Voices Of Others Research Articles

Traces of mobility in the landscape: creative possibilities of everyday heritage practice

This photo essay explores the notion of heritage landscaping as a creative space of radical possibility. In attempting to go beyond a ‘critical heritage examination’ of an iconic heritage artefact, the paper explores how transient traces of ongoing and situated practices of heritage landscaping might provide a means of commons possibility, as an open and inclusive space of sociality. Making room for temporal and spatial complexity and the voices of others, the paper sketches how radical landscape nostalgia might provide the basis for a form of heritage activism that can both critique existing dimensions of power and sketch a space of creative possibility for societal transformation.

Diabetes, Insulin & Politics: 28 Years of Stigma, Innovation, and Ableism

ABSTRACT Nearly 3 decades after my type 1 diabetes diagnosis, I wrote this essay to document my journey. Through childhood and teen years where I experienced emotional abuse in clinic and felt the deepest of fears. Then in college, when I realized my voice mattered and I could elevate the voices of others with diabetes. During grad school, I began meeting with legislators and understanding how health policy works. I am now a health psychologist focused on improving health equity for people with diabetes and disabilities. Importantly, my research findings highlight how the U.S. medical system is not equipped to support people with diabetes. In this essay I also highlight key people in the diabetes and disability community who have served as lighthouses on my journey and continue to shine light across my path.

From toxic bonds to healing relationships. A journey through group analytic theory and practice

The essentials of therapeutic practice in group analysis are summarised through three basic principles. The conductor is responsible for fostering a climate that allows each of a group’s members to find their own voice; bear witness to the voices of others; and come out of the shadows together through the group’s discourse. These principles are built on the author’s earlier writing about the speech, silence, and the language of the group which can make a home amongst strangers. They are framed in the ordinary language of daily experience and the parallel idiom of musicology to address the most primary of musical instruments—the voice. They incorporate of a range of other terms and concepts that bring our attention to core complexities at the heart of many peoples’ deepest sources of disquiet arising out of unresolved intergenerational trauma. The group’s work is akin to a mourning process set in motion for hitherto unacknowledged grief. Disturbance can move about unpredictably. Our challenge is to locate and translate hidden, buried or displaced injury into the everyday language of human suffering where seeds can be sown for resolution. This multi-modal presentation is illustrated with clinical vignettes from groups at work and with collage and paintings. It opens with a Paul McCartney song, ‘Blackbird’ (1968), whose music and lyrics give historical significance to the struggle for human rights. Its closing vignettes explore ‘tools for conviviality’ with images of lost and found brotherhood and a spontaneous online ceremony of eating together in China. The paintings of Morris Nitsun bring us to an ultimate agency for change generated by small groups—the shifting mood-scape of their dynamic life. One image conveys the tragedy and desolation of the pandemic, and another offers the natural world’s consolation in beauty.

To Speak with the Other—To Let the Other Speak: Paul Celan’s Poetry and the Hermeneutical Challenge of Mitsprechen

This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or “with-speaking” in Paul Celan’s poetry. “With-speaking” supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan’s notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of dialogue, challenges the separation between author and interpreter, rendering the traditional concept of intertextuality inadequate. The poems, according to Celan, give voice to human destinies, making texts audible as the voices of others. This vocal dimension of Celan’s poetry has prompted extensive discussion among philosophers, particularly in France. Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, influenced by German phenomenology and hermeneutics, critically examine the ethical implications of speaking “about” the other. They challenge traditional hermeneutical practices, emphasizing the responsibility of interpreters to respect the unique and untranslatable character of individual voices. This critique extends to Protestant categories of interpretation, drawing on alternative Jewish perspectives on being-in-the-world and alterity. The text explores the tensions inherent in speaking “for” or “in the name of” others, especially in the context of interpreting Celan’s work, raising questions about maintaining the fundamental difference and distance that otherness implies. The discussion concludes by highlighting Werner Hamacher’s formulation of a new philology that disrupts hermeneutical violence, influenced by the critiques of Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, and offering an alternative way of addressing the particular challenges posed by Celan’s poetry.

As pessoas que passavam xingavam ela de “macaca”: as facetas do racismo em textos infantis

Abstract How do public school students represent manifestations of racism in texts? Through the analysis of polyphony, we scrutinized the nuances of racial prejudice in personal accounts of sixth-year students from a public school. Considering the speaker's division allowed us to see how racism appears in the words of children aged 10 to 12 years. Racial insults were the main marks of the racism reported. However, it appears never in the voice of the narrator of the text, but always in the voice of other enunciators. We noticed that children judge racist manifestations wrong, censoring their occurrence. However, such manifestations are included in the voices of others incorporated in the texts. We conclude that the Polyphonic Theory of Enunciation is a useful tool to deepen the understanding of racist discourse.

Reading in Uncertain Times

Reading in Uncertain Times

Dialogue and the micro-processes of founder meaning-making during growth

This article draws upon dialogic theory to explore how meaning is co-constructed in dialogue as founding entrepreneurs devise strategies for venture growth. Drawing from a longitudinal study of the impact of a UK University business growth programme upon such strategies, we identify ways in which dialogue influences the meanings attributed to the adoption of, or resistance to, growth strategies. ‘Productive’ dialogue emerging from a diverse range of relevant voices encouraged founders to reflect upon the meanings given to current growth initiatives whilst devising future strategies. Conversely, founders could use ‘degenerative’ dialogue to block the voices of others in order to resist change and protect existing meanings. We contribute to debate by utilising dialogic theory as a conceptual tool to illustrate how business growth programmes shape the meanings founders apply to embrace, or resist strategic change, to effect venture growth.

Rendezvous

The pandemic returned me to photography. It heightened my awareness of movement. In common with many others, during lockdown, I took to walking, increasingly, in my case, with camera in hand. When lockdown lifted, it was Paris that I was drawn to. In a city such as Paris, one of the consequences of the pandemic was a re-enchantment of public spaces. If the lockdown prevented indoor encounters, the public park became a scene of meeting. A sharing of light and shadow. no longer not yet is a response to my encounter with the chairs as I walked in the parks: empty, clustered together in pairs and groups, abandoned at random or carefully arranged, they came to seem like the ghostly traces of a series of meetings that I was either too late or too early to witness. These chairs marked the dehiscence of the present moment; the no longer and the not yet. Who sat here? Who will sit here? Why? What desires filled the empty spaces? The chair is both open and indifferent to such questions, even as they in turn become the prompt to a desire for narratives that might give form to these hauntological meetings. Between documentation and imagination. The photographs and text here are mine, although there are traces of the voices of others, just as there are traces of meeting. The photograph shadows forth that which is no longer there. It produces ghosts, even if they cannot be seen or heard within the frame. The clusterings of words and images gathering here are part of a sequence continuing.

Audiovisual speech perception: Moving beyond McGurk

Although it is clear that sighted listeners use both auditory and visual cues during speech perception, the manner in which multisensory information is combined is a matter of debate. One approach to measuring multisensory integration is to use variants of the McGurk illusion, in which discrepant auditory and visual cues produce auditory percepts that differ from those based on unimodal input. Not all listeners show the same degree of susceptibility to the McGurk illusion, and these individual differences are frequently used as a measure of audiovisual integration ability. However, despite their popularity, we join the voices of others in the field to argue that McGurk tasks are ill-suited for studying real-life multisensory speech perception: McGurk stimuli are often based on isolated syllables (which are rare in conversations) and necessarily rely on audiovisual incongruence that does not occur naturally. Furthermore, recent data show that susceptibility to McGurk tasks does not correlate with performance during natural audiovisual speech perception. Although the McGurk effect is a fascinating illusion, truly understanding the combined use of auditory and visual information during speech perception requires tasks that more closely resemble everyday communication: namely, words, sentences, and narratives with congruent auditory and visual speech cues.

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

La escritura fonoautográfica de Rodolfo Walsh: la grabadora y la disputa por la voz obrera en ¿Quién mató a Rosendo?

Most of the literary criticism has pointed out the importance of inscribing the voices of others or giving voice to others in Rodolfo Walsh’s writing. However, the material and technological conditions under which those voices appear in his texts have been scarcely addressed. In this essay I delve into sound studies to explore the uses of the tape recorder in the writing of ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969). I propose the notion of a phonoautographic writing to refer to a textual practice conceived as a transcription of voices. The article analyzes the phonoautographic writing in ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? and explores how the tape recorder allowed Walsh to incorporate and manipulate the voices of his working-class characters. My argument is that Walsh used the tape recorder to register the workers’ voices in order to rearticulate in a personal way the sonic legacy of Peronism in the late 60s, a moment of crisis in the representation of the Argentine labor movement.

The own-voice benefit for word recognition in early bilinguals.

The current study examines the self-voice benefit in an early bilingual population. Female Cantonese–English bilinguals produced words containing Cantonese contrasts. A subset of these minimal pairs was selected as stimuli for a perception task. Speakers’ productions were grouped according to how acoustically contrastive their pronunciation of each minimal pair was and these groupings were used to design personalized experiments for each participant, featuring their own voice and the voices of others’ similarly-contrastive tokens. The perception task was a two-alternative forced-choice word identification paradigm in which participants heard isolated Cantonese words, which had undergone synthesis to mask the original talker identity. Listeners were more accurate in recognizing minimal pairs produced in their own (disguised) voice than recognizing the realizations of speakers who maintain similar degrees of phonetic contrast for the same minimal pairs. Generally, individuals with larger phonetic contrasts were also more accurate in word identification for self and other voices overall. These results provide evidence for an own-voice benefit for early bilinguals. These results suggest that the phonetic distributions that undergird phonological contrasts are heavily shaped by one’s own phonetic realizations.

Assessing anti-racist resources online

Examining the response of a library during a tumultuous period not only provides insight about the library’s past, but also allows the library to improve its actions to better serve its communities in the future. The summer of 2020 marked such a period in American history. Amidst the cries for systemic change following the murder of George Floyd, the social media profiles of individuals and organizations alike–including academic libraries–flooded with anti-racist reading lists, informational articles, webinars, and other such educational materials. How do we qualify these resources? How do we understand the roles that academic libraries play in this resource sharing, and how do we use that information to assess their involvement? Building upon Dr. Bharat Mehra and Dr. Rebecca Davis’ (2015) Strategic Diversity Manifesto, this talk describes the beginning of a project meant to determine how academic libraries can examine their online presences: where and how they have raised their voices, incorporated the voices of others, or stayed silent.

An innovative research approach for inclusion studies for those with Traumatic Brain Injury

Students with traumatic brain injury (TBI) are often marginalized in terms of participation in higher education because of an implicit association of TBI with less academic functioning. The first named author is a Ph.D. scholar who aimed to add her voice to the voices of others and examine the lived experience of students with the same condition to identify possible supports that would enhance inclusion in higher education. This research was driven by the desire to illuminate both the hidden nuances of personal experience (hence the use of autoethnography) and to highlight the lack of research about educational participation of TBI survivors. The analysis was from both professional and personal perspectives. Through an examination via an iterative and interconnected research process, the authors explored the question, what are the supports for participation and access for students with TBI in higher education considering the first author’s experiences. Traditional research might provide generalizable data but may not facilitate deep illumination of experience and voice. This examination transcended traditional research and comprised autoethnographic and interview-based inquiry. It challenged the research team to consider different perspectives and to interrogate their own interconnections in the same engagement while working towards the same goal. The concept of transmethodology will be discussed regarding the development of multiple perspectives that can assist in transgressing the common divisions in the theory and practice divide and explores knowledge of marginalization regarding participation for students with TBI. This paper argues for the importance of innovations such as transmethodology when researching deeply personal phenomena.

Mixed Speak

This short piece addresses the challenges of being biracial and finding your own voice while listening to the conflicting voices of others: parents, grandparents, friends, mentors, teachers, coaches. I had two constraints while writing this: one, I had to emulate Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl,” where a mother teaches her daughter how to be a respectable girl and not “the slut you are so bent on becoming”; and two, I had to develop this for a high school literature assignment while studying remotely during New York’s pandemic lockdown. I had no “in-person” communication other than with my immediate family, which made it even harder to find one’s own voice: you need the voices of others in order to distinguish yours from theirs. I wondered: what is sound--music? vibrations? noise? everyday sounds? silence? Will silence always protect you?

Gender context modulation on the self-enhancement effect of vocal attractiveness evaluation.

People evaluated their own voices as sounding more attractive than others rated their voices (i.e., self-enhancement effect from the perspective of the rater, termed "SE_rater"), and people also rated their own voices as more attractive than the voices of others (i.e., self-enhancement effect from the perspective of the voice, termed "SE_voice"). The aim of the present study is to explore whether the gender context (i.e., same-sex and opposite-sex rating context) could influence the SE effect of voice attractiveness evaluation. Male and female participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of their own voices and other participants' voices, either in a same-sex session or an opposite-sex session. The results demonstrated both the SE_rater and SE_voice effect in the same-sex and opposite-sex contexts, for both male and female. More importantly, we found that the SE_rater for the male voices was significantly greater than that for the female voices in the same-sex context whereas no such difference was found in the opposite-sex context. In addition, the SE_voice effect in men was larger in the same-sex context than that in the opposite-sex context whereas the SE_voice in women was smaller in the same-sex context than that in the opposite-sex context. These findings indicated that the self-enhancement effect of vocal attractiveness was modulated by the gender context.

Conversations about structural racism are uncomfortable. That’s the point.

Conversations about structural racism are uncomfortable. That’s the point.

The Return of the Barbarians and the Colonial Order of the Archive

Cavafy's barbarians constitute a peculiar metaphor for the (self-)censoring process of revealing and hiding the voices of Others in the colonial order of the archive. The theme recurs in three of his works—an “unwritten” poem, a “hidden” poem, and a poem included in the canon—all of which reflect Cavafy's engagement with British colonialism in Egypt. The novelist and critic Stratis Tsirkas, also a Greek who grew up in Egypt, has argued that Cavafy's rising aversion to the British occupation regime developed alongside the shifting ideological lines of the Hellenic diaspora, as expressed by its dominant segment. Drawing upon Tsirkas's readings of the poems, we can revisit the poet's archive as a kind of “taxonomy in the making” where colonial reality is inscribed. In addition, Cavafy's “recording” of the hidden material allows us to reframe our readings of his canonical poems.

Evaluating capital assets in governing protected area co-management in the Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary, Bangladesh

Co-management in the Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary was evaluated to assess how fairly capital assets were considered in the beneficiary selection, and to what extent it affected vegetation cover. A semi-structured questionnaire survey was employed to collect necessary information along with satellite images. The study revealed that many variables of social capital and a few variables of natural and financial capital played a significant role in the participant selection process. Analysis of dependency showed that the participants did not rely significantly on the forest both in terms of resource collection and their monetary value implying that the most dependent people were not adequately represented in the co-management team. The dominance of local leaders suppressed the voices of others in the management venture. An increase in forest vegetation cover was observed during the project period, although shortly after the end of co-management projects a slight deterioration of forest cover was noted. The findings of the study can serve as a guide in the future application of community forestry programmes in protected areas of Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world within similar socio-physiographic settings.

Philosophical chemistry: what the alchemy of Gadamer And Aristotle brings to leisure studies

ABSTRACT In this research note I argue that leisure has rarely been studied using hermeneutic philosophy and phenomenology. Yet hermeneutic philosophy offers a richly realised, empathic philosophy of egalitarian communication, anchored in respect and openness. In hermeneutic philosophy language is pre-eminent for expressing the meanings of our life experiences and how we understand them. I suggest that hermeneutic philosophy and phenomenology, entwined with Aristotle’s concept of leisure together forge a potent approach for studying and interpreting leisure meanings. Moreover, it has often been asked whether hewing to Western-centric philosophies in the unfolding of leisure meanings of people of other cultures has relevance or is appropriate. I propose that in holding to Aristotle’s holistic understanding of leisure as essential for human thriving we may come closer to more receptively hearing and understanding the voices of others when they share with us what is fulfilling and meaningful in their leisure. Therefore, I propose that the embrace of leisure as a philosophy of thriving and flourishing, entwined with a hermeneutical phenomenological approach to understanding being through language, affords a heady alchemy of philosophically forged tools for guiding leisure studies in exploring the ontological, lived experiences of leisure.