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i have been working with listening for over a decade now. this morning @ZoeSTodd and i were talking about how terms and ideas become pulled from practice. practices that words like listening, or kin studies, point to are life work. i struggle endlessly with listening.
the reason i struggle is that listening requires a very difficult simultaneous movement. it requires you to situate yourself - embodied, emplaced, within an historical and collective world, and to see this clearly. and it requires you to approach an encounter without preemption
to both sit within your body, and not preempt how an encounter will play out is challenging. it is to listen with curiosity but not overcoding. it is to read how your body impacts the world around you, and to divest from ego attachment to what you assume is happening
this way of listening undoes everything i have ever learnt. its slow and it requires humility. it means being very open to misunderstandings and miscommunications. to write about this listening sounds simple, but it is painstaking work.
what these terms emphasise is literally an undoing of how one knows, lives, relates, comports oneself. it undoes abstraction of harm, violence, complicity. you cannot avoid yourself. this is antithetical to colonial-capitalist academia
so thats what is at stake for us when we write about this. what seems simple is often the hardest and most revealing. questions like: how do you listen? what do you hear? show that we are always working across difference, which is itself always unfolding and unknown.
@nkoyenkoyenkoye and @carsoncoleart and i are also working on abolitionist listening which ties to this too. listening allows us to imagine beyond even the most distant horizons we conceive, towards things we will likely never know
