What can disability justice movements teach us about creativity, collective care, and the art(s) of radical interdependence?  How to they (re)envision health, wellbeing, solidarity, and justice?  What creative strategies and art-activism do they use?  And how do these approaches intersect with trauma-informed and intersectional approaches to healing, justice and collective liberation?

As Disability Justice and Transformative Justice educator and organiser Mia Mingus tells us, ‘disability justice is simply another word for love’. 

In this pop up reading group, we will discuss a selection of short written texts and audio/visual media by Disability Justice activists and artists, including the Disability Justice Network, as prompts for thinking together through these questions and more.

Texts: Selected texts and prompts will be circulated to registered participants two weeks in advance, along with some prompts and questions for discussion.  Texts include:

• Julia Rose Bak, Disability Justice Network: Disability Justice dreams of a world where no one gets left behind.

• Sins Invalid: 10 Principles of Disability Justice.

• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Care Webs.

• Mia Mingus: Medical Industrial Complex (visual).

• Alice Wong: Assembly for the Future - The Last Disabled Oracle (video).

Event Accessibility and Format:  We take the ongoing pandemic seriously and the reading group will strive to be run in a COVID-safe way that is accessible for all. The reading group will be run in a hybrid in-person / online mode for people to unable to attend in person for any reason.  The space will be well ventilated and/or air filters will be brought in to improve air quality and N95 masks will be encouraged for those who can wear them.

Expressions of Interest: To allow breathing space for discussion and reflection, places for the reading group are limited. Selected texts and prompts will be circulated in advance.  Interested UNSW HDRs and ECRs are particularly encouraged to register. EOIs close 25 September. Register your interest here.

In this session as part of the Big Anxiety Research Centre Open Studio, I will talk about my current project-in-development, Holding Breath which explores collective listening, care and connection in the wake of pandemic grief (and beyond) through a series of intimate, generative and reciprocal encounters through the sharing of voice-note memos.  The project works co-creatively with women and trans non-binary people who experience debilitating or persistent breathlessness across unevenly shared and felt thresholds of experience. The project foregrounds slow, attentive and reciprocal listening and works from my own lived experience of living with/in discomfort, debility and breathlessness.  In this session, I will talk about the initial prompts and inspirations for the project, ethical and methodological questions, growing a distributed network of care and solidarity, and more.  It is an ‘experiment in listening’ (Shah, 2021), and perhaps a creative sound project, but I'm also thinking of it as an embodied archival project.  A short example of voice-note exchanges will be shared from the creative development and testing stage, after which I will encourage listening-oriented responses from the audience.

Where: UNSW Sydney, The Bank, Kensington campus.

Abstract:

From the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and refugees on former Australian colonial territories in offshore ‘black sites’ (Pugliese, 2013), to the over-incarceration and deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, racialised carceral logics and the surveillance of blackness (Browne, 2015) are at the heart of the settler-colonial Australian state.

This paper frames the Australian podcast series Breathless as a sonic media intervention that disrupts the norms of listening and attention that silence or sensationalise these modes of violence, contesting mainstream media representations. Made by community radio station 2SER in Sydney in partnership with independent media organisation Guardian Australia, Breathless bears witness to the life and death of young Dunghutti man David Dungay Jr. who died in Sydney’s Long Bay jail in 2015 from positional asphyxia following restraint and sedation by state correctional services officers. Breathless is part of an emerging model of collaborative podcasting that combines independent journalism, community radio, and grassroots activism to amplify the voices of those whose lives are impacted by state-sanctioned violence and incarceration. The podcast raises vital questions about the conditions of listening and being heard when the voices of First Nations people are silenced, discredited or ignored in mainstream media.

The podcast follows the 2018 coronial inquest into Dungay’s death, and walks alongside members of the Dunguay family whose campaign to raise awareness of Indigenous deaths in custody motivates their ongoing struggle for justice. Central to the inquest is prison CCTV footage of the last moments of Dungay’s life that captures him in a state of increasing duress. Repeatedly telling correctional services officers ‘I can’t breathe’, Dungay’s final words -- uttered twelve times like an incantation -- hauntingly echoes the last words of Eric Garner, the unarmed black man who died under restraint by police in 2014 in the United States.

Bringing an orientation towards sound into conversation with theoretical concepts of political listening (Bickford, 1996; Bassel, 2017; Dreher 2009, 2018), media witnessing (Lydon, 2018; Peters, 2001) and earwitnessing (Lloyd, 2009), this paper conducts a close listening of four episodes of Breathless to locate it within a larger ‘archive of breathlessness’ left in the wake of colonisation and violence (Sharpe, 2013). Listening along and against ‘the archival grain’ (Stoler, 2002), I attend to the sounds of Dungay’s death and the family’s grief, beyond the evidentiary framing of the CCTV footage. As a provocation to stretch the ear - to slow down, to listening again, to listen differently - I argue Breathless presses us to register the ‘continuity of colonial practices’ (Carlson et al. 2016) found in the details of David Dungay’s death, while attending to his dignity and the dignity of his family in its wake.

References:

Bassel, L. (2017). Listening as Solidarity. In The Politics of Listening (71-87). Palgrave.

Bickford, S. (2018). The dissonance of democracy: Listening, conflict, and citizenship. Cornell University Press.

Carlson, B. L., Jones, L. V., Harris, M., Quezada, N., & Frazer, R. (2017). ‘Trauma, Shared Recognition and Indigenous Resistance on Social media’. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 21.

Dreher, T. (2009). Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice. Continuum, 23(4), 445-458.

Lloyd, J. (2009). The listening cure. Continuum, 23(4), 477-487.

Lydon, J. (2018) Visualizing Human Rights. UWA Press.

Peters, J. D. (2009). Witnessing. In Media witnessing (23-48). Palgrave Macmillan.

Pugliese, J. (2013). State violence and the execution of Law: Biopolitcal caesurae of torture, black sites, drones. Routledge.

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Stoler, A. L. (2010). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press.

Western Political Science Atssociation Conference April 2019

Panel Title: Conditions and Practices of Democratic Listening
Section: Political Theory and its Applications
Chair/Discussant: Susan Bickford
Paper 4:
Title:  Dwelling in Discomfort: On the Conditions of Listening in Settler Colonial Australia
Primary Author: Poppy de Souza 
Institutional Affiliation: Griffith University
Email: poppy.desouza@griffith.edu.au
Secondary Author: Tanja Dreher
Institutional Affiliation: University of New South Wales
Email: t.dreher@unsw.edu.au

Abstract: While critical scholarship on listening as a political practice has flourished in recent years, there remains much work to do on theorising political listening as a situated practice in specific contexts, including listening as a practice that might unsettle settler colonial relations. In this paper, we extend Susan Bickford’s pathbreaking work on political listening (1996) and our own theorisation of located listening in the Australian context (Dreher and de Souza, 2018) to offer provisional thoughts on the generative potential of refusal, discomfort, attunement and yielding. We take as our starting point the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart as a prompt and challenge for thinking about broader conditions of listening and being heard in settler colonial Australia. Culminating from the First Nations Constitutional Convention and following an unprecedented process of democratic deliberation among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives, the Uluru Statement clearly sets out the conditions of listening required in order for First Nations to be heard: a recognition of the authority and ontological primacy of First Nations peoples; a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament; and a Makarrata Commission to supervise agreement-making and local-level truth-telling. We argue it is vital to listen to Indigenous histories of refusal (rather than refusing to listen); to become more attuned to our differently located listening positions in response to the needs and desires of others; and ultimately yield to the authority of First Nations peoples to set the terms, frames and limits of recognition, within and beyond liberal and colonial logics. We suggest taking up responsibility to dwell in discomfort must also be part of the conditions of listening required to envision more just futures, with the sovereignty of First Nations people placed at its heart. Therefore, listening must be located within a decolonial framework to extend and unsettle conventional liberal democratic modes of deliberative listening.

I will present a paper at the upcoming Politics of Listening conference, which I am co-convening with Tanja Dreher at UNSW, Sydney.

Title: Slow listening and the unsettling ethics of attention in Curtain the podcast

Abstract: From the over-incarceration and deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and refugees on former Australian colonial territories, racialised carceral logics and state-sanctioned violence are at the heart of the settler- colonial Australian state. In this context, recent Australian podcast series such as Bowraville, Unravel: Blood on the Tracks, The Messenger, Breathless, and Curtain can be understood as sonic interventions which register the conditions of structural and racial injustice. Combining longform journalism with the intimacy and immediacy the audio medium, these podcasts hold the potential to raise awareness, mobilise action and advocate for change. Yet they also circulate in an uneven economy of attention that privilege ‘binge’, ‘on demand’ and ‘serial’ listening modes and media forms that increasingly sensationalise injustice-as-entertainment.

This presentation focuses on an ethics of listening in response to Curtain, an independently produced podcast series made by Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire and Yuin man Martin Hodgson and which has broadcast over 60 episodes to date. Curtainexplores ‘the darkest parts of our criminal justice system’ and is committed to finding justice for Kevin ‘Curtain’ Henry, an Aboriginal man wrongfully incarcerated by the state of Queensland for over twenty-five years and currently ineligible for parole. Despite a dedicated First Nations and international audience, Australian audiences make up a small percentage of the podcast’s listenership, and the makers have expressed frustration at its limited media attention and non-Indigenous engagement. Responding to this concern, I bring an orientation towards sound into conversation with important scholarship on the politics of listening, and draw on critical temporalities of slowness (Berlant, 2007; Puar 2018) and endurance (Povinelli, 2011), to explore the multiple ways 'just hearings' in relation to First Nations struggles for justice are stalled, protracted and foreclosed. In paying attention to what gets in the way, I make a critical manoeuvre to register the conditions of life and labour for both the makers and subjects of the podcast, and gesture towards an ethics of slow listening that refuses the logic of desire and consumption at the heart of the attention economy.

My colleague Professor Tanja Dreher and I will present a seminar on the politics of listening at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University

Full event details: https://www.vision6.com.au/em/message/email/view.php?id=1365036&u=77607&k=nMARNGQ5hizD1BNS5ZK2CdhgBRzRLNqOFZpgTLsq4iA

The politics of listening can shift responsibility for more just futures from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard in media. In this seminar we examine two recent innovations in First Nations media in order to sketch two key themes in the emerging scholarship on the politics of listening. 

First, we turn to the Twitter day of action, Indigenous Health May Day, in order to explore listening as a metaphor for political practice.  #IHMayDay invites non-Indigenous people to participate by listening to and amplifying First Nations voices within a decolonising framework which challenges deficit discourse. We then focus on sound in the Indigenous podcast Curtain, an ongoing investigative series centred on finding justice for Aboriginal man Kevin ‘Curtain’ Henry, and which examines Australia’s criminal justice system more broadly. Considering the intersection of listening aesthetics and ethics in Curtain, we explore the potential for ‘slow listening’ to disrupt neoliberal and settler-colonial temporalities and hierarchies of attention.

Taken together, we argue #IHMayDay and Curtain each encourage decolonised listening practices as routes to justice and more equitable futures, based in unsettling entrenched hierarchies of attention and catalysing new economies of voice. 

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Dr Tanja Dreher is an ARC Future Fellow, UNSW Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor in Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Tanja’s current research focuses on the politics of listening in response to community and activist media.  Tanja was a founding co-convenor of the Listening Project funded by the Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network (2008 - 2010) and is working on a monograph, Listening Across Difference: Media beyond the politics of voice. Tanja is visiting the centre during March to work with Poppy and Susan Forde.
 

Dr Poppy de Souza is an Adjunct Research Fellow with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University and a researcher with the University of Melbourne on the ARC Discovery project From Members to Leaders? Aboriginal Participation in Political Parties. Her scholarship critically engages with the ethics and politics of voice and listening in the context of changing media technologies, everyday cultural production, representational politics and political transformation, with a focus on sites of struggle, resistance and innovation.  Her work has been published in Media, Culture & Society and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

I will be presenting some of my research on acoustic violence, the 'white ear' and hearing racism at a roundtable workshop on Acoustic Justice at the Melbourne Law School, with scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the juridical dimensions of sound and listening and the acoustic dimensions of law and justice.

The event is organised by Dr James Parker, Institute for International Law and the Humanities
Melbourne Law School in conjunction with Mehera San Roque at UNSW Law.

On Saturday 15 July, as part of a series of events relating to acoustic justice, Liquid Architecture is hosting "A courtroom is not a gallery":

http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/program/acoustic-justice/

I will be presenting a conference paper at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 2016, taking place on December 14-17, Sydney. http://crossroads2016.org/

Title: What does injustice sound like? The dynamics of racism, acoustic violence and the booing of Adam Goodes

Abstract: At the height of public debate last year surrounding the sustained booing of Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes, mainstream media attention focused on whether this was, or was not, a display of racially motivated behaviour - with predictable responses from all sides. Amongst this cacophony of voices, two stood apart in identifying what we might call the 'acoustic violence' of systemic racism. To the untrained ear, distinguishing a ‘boo’ from a ‘boo’ may be difficult, but to those systematically exposed to its injurious effects, parsing this distinction can be a necessary act of survival. Taking as its starting point responses from Waleed Aly and Stan Grant expressed at the time, and drawing on Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s notion of ‘forensic listening’, this paper develops a political framework for listening beyond speech that challenges colonial power and the uneven distribution of attention in the context of Indigenous-settler relations and ongoing struggles for justice.

Conference paper presented as part of the two-day symposium "Tap, swipe, scan, submit! Interrogating Media Devices", 7-8 July 2016, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland.

Title: Reconstructing the ‘story of you’: listening and personal biometrics

Abstract: In recent years, listening has undergone a dramatic transformation. In this presentation I consider two emerging modes of listening – biometric and algorithmic listening – that epitomise how listening works in our post-convergent, post-Snowden, post-privacy moment. Increasingly deployed through highly technical and often obscure systems of regulation and control, these modes of listening are used to reconstruct the very stories and narrative accounts of ordinary citizens through the narrative order of their metadata. The ubiquity of personal digital devices like smartphones and wearable technologies extends these modes of listening into intimate realms. I consider how the rise and uptake of self-quantification and lifestyle monitoring devices expose users to biometric and algorithmic listening practices that mine and extract personal biometrics and aggregated metadata to reconstruct the ‘story of you’. 

SUN 18 Oct 2015
4pm-7pm
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Federation Square, Flinders St, Melbourne
FREE

About:

At Melbourne Festival, Liquid Architecture will present a series of audio documentaries from Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Aural Contract as a ‘live listening event’ in the cinema setting. THe event will also include talks by researchers James Parker and Poppy de Souza that will further develop themes around the politics of listening.

Poppy's talk will theorise "listening economies of extraction" and asks “how listening works, and what listening does, in our post-convergent, post-Snowden, post-privacy moment.”

Biographies:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan's (b. 1985, Amman, Jordan) work examines the contemporary politics of listening—its relationship to power, borders, human rights, testimony and truth—through the production of audio documentaries and essays, installations, sculpture, photography, and performance.

Dr James Parker is a lecturer at Melbourne Law School, where he is also director of the research program ‘Law, Sound and the International’ at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. James’ monograph  Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP, 2015) looks at the trial of Simon Bikindi, who was accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of inciting genocide with his songs. James' current research explores legal questions around the weaponisation of sound across three main sites: the battlefield, the torture chamber and the city. James is also an active music critic and radio broadcaster.

Poppy de Souza is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural practitioner who has worked in curatorial, educational, archival, community arts and academic contexts.  Both her research and practice are concerned with the politics of 'voice'.  Her work investigates the relationship between new assemblages of technology, everyday forms of cultural production, and the contemporary conditions of 'voice poverty'.  Poppy has recently completed her PhD "Beyond Voice Poverty: New Economies of Voice and the Frontiers of Speech, Listening and Recognition" through the University of Melbourne.

More details:

Melbourne Festival

Liquid Architecture