Listening to Learning or, Becoming Listening Bodies

Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence in collaboration with Dr. Michael Gallagher in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) 2017/18.

This project emerged within a constellation of interviews, workshops, field recordings and writing. Listening to Learning is an audio documentary with education and geography practitioners concerning the role of listening in their research; how they listen and what they listen for. Voices are layered and mixed with ambient and electromagnetic fields from the architecture of the research centre, enmeshing the space in which learning takes place. The work premiered in Jan 2018 in MMU and featured in the radio arts festival, Radiophrenia, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, 2020. With Gallagher and Dr. David Rousell, the project: Becoming Listening Bodies was also developed. This research explored how listening walks affect bodies, and how the method of walking can function as a multi-sensory pedagogy. Listening walks were recorded using a variety of wearable biosensors, body mounted video cameras, photographs and audio, producing a rich set of “sensational” research data. This data was shared with participants as part of a dialogical process with responses gathered through various creative methods including projections, mapping, drawing and collage. 

Keywords: biosocial, extensions, learning, making-with, unsoundwalk

Conference on Arts Based Research & Artistic Research, TATE | Radiophrenia | Palgrave Macmillan