they are activated, maneuvered, reconfigured, and denied. This is a process that is also about foregrounding the ordinary, listening for resonance and experience from spaces and people whose narratives have slipped beneath accepted historiographies, expectations, and statistics. It is about listening in action, and observations from the ‘field’ of digital storytelling. And it is about listening online, a practice which extends to social media threads, newspaper articles and UK government policy statements. Listening is done with age, and as witness, in place, and in time and the talk reflects on how listening may be changed by where we listen, when and who to.