Methodologies to capture listening
Convenors: Cate Thill (ND) Tanja Dreher (UTS) Kate Crawford (UNSW)
This workshop builds on and extends the productive discussions generated through The Listening Project in 2008 by focusing on methodologies for researching ‘listening’. The question of appropriate methodologies has arisen in several of the themed workshops and is of particular interest to a number of CRN members seeking to develop ARC grant applications on listening for 2010.
The workshop will focus the question of methodologies through attention to another challenge identified in the 2008 workshops: the need to develop better understandings of the differences and interrelationships between private and public as well as between individual and institutional listening. The challenge is to develop methodologies which can integrate micro and macro perspectives.
The workshop moves beyond established traditions of listening as methodology (eg. interviewing, participant observation, anthropology, oral history) to focus instead on the methods available to document and analyse listening itself – especially where ‘listening’ is understood figuratively as political and ethical practice. Workshops to date have found that ‘listening’ understood in this way is particularly difficult to ‘pin down’ or to ‘capture’. Attention to listening means grappling with process, relationships and potentiality. The methodologies workshop will therefore progress the 2008 discussions towards the development of empirically grounded research on listening.
Participants are asked to prepare and circulate beforehand a 1-2 page overview of a methodology that they are either using or would like to propose. We encourage both grounded reflections on existing research projects as they engage with ‘listening’, and experimental proposals for innovations in methods and methodologies. Each participant will be asked to speak to their paper for 5 mins in their preferred session (ie public/private, individual/institutional or macro/micro).
Workshop aims:
- Identify and discuss available methods for the study of ‘listening’
- Explore possibilities for innovation in adapting existing methodologies and developing new ones
- Develop methods to be used in ARC grant applications on ‘listening’
- ECR development
- Discuss possibilities for an edited collection
Proposed workshop outcomes:
- Contribution to development of ARC grant applications
- Collaborations
- Potential for an edited collection
Download the Methodologies to Capture Listening Report [PDF]
Download the Methodologies to Capture Listening Workshop Booklet [PDF]