This project examines the listening practices of those with a professional obligation to represent the voices of disadvantaged and vulnerable groups within Australian society. Interviews with policy actors will provide data on the complex processes of attention, responsiveness, recognition, negotiation and understanding involved in listening practices. A number of pressing issues relating to the development of social policy in a highly dynamic media environment will be addressed, including to what extent a listening framework can help renegotiate processes of marginalization, recognize barriers to social justice, and enhance professional ethics.

Aims:

• To explore the listening practices of policy actors working in the field of policy making, advocacy and service delivery
• To examine how values, policy context, institutional context and media shape listening

Justification

In research and advocacy work within the field of social policy, there is an emerging focus on issues of recognition in relation to the institutional contexts that shape how different voices are heard. While, conventionally, justice for marginalised groups is understood as a matter of redistribution of material resources, debates about welfare are now also framed as matters of recognition (Honneth 1995; Fraser 1997; Williams 1999; Fraser 2003). Ruth Lister has linked the claims of new social movements with the recognition framework in the UK context to argue that “calls for the voices of marginalized groups to be heard in policy-making and campaigning are becoming more vocal” (2007). Anna Yeatman and Kathryn Owler (2001) point out that, in Australia, contractualist protocols in employment service delivery can be interpreted as a means of responding to claims for recognition. Nonetheless, they argue that how service users are heard is still contingent on case managers’ capacities for openness and responsiveness. This, in turn, is affected by the institutional context within which case-management takes place (e.g. whether it is orientated entirely towards the compliance of individuals or extends itself to include collective recognition).

While the concepts of voice and recognition have attracted significant scholarly attention, listening is an under-researched area of social and political thought. The Listening Matters project addresses this gap in research and expands on important insights based on theories of recognition and voice by examining precisely how listening relations contribute to the outcome of recognition as well as how such relations are shaped by the media, institutional and policy contexts. Adopting a primary focus on listening practices, this study will analyse how new imperatives or responsibilities to listen are understood and negotiated by policy actors.