New book: Listening without borders

What does it take for people to encounter one another ethically when practices, worldviews and imaginations clash?

Professor Maggie Kubanyiova's new publication, Listening Without Borders (co-edited by Dr Parinita Shetty) brings together more than 40 academics, arts practitioners and educators to attend to these questions through interdisciplinary encounters. The book invites a new way of engaging with difference across disciplines and practices. It does not offer answers but creates a framework for staying in the conversation. The mode of inquiry offers pointers for future engagement in the academy and professional practice. Listening without borders can serve as a resource for reflection to anyone tasked with creating inclusive environments in classrooms, workplaces, and neighbourhoods.

The book is based on an AHRC-funded project ETHER. You can hear Maggie talk about why the book is available in an open access format.

From the latest reviews:

Listening Without Borders is a ground-breaking book which offers a listening space and a space for 'listening in' and leaning in. I found myself gripped by the conversation and dialogue which emerged, by the space for a radical thought in place of a thoroughly referenced theory. I found this to be freeing, to be creating multiple edges, as in permaculture, allowing for a flourishing ecosystem of thought and listening. I found myself thinking hard with the gentle and generous thoughts in the book. I found myself relieved that there was no 'conclusion' and that the authors instead were both 'staying with the trouble' as Haraway puts it, 'listening to the trouble' and also refusing to clean it up or make it all tidy. This eschewing of what is often a violent epistemic move is especially refreshing. The insistence that arts can then be a positive way of enabling fresh ways of listening and learning to these interstices and possibilities for new avenues for thought, rather than closures, was fully congruent with the dialogue in the book.

The book is enticing, it does indeed attempt to listen without borders, to flow like a conversation and to bring conversation with all its excitement and at times alarming thrill, into the kind of academy we need to work within the poly-crises of the day. I'd recommend this book heartily to postgraduates in arts humanities and social sciences and especially those researching with arts and with languages.

Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts, University of Glasgow, UK and author of "Decolonising Multiligualism: Struggles to Decreate"

***

Written in community across a broad range of contexts, disciplines and intellectuals, Listening Without Borders provides a rich, meditative tapestry on encounters through language(s) and arts. This book is beautifully curated, empathic and intellectually stimulating while inspiring necessary questions on broader issues of language and plurality.

Kamran Khan, Director of MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism, University of Birmingham, UK

***

Provocative and timely, this set of expansive interdisciplinary conversations engages with the unequal, unsettling, yet creative dimensions of listening in encounters across difference. It will resonate with all those within and outside the academy who seek a more profoundly ethical attunement to others.

Caroline Kerfoot, Stockholm University, Sweden

***

This book reveals a diverse group engaged in a multilayered dialogue, upending our understanding as humans and scholars about how and why we interact with others. Their theoretical, practical and ethical interactions offer possibilities, not answers. They offer understandable and moving meditations on encountering others ethically and listening without ego.

Paula Golombek, University of Florida, USA