I will be presenting a paper at the 2019 Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA) conference in Brisbane in December.

Title: Dwelling in Discomfort: On the conditions of listening in settler colonial Australia

Authors: Poppy de Souza (Griffith University) and Tanja Dreher (UNSW)

Abstract:  In this paper, we explore the conditions of listening and being heard in settler colonial Australia, prompted by the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, to think through the politics and practices of listening required of non-Indigenous / settler Australians to register First Nations voices.  Extending Bickford’s (1006) work on political listening, and our own theorisation of located listening within a decolonial frame (Dreher and de Souza, 2018), we consider the ethical and affective dimensions – as well as the generative possibilities – of refusal, attunement, yielding and dwelling in discomfort.  We pay attention to how, as listening-oriented dispositions, they might prepare for a more contingent and ‘unsettled relationality’ (Bordreau Morris, 2017, 458), rather than one of settled residence, providing alternative possibilities for living together in the wake of colonisation with the sovereignty of First Nations people placed at its heart.