Listening Without Borders - (Writing Without Borders) by Magdalena Kubanyiova & Parinita Shetty

About the Book

This book asks what it takes for people to encounter one another ethically when practices, worldviews and imaginations clash. It uses 'listening' as an encompassing metaphor for attending to others and engages over 40 contributors across geographies, disciplines, art forms and practices in a conversation which the reader is invited to join.

Book Synopsis

This book asks what it takes for people to encounter one another ethically when practices, worldviews and imaginations clash. It engages over 40 contributors across geographies, disciplines, art forms and practices in a conversation that touches on topics ranging from the climate catastrophe to the disintegration of the welfare state and the erasure of certain bodies from public spaces. It is concerned with how these 'big' questions play out in 'small' everyday encounters in classrooms, rehearsal rooms, arts projects, charity events or city markets. The book's polyphonic text does not present answers to its central questions in the way a typical research publication might do. Instead, it creates a flow and invites the reader to join a conversation. By refusing to deliver an argument, the book opens new possibilities for relating to others in the academy and arts.

This book is open access under a CC BY ND licence.

Review Quotes

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""

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"

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, University of Birmingham, UK"

About the Author

Maggie Kubanyiova is Professor of Language Education at the University of Leeds, UK, where she is Director of the Centre for Language Education Research. Her research interests cut across sociolinguistics, education and arts. She led an Arts and Humanities Research Council project, Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other (ETHER), one of the outcomes of which is this book.

Parinita Shetty is a postdoctoral researcher, public library assistant and children's book writer. She is interested in exploring online fan communities of popular media, children's literature, critical literacies, fan podcasts, public pedagogy and intersectionality. She is passionate about including diverse voices in academic and cultural spaces, and finding creative ways to make knowledge accessible to diverse audiences.