Listen! Hear: What Listening (Still) Has to Offer Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Troubling What Is Taken for Granted in Qualitative Inquiry (Table 7)

Abstract

Despite the appeal of automatic transcriptions and AI summaries of qualitative interviews, the act of listening to audio recordings remains vital to qualitative inquiry. Drawing on Snaza (2024), we participated in endarkened listenings. In these listenings, we attended to the sensational rather than the sensible, resisting enlightenment rationalities and, instead, attuning to the more-than-human, the affective, the not-yet, and the esoteric. Instead of listening for expected outcomes, answers to research questions, and codable snippets, we listened speculatively (Franklin-Phipps, 2023) asking, what might listening other-wise (McKitterick, 2021) offer? We share three practices of listening attentive to uncertainty, imagination, and absence.

Authors

• Susan Ophelia Cannon, University of Georgia

• Kate O'Brien, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Hannah M. Edber, Mercer University