We are pleased to announce the next event in our Early Career Event Series, ‘Listening for the Othered in Cultural Spaces: Listening Practices within Museums – How to Engage with Space and Sound?’ with Girinandini Singh. Please see details of the event and the registration link below.
11.00 – 11.40 GMT 28 February ONLINE
Registration: https://shorturl.asia/i0coL
Event Description:
‘Sometimes sound is swift and imperceptible, other times bodies cannot help but feel “those points where time stands still,’ draws you back, leaps ahead, and you “slip into the breaks”. Floating alongside the sounds in a space, for me conjures up images of stillness, unable to quite capture the tangibility of something but bearing witness, nonetheless. When I think back to the times I’ve tried to learn a new language, for instance – Arabic, Nepali, Italian – what I remember is a sense of floating along the formless – an endless sea of sounds big and small, booming or infringing on mute – vowels merging with consonants, grabbing for form and shape or perhaps it was me who was grabbing for said structure. Saloṁe Voegelin writes about the inextricable lightness of sound, and its movement – especially when said sound, movement, and space is wholly and entirely alien to one – ‘It was all, at least at first, greatly confusing. I was at sea amid movement without form and could not anchor my thoughts in the steady container of the object but, instead, had to let them pass continually in the formless shape of sound. There was no pinning down, no transference, no hold, just the roller-coaster of changing shapes whose materiality was their contingent possibility’. I begin by considering this nature of sound for it leads me to thinking about the ethics of listening and what weight that may carry for us as researchers and educators and to us as learners and consumers. In this talk, we will explore listening as a methodology of doing/thinking/being in research and practice, a perspective that is embedded in a practice of decoloniality. I will explore examples in a variety of spaces from classrooms to museums to digital worlds. As we collectively explore the presence of sound/stillness/silence within spaces of research, learning, and education largely we will explore the act/action of listening as a diffractive apparatus. What does such a listening apparatus do? Can it allow us to build multi or plural worlds with polyphonous perspectives and possibilities of knowing/knowledge-making? I will attempt to engage and think through collaboratively with participants, what stories we are allowing in, perpetuating, grabbing onto – as we look for a recognizable form in the formless sea of sound within an alien language – what can this do for inclusivity or dare I alternate it with the polyphony of experiences in the classroom and pedagogical practices.
Girinandini is currently pursuing her PhD in Education (Arts and Creativity in Education Research Group ) on Exploring Sound/Silence as a form of presencing underlying and alternative socio-cultural worlds, histories and legacies. Girinandini also works with The Brilliant Club and with Cambridge cultural institutions like Kettle’s Yard and Cambridge Visual Culture, designing and developing learning engagement programs utilizing aesthetic education, performance within museum spaces, and oral storying formats for schools and community outreach.