Listening, Belonging, and Memory - by Abigail Gardner (Paperback)

About the Book

"An interdisciplinary approach to listening, in relation to the self, nation, age, witnessing and memory"--

Book Synopsis

Listening, Belonging, and Memoryputs connected listening at the center of current debates around whose voices might be listened to, who by, and why. Arguing that listening has to be understood in relation to the self, nation, age, witnessing, and memory, it uses examples from digital storytelling, listening projects, and critical media analysis to highlight connections between listening and power. It centers on voices, stories, and silence, how they interweave, and are activated, maneuvered, reconfigured, and denied. It focuses on the small, microengagements
that crouch within the superstructures of violent border control and the censorious policing of sonic citizenry, identifying cracks in the reshuffling of histories and hierarchies that connected listening affords.

Review Quotes

Abigail Gardner ponders the taken-for-granted act of listening, to understand its contexts and nuanced relationship to how voices and the stories they tell are heard, to belonging, to memory and thus to understanding history, community and indeed one's own self. This is a richly empirical book that listens to a range of voices and representations including those of war veterans, to migrants and their music, social media memorialization by the Auschwitz Museum of the victims of the Holocaust to everyday narratives recorded by public service broadcasting. Between sound, image, narrative, and silence (and the silenced) it is humanely attuned to and informative about the ways in which listening has been theorized and practiced. Central to this process is a lyrically expressed engagement with method as Gardner is vividly present in this book, her affective and accessible writing inviting us to understand the scholar's own act of listening as research, reflective about her own position and processes of listening to others in the act of telling. Informed by a committed Cultural Studies tradition, a feminist politics and a sensitivity and respect for ordinary life, Gardner is someone to listen with and closer to in comprehending contemporary memory practice and everyday historiographical work.
Paul Long, Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and Director, Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre, Monash University, Australia

Gardner does for sound what Ellis did for vision in Seeing Things (2000), establish listening as witnessing, working through and in this book as thinking with your ears. Immersed as we are in podcasts, music streaming, radio, political speech, text-to-audio machine learning, and voices from the analogue past re-mastered, Gardner's book is very timely. Listening, Belonging, and Memoryaddresses the multi-modality of contemporary listening, but also the social justice rationale for proper and careful listening in an age of multiple and conflicting claims to free speech in our slogan-dominated visual culture.
Joanne Garde-Hansen, Professor, Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK

Poetic in its tone and sensibility and yet carrying strong political and ethical threads, this book beautifully considers listening in the structures of communities and storytelling. Drawing on key work within memory studies, feminism, affect and media studies, the book takes a variety of approaches to carefully map the impact and power of listening.
Kristyn Gorton, Professor of Film and Television, Leeds University, UK

About the Author

Abigail Gardner is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She is the author of Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (2020) and PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance (2015) and co-author of Aging and Popular Music in Europe (2020) and Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (2012), with Ros Jennings.