Listening in the Commons: Community Media Projects and the Reinvention of Education

• In Event: 29.028 - Participatory Media as Intervention and Method

Abstract

Following Dolby’s (2012) critique about the one-sidedness of current approaches to participation and the critical importance for democratic education of learning how to listen, our paper suggests a turn to listening in the context of participatory media projects and a shift away from the emphasis on "voice," currently the pre-eminent metaphor used in writing about them. Spivak (1988) makes a case for the impossibility of Western academics facilitating the project of self-representation for politically liminal subjects and asks instead what it would mean to listen. Taking our cue from Spivak, in this paper we explore the limits, possibilities and dynamics of listening, in this case, to youth in New York and Montreal, and to recently immigrated women in Toronto participating in three different community media projects.

We argue that critical reflection on listening is particularly relevant to educators working at a time of profound socio-economic inequality and cultural conflict. The case studies we discuss in this paper explore the qualities of listening that work as a pedagogic practice of participatory democracy. In addition to considering the forms of listening that help to negotiate difficult conversations about gender inequality, racial injustices, and socio-economic disparities, we pursue the value that an ethics of listening might have for cross-cultural conversations. Can particular practices of listening ameliorate uneven power structures (Waks, 2011), and legacies of distrust and betrayal?
Through our analysis of the pedagogies and products of the three community-based media projects we studied, listening emerged as central to the storytelling in these community spaces—the listening of project facilitators to participants, of participants to each other, and of the participants to themselves as they mine and shape memory, experience, and observation into multimedia narratives. What structures, spaces, and kinds and qualities of relationship make listening possible? How might these shape a pedagogy of listening able to support multimedia explorations of the self and others in both informal education and classroom settings?

Cavarero (1997) and others suggest that listening is most importantly a relation that demands attention to the ethics of coming into being in community with others. This approach to listening resonates with our understanding of education as a common good, where the ethics of the common (Bollier & Helfrich, 2013) suggests a view of education as engendering affiliation within communities rather than promoting the rights of the individual. In this paper, we consider how the experience of listening facilitated in these participatory media projects can generate richly diverse public spaces of learning and debate, “the commons” of education. We explore the stories told through these projects, but also the processes which foster them -- how we can get “good at telling and listening” (Godard, 2014) -- and in the kind of ‘commons’ they might help foster in return.

Authors

• Bronwen E. Low, McGill University

• Chloe Brushwood Rose, York University