Tactical Soundwalking in the City: A Feminist Turn from Eye to Ear

The histories of walking in art are both male-dominated and visually oriented. This is most clearly expressed in the 19th century figure of the “flâneur.” Building on the history of both the flâneur and Guy Debord’s psychogeographic “dérive,” Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City,” published in 1980, suggests walking as a tactical act of resistance to the alienation of the modern city. While de Certeau begins his essay with a critique of visuality, or the scopic drive, he misses a crucial opportunity to move from eye to ear. In alliance with the sonic philosophy of Salomé Voegelin, this paper argues for listening as a mode that, counter to the objectifying uses to which visuality has culturally been put, offers a mode of engaging with the world that is relational, ecological, and feminist in orientation. Through a discussion of the practices of soundwalking and Deep Listening, and analysis of soundwalking projects by Suzanne Thorpe, Viv Corringham, and Amanda Gutierrez, a new story emerges about listening in public space as a tactical act.

This article draws on the research project Post-abortion narratives shared by Perth women via face-to-face interviews. The project was subsequently disrupted by the arrival of COVID-19 in Perth, Australia, making it necessary to conduct interviews via video call. The experience of using an online platform to conduct interviews became an opportunity to consider more carefully the practice of ‘deep listening’. This kind of listening involves creating an emotional connection with the participant so that the interviewer is able to hear multiple layers of meaning and context. It includes listening mixed with perception in which one can hear the emotions of the other. In a paradigm where the interview is seen as an interaction between two embodied individuals and the interviewer herself is the instrument of research, this article examines the communication that occurs in the space between two co-present, embodied individuals and explicates the practice of deep listening. While interviewing via video call is an excellent tool, I argue that a layer of meaning is removed by the technological medium, which impacts the researcher relationship and thus the ability to listen deeply.

Young women who use violence in their interpersonal, family, and domestic relationships commonly exist as a cross-over cohort, simultaneously victims and perpetrators, characteristically disadvantaged and disengaged and lacking accessible trauma-informed and culturally responsive interventions. This paper presents cross-cultural reflections on work with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young women who use violence. It explores the tensions in this work of honouring histories and context and acknowledging female agency, choice and control. Informed by Yarning processes, the paper intentionally foregrounds Aboriginal knowledge and experience. In doing so, it highlights the power and potential of Deep Listening and relational practice for recognising the impact(s) of trauma resulting from intergenerational intersections of gendered oppression, structural racism, and social inequalities as drivers of female violence. IMPLICATIONS Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing have important contributions to make to practice with young female perpetrators of violence Deep Listening and relational approaches can support safety and connection necessary for healing, change, and growth.

IntroductionThis essay considers three design projects as microprotests. Reflecting on the ways design practice can generate spaces, sites and methods of protest, we use the concept of microprotest to consider how we, as designers ourselves, can protest by scaling down, focussing, slowing down and paying attention to the edges of our practice. Design microprotest is a form of design activism that is always collaborative, takes place within a community, and involves careful translation of a political conversation. While microprotest can manifest in any design discipline, in this essay we focus on visual communication design. In particular we consider the deep, reflexive practice of listening as the foundation of microprotests in visual communication design.While small in scale and fleeting in duration, these projects express rich and deep political engagements through conversations that create and maintain safe spaces. While many design theorists (Julier; Fuad-Luke; Clarke; Irwin et al.) have done important work to contextualise activist design as a broad movement with overlapping branches (social design, community design, eco-design, participatory design, critical design, and transition design etc.), the scope of our study takes ‘micro’ as a starting point. We focus on the kind of activism that takes shape in moments of careful design; these are moments when designers move politically, rather than necessarily within political movements. These microprotests respond to community needs through design more than they articulate a broad activist design movement. As such, the impacts of these microprotests often go unnoticed outside of the communities within which they take place. We propose, and test in this essay, a mode of analysis for design microprotests that takes design activism as a starting point but pays more attention to community and translation than designers and their global reach.In his analysis of design activism, Julier proposes “four possible conceptual tactics for the activist designer that are also to be found in particular qualities in the mainstream design culture and economy” (Julier, Introduction 149). We use two of these tactics to begin exploring a selection of attributes common to design microprotests: temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, progress and incompletion are dealt with; and territorialisation – which describes the scale at which responsibility and impact is conceived (227). In each of three projects to which we apply these tactics, one of us had a role as a visual communicator. As such, the research is framed by the knowledge creating paradigm described by Jonas as “research through design”.We also draw on other conceptualisations of design activism, and the rich design literature that has emerged in recent times to challenge the colonial legacies of design studies (Schultz; Tristan et al.; Escobar). Some analyses of design activism already focus on the micro or the minor. For example, in their design of social change within organisations as an experimental and iterative process, Lensjkold, Olander and Hasse refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian: “minor design activism is ‘a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation” (67). Like minor activism, design microprotests are linked to the continuous mobilisation of actors and networks in processes of collective experimentation. However microprotests do not necessarily focus on organisational change. Rather, they create new (and often tiny) spaces of protest within which new voices can be heard and different kinds of listening can be done.In the first of our three cases, we discuss a representation of transdisciplinary listening. This piece of visual communication is a design microprotest in itself. This section helps to frame what we mean by a safe space by paying attention to the listening mode of communication. In the next sections we explore temporality and territorialisation through the design microprotests Just Spaces which documents the collective imagining of safe places for LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer) women and non-binary identities through a series of graphic objects and Conversation Piece, a book written, designed and published over three days as a proposition for a collective future. A Representation of Transdisciplinary ListeningThe design artefact we present in this section is a representation of listening and can be understood as a microprotest emerging from a collective experiment that materialises firstly as a visual document asking questions of the visual communication discipline and its role in a research collaboration and also as a mirror for the interdisciplinary team to reflexively develop transdisciplinary perspectives on the risks associated with the release of environmental flows in the upper reaches of Hawkesbury Nepean River in NSW, Australia. This research project was funded through a Challenge Grant Scheme to encourage transdisciplinarity within the University. The project team worked with the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment Management Authority in response to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? Listening and visual communication design practice are inescapably linked. Renown American graphic designer and activist Sheila de Bretteville describes a consciousness and a commitment to listening as an openness, rather than antagonism and argument. Fiumara describes listening as nascent or an emerging skill and points to listening as the antithesis of the Western culture of saying and expression.For a visual communication designer there is a very specific listening that can be described as visual hearing. This practice materialises the act of hearing through a visualisation of the information or knowledge that is shared. This act of visual hearing is a performative process tracing the actors’ perspectives. This tracing is used as content, which is then translated into a transcultural representation constituted by the designerly act of perceiving multiple perspectives. The interpretation contributes to a shared project of transdisciplinary understanding.This transrepresentation (Fig. 1) is a manifestation of a small interaction among a research team comprised of a water engineer, sustainable governance researcher, water resource management researcher, environmental economist and a designer. This visualisation is a materialisation of a structured conversation in response to the question What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? It represents a small contribution that provides an opportunity for reflexivity and documents a moment in time in response to a significant challenge. In this translation of a conversation as a visual representation, a design microprotest is made against reduction, simplification, antagonism and argument. This may seem intangible, but as a protest through design, “it involves the development of artifacts that exist in real time and space, it is situated within everyday contexts and processes of social and economic life” (Julier 226). This representation locates conversation in a visual order that responds to particular categorisations of the political, the institutional, the socio-economic and the physical in a transdisciplinary process that focusses on multiple perspectives.Figure 1: Transrepresentation of responses by an interdisciplinary research team to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows in the Upper Hawkesbury Nepean River? (2006) Just Spaces: Translating Safe SpacesListening is the foundation of design microprotest. Just Spaces emerged out of a collaborative listening project It’s OK! An Anthology of LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual and Queer) Women’s and Non-Binary Identities’ Stories and Advice. By visually communicating the way a community practices supportive listening (both in a physical form as a book and as an online resource), It’s OK! opens conversations about how LBPQ women and non-binary identities can imagine and help facilitate safe spaces. These conversations led to thinking about the effects of breaches of safe spaces on young LBPQ women and non-binary identities. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed presents Queer Feelings as a new way of thinking about Queer bodies and the way they use and impress upon space. She makes an argument for creating and imagining new ways of creating and navigating public and private spaces. As a design microprotest, Just Spaces opens up Queer ways of navigating space through a process Ahmed describes as “the ‘non-fitting’ or discomfort .... an opening up which can be difficult and exciting” (Ahmed 154). Just Spaces is a series of workshops, translated into a graphic design object, and presented at an exhibition in the stairwell of the library at the University of Technology Sydney. It protests the requirement of navigating heteronormative environments by suggesting ‘Queer’ ways of being in and designing in space. The work offers solutions, suggestions, and new ways of doing and making by offering design methods as tools of microprotest to its participants. For instance, Just Spaces provides a framework for sensitive translation, through the introduction of a structure that helps build personas based on the game Dungeons and Dragons (a game popular among certain LGBTQIA+ communities in Sydney). Figure 2: Exhibition: Just Spaces, held at UTS Library from 5 to 27 April 2018. By focussing the design process on deep listening and rendering voices into visual translations, these workshops responded to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s idea of the “outsider within”, articulating the way research should be navigated in vulnerable groups that have a history of being exploited as part of research. Through reciprocity and generosity, trust was generated in

ABSTRACTWithin social work education, contemplative practices are a way of improving and supporting positive student development while providing a holistic educational experience. Contemplative practices assist students in developing valuable coping skills and self-regulation, while also teaching techniques for stress reduction. This article begins with an introduction to contemplative practices and then specifically discusses the contemplative practices of mindfulness, meditation, yoga, deep listening and free writing, some of which are more prevalent and established within social work education than others. Definitions, uses and empirical evidence within social work and higher education are offered throughout. Finally, implications for teaching, as well as challenges to integrating contemplative practices within social work education are discussed.

Numerous researchers and educators have identified musical improvisation as a strategy with significant benefits for musical learning. Nevertheless, many educators are reluctant to use it due to insufficient preparation and skills. This study aims to assess the impact of a training programme designed to equip future teachers with tools and resources related to free or non-idiomatic improvisation. A single-factor within-subjects design with repeated pre-post measures was employed, involving 36 students from a bachelor's degree in elementary education. Two questionnaires were administered, and three focus groups were conducted. The findings revealed: (1) a reduction in emotional discomfort and an increase in confidence and group cohesion; (2) a greater openness and inclination towards practices of exploration, experimentation, and deep listening; and (3) a shift from a traditionalist view of music to a stronger connection with contemporary music. These results underscore the necessity of further integrating improvisation into initial teacher training.

How academics understand and attend to their practices of collaborative writing is a significant issue for these pandemic times of multiple demands, pivoting, research engagement, and output. In this chapter, we focus on our writing collaboration that is located in cafes. With the visual and poetic narrative inquiry practices of our collaboration presented, we focus this table chat on our practices in academia, the connections made through and with interdisciplinary academic ways of being, and ways of connecting. We consider the community space of the cafe that scaffolds care, and careful thoughtfulness of wellbeing through embodying practices of openness, deep listening, and vulnerability. We think through the academic space where one has an engaged voice in the sense-making of practice, matter and affect. We are thinking through this notion, locally, in this first year of COVID-19, to make sense, to enact self-care and for the joy that our collaboration brings.

Reviewed by: Telepathic Improvisation (2017) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (Boudry/Lorenz) Farrah O’Shea TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION (2017). By Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (Boudry/Lorenz). Witch Hunt, Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. October 22, 2021. Entering a small, unlit room with black walls and carpet, audience members hovered around the edges of a short black stage at the Hammer Museum to view the film installation, Telepathic Improvisation (2017) by artist duo Boudry/Lorenz, known for installations that reimagine normative approaches to historical narratives and spectatorship. With its own dimly lit stage, the world of the film mimics the dark walls and floors of the installation space, thinning the boundary between the audience and the film and setting the stage for an experiment in telepathy. To begin the film, which is looped, a performer (Marwa Arsanios) dressed in a vermilion jumpsuit walks to the center of the stage, which is bare and set to look like the backstage of a production. Arsanios—an artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose work concerns gender relations, collectivism, urbanism, and industrialization—is framed by a line of downstage lights, a guitar, and a white motorized unit. Looking into the camera, she addresses the installation’s audience: “You are attempting inter-group, or interstellar telepathic transmission, following the 1974 score, Telepathic Improvisation by Pauline Oliveros.” While she is speaking, performance artist MPA, whose work explores how the social and the political impact the body; Ginger Brooks Takahashi, who creates collaborative project-based feminist and queer works; and Werner Hirsch, a freelance artist, dancer, and drag performer (sometimes also known as Prince Greenhorn or Antonia Baehr) walk on set, dressed in shades of red and white, with Arsanios and MPA in jumpsuits. Audience members are instructed to close their eyes and telepathically send actions to the performers, which include the four human beings as well as the guitar, lights, and motorized units. When the performers receive the action, they enact it. To illustrate that actions are being sent to and received by nonhuman subjects, onscreen stage lights flicker [End Page 370] as though receiving messages, and two motorized platforms suggest independence, at one point pushing a performer onto the screen. As audience members recognize the action they sent onstage, they are to raise an arm, completing the exchange. With this choreography, present-day audience members interact with performers filmed five years ago, activating the installation through a reification of the film’s promise of telepathic exchange. Click for larger view View full resolution Witch Hunt, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 10, 2021–January 9, 2022: Marwa Arsanios, Werner Hirsch, MPA, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi in Telepathic Improvisation (2017). (Photo: Jeff McClane.) On several occasions during the piece’s run at the Hammer, although not when I attended, MPA appeared in person wearing a red jumpsuit and matching face mask. This visual reference to the COVID-19 pandemic contemporized the film, further connecting it to the installation audience. Moving around, sitting, or lying on a short lighted stage, MPA interacted with the film and a new sound-scape written by Rashad Becker for the Hammer installation. In MPA’s absence, the stage was both a reminder of past performances and those yet to happen. Somehow incomplete, the stage served to connect to the visual, darkened aesthetic of the film while suggesting a reality that was partial and not yet realized. Thus telepathy was construed as an exercise that invites engagement with the past meant to inspire action in the future. The stasis of the present moment, indicated by the vacant, darkened stage, served as a call to action, a reminder of political work yet to be done. In the 1974 performance score from which Telepathic Improvisation takes its name and cue, the late composer/performer Pauline Oliveros deconstructs the boundaries between audience and performer. Through the collective practice of group listening, what she calls “deep listening,” a practice meant to connect its participants to one another and the environment, Oliveros asks the audience to imagine sounds and manifest them as part of a group. Boudry/Lorenz take this practice a step further, engaging multiple dimensions by inviting an intergroup, interstellar...

This article aims to explore how the theoretical and pedagogical intersections of sonic art and creative oral history may work together to enhance the public response of socially engaged, interdisciplinary artwork. The main topics of discussion will include Panos Amelides’s paper ‘Acousmatic Storytelling’, the socio theoretical approach suggested by Salome Voegelin in her paper ‘Sonic Memory Material as “Pathetic Trigger”’, the behavioral study from the oral history sound installation by Dr Luis Sotelo Castro called Not Being Able to Speak is Torture, and the Deep Listening and Sonic Meditation practices and teachings of Pauline Oliveros, as well as compositions by Yves Daoust, Hildegard Westerkamp and Trevor Wishart. One consistent theme revealed through these investigations was that socially engaged, aurally focused artwork informed and woven by familiar and documented ‘life’ sounds or nostalgic sound events increases emotional triggers for the audience, creating a deeper engagement with the art piece or performance. Furthermore, an informed and host-led directive encouraging participatory and attentive listening through either meditation or discussion increases audience reception and takeaway, thus inspiring and unifying mass group empathy. This article suggests that the application of these techniques by electroacoustic composers, sonic artists, oral historians and interdisciplinary artists will create informed, passionate and empathetic listening spaces that live beyond the insular, creative experience itself.

When I was twelve years old, I attended a routine school posture screening. Following an orthopaedic examination, I was diagnosed with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. Although it turned out for me that it was not a serious and progressive form of scoliosis, the diagnosis impacted my life in a disabling way, resulting in feelings of fear, anxiety, and losing a sense of trust in my own body. I experienced bodily doubt. This was also accompanied by me negatively objectifying my body. This article is an evocative autoethnography presenting my personal story of experiencing a medical diagnosis of scoliosis. The health of my spine was evaluated purely by comparison to a desired aesthetical straight line. The way I felt in my body was never taken into consideration during this process. It is also a story of finding my own ways of healing, which was possible through engaging in dance and somatic practices. They allowed me to experience my body as a living subject – a soma. I was able to find ways to positively objectify my body through practices of deep body listening and developing greater bodily awareness. My healing was also connected to re-gaining a sense of bodily certainty and trust, through experiencing moments of wholeness in spontaneous expressive self-movement. Dance is also vital in my story. The personal evolution of approaching dance presents a healing potential of this art, allowing for the conscious, expressive, and therapeutic nature of the living body to be unveiled.

The article deals with concepts proposed by Sándor Ferenczi: confusion of tongues, disavowal and progressive trauma, illustrated by a clinical example, in which excessive life experiences deeply determined the psychic construction, compromising the integrity of the self-image and the potentiality of egoic capacities. We attempt to understand the uniqueness of the patient's history, and the ethical practice of deep analytic listening.

In 2018 I was appointed to the position of Glasgow’s first UNESCO City of Music artist-in-residence. Over the course of a year I worked with numerous community groups and choirs across the city to collaboratively devise and realise a new choral/film work, titled Åčçëñtß, which was performed by an audience of over three hundred and fifty people at its premiere at the Glasgow Royal Concert Halls in 2019. Åčçëñtß explores accents as a sonorous social matter – staccatos and lilts, patterns of difference in our voices, as sonic markers of place and community – sounds that I have come to understand as resonating between our individual and collective identities. This paper presents some of the thoery orientating my compositional praxis, speaking nearby a reflective account of some of the compositional considerations and processes undertaken through the project. Through it I explore Karen Barad’s methodology of diffractive thought, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of speaking nearby within the interval, Pauline Oliveros’ practice of Deep Listening, thinking towards how these might meet through my praxis to come close to Timothy Corrigan’s Refractive Cinema. Åčçëñtß speaks to the complexity of authorship and agency in distributed, collaborative composition and the motive relationships between sound and image, spectacle and spectator – between the individual and the communal.

The concept of compassionate presence is relatively new within clinical care, unlike the term compassion. Compassionate presence is a unique subset of compassionate care. It refers to the contemplative aspect of our relationship with patients. While compassionate care can involve empathy, forming connections, helping patients with issues, being respectful, caring, and so forth, compassionate presence calls upon a unique set of skills in which the clinician moves to a more reflective and contemplative space with the patient. In 2009, George Washington University's Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish) held a consensus conference on competencies in spirituality and health education using the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies for medical residency education as the framework. Specific communication behaviors for compassionate presence include the practice of deep listening, curious inquiry, perceptive reflections, the use of silence in patient communication, and assessing for spiritual distress.

The “critical ear” is a concept crossing ideas of “technical listening” and “ear cleaning”. It was first presented as a workshop (Synth Library Prague, July 2024) dedicated to listening in its manifolds and complexities. It discussed our sonic environment and the several contexts in which listening takes place. Based on exercises that train frequency recognition, for example, how can we recognise that content in our mundane soundscape? In that sense, these exercises take a very pragmatic perspective, aiming at identifying frequencies and acoustic phenomena out-in-the-world. These comprise a basic relationship with sound, that of spatial acoustics, but at the same time, it adopts practices of deep listening and sound healing, towards the poetics of listening. The critical ear reflects the author’s practice endeavour: a constant sway between a technical understanding of sound and a socio-political reflection on being a listener.

Reviewed by: Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words by Frederick Bianchi and V. J. Manzo Ely Lyonblum Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words. By Frederick Bianchi and V. J. Manzo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. [xxvii, 204 p. ISBN 9780190234614 (hardback), $105; ISBN 9780190234621 (paperback), $36.95; ISBN 9780190234645 (e-book), varies.] Figures, tables, illustrations, index. The concept of the "soundscape" received its language from R. Murray Schafer's Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977; 2nd ed., The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World [Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994]). And yet much of contemporary sound art eschews the term soundscape in favor of language that is less lauded with polemical notions of sacred versus vulgar sounds. Experimental musical practices that incorporated environmental sounds were further explored by Pauline Oliveros, who was famous for her practice of deep listening and a holistic approach to composition that drew from elements of the environment. Uniquely, sound art has developed across sectors in radio, film, anthropology, music studies, and media arts. Accordingly, writing about sound studies effectively is writing from an interdisciplinary network that values creativity and critique equally. Bringing together perspectives of those who might count themselves as sound-studies [End Page 109] scholars demonstrates the wide scope of research and practice present in the field. With this in mind, Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is a text that is long overdue. While many studies in performance and media arts engage with creative practitioners of the field through interviews, Bianchi and Manzo take a more traditional, academic approach—only in form, not in content—and have the artists write for themselves to great effect. The text begins with a primer on sound art and environment that is especially useful for those unfamiliar with the featured authors' work. The editors deserve praise for their careful selection of contributors, from commonly referenced artist–researchers such as John Luther Adams, Ximena Alarcón, Christopher DiLaurenti, Bernie Krause, and Andrea Polli, to those sound artists whose nascent work shows great promise. Many of these short essays assume a similar structure, making the diversity of their research more easily readable. The authors identify their disciplinary or professional training and offer strategies for approaching subjects through sound—in some instances the very subject they aim to address. References to influences of their practice provide clues to the diverse nature of environmental sound art and a wide scholarly web of practices, many of which began as wildly experimental and are now common in the university classroom. (Marcel Duchamp and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are cited as examples.) Some authors reflect on their site-specific installations (Luther Adams's The Place Where You Go to Listen and China Blue's Negative Ellipse); Polli and Marty Quinn dissect the subject of environmental sound as data; and Bruce Odland, Alarcon, and Zimoun explore listening as sensory studies of place. As they approach these topics, the tone of the text vacillates between academic critique and personal commentary. This balance of writing in sound studies is especially critical in order to create space where scholars and artists can meaningfully exchange knowledge concerning their respective practices. More interesting, however, are the scholars' insights into the creation of their research. Throughout their many essays, the authors avoid the common trap of discussing sound art in strictly musical terms or with subjective linguistic vernaculars that are so unfamiliar to music studies that readers are left without a point of reference. This book joins the company of a small but quickly growing collection of texts concerning sound artists. Angus Carlyle and Cathy Lane, in their In the Field: The Art of Field Recording (Axminister, UK: Uniformbooks, 2013), use a series of interviews with artists and scholars to conduct historical research and review the current landscape of field-recording practice. Throughout, the authors examine field recording as the basis for new approaches to sound art, documentary, and music production. Another notable addition to the sound studies library is Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), which provides readers with a wide view of the field, including words in use by artists...