Participation's "Others"
A Cartography of Creative Listening Practices 

Led by:    Julian Brigstocke (Cardiff University, UK)
               Tehseen Noorani (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore USA)

AHRC funded, 2014 - 2015.

How might participatory democracy and research be extended to non-human or non-living voices? This collaboration between researchers, artists and community groups in the UK and USA explores experiments with addressing the inclusion of more-than-human and/or not-yet-living actors in participatory practice. We are exploring creative, arts-led methodologies for listening to agencies which do not possess an ordinary ‘voice’ in participatory democratic processes, and asking how it is possible to establish legitimate forms of authority to speak on behalf of these voiceless actors.

Participatory democracy and research are often described in terms of ‘giving voice’ to marginalized subjects. But what happens when we attempt to attune ourselves to forms of political agency that do not possess a conventionally recognised ‘voice’ to be amplified? What new engagements between participatory research, artistic invention, and political agency are needed when ‘voice’ has to be invented rather than simply amplified?

In this project we are exploring the essentially ‘hybrid’ nature of community, recognising the ‘entanglement between past and present, living and dead, fantasmic and real, self and other, human and non-human’ that makes up any community. We aim to draw together, analyse, and construct creative methodologies for participating with non-conventional forms of political agency.

The project derives its urgency from the disastrous ethical, ecological and political consequences of the dominance of anthropocentric approaches to society which see the world as a resource for human endeavours. There is increasing recognition of the need to displace the figure of the individual human subject as the sole form of political agency. The problem we are facing is not just environmental damage but a predicament afflicting all three ‘ecological registers’: the environmental, the social, and the mental. If we wish to address key societal challenges, we need to pursue a more ecologically sustainable relationship with more-than-human nature, and to establish a democratic forum capable of listening to political agencies that exceed the individual human subject.

All forms of democracy, whether representative or participatory, presuppose the legitimacy of processes that grant certain actors authority to speak on behalf of others. But by what authority can humans speak ‘for’ non-human actors such as future generations, animals, or even objects and technologies? And what forms of creative listening does this require? We will be exploring the ways in which including non-human agents into into participatory practice is a necessarily creative exercise, requiring an imaginative translation of material and temporal processes into democratic discourse. Allowing new voices to enter the political stage requires being open to a novel ‘redistribution of the sensible’, a re-ordering of what is audible and inaudible, in political discourse. The project will investigate the role the arts might play in enabling marginalized and inaudible forms of political agency to acquire a role in participatory democratic practices.

Events include a symposium in New York on 'Participatory Democracy's Non-Human and Non-Living "Others" (New York, May 2014), a residential theory retreat in September 2014, and a UK symposium on 'Spaces of Attunement: Life, Matter, and the Dance of Encounters' (30-31 March, 2015). 

If you have any questions, please contact Julian Brigstocke or Tehseen Noorani.

Participation's "Others": A Cartography of Creative Listening Practices

Book: Listening With Non-Human Others

Symposium: Spaces of Attunement: Life, Matter & the Dance of Encounters. 

Retreat: The Voice of the Other

Symposium. Participatory Democracy's "Others"

Special issue of GeoHumanities on Spaces of Attunement

Project Partners