Locating Listening

Abstract

This chapter sketches two practices for listening as a situated politics of difference. First, Dreher and de Souza consider protocols for Acknowledging Country which provide a framework for locating listening in the networks of power and privilege in settler colonial Australia. While often dismissed as token gestures, they focus on how such practices might serve to unsettle the settler and hold the potential to transform relationships. Next, they explore the Quaker decision-making practice of ‘attunement’, also taken up by the UK Green Party. Attunement involves specific forms of silence and pause in preparation for listening, supporting moments of simultaneous attention, and yielding to others. In distinct, yet connected ways, these practices of located listening might prepare for, and catalyse, a space of ethical responsiveness and transformative politics of difference.