Listening to Social Transformation through Engagement Network
LiSTEN is a community-engaged and multidisciplinary research network exploring the complex relationship between listening and social transformation in Canada and Canada-in-the-world through research-creation, experiential pedagogies, and scholarship.
Loud calls for social change are rocking Canadian society, but too often it seems that no one is really listening. Spurred by an urgent need to improve civil discourse and equity in an increasingly divided society marked by polarization and isolation, LiSTEN advances an expanded, multimodal, and multisensory conception of listening as processual, ethical, political, and worlding. Our network explores listening in distinct contexts, from creative industries, education, and law to environmental activism and social justice advocacy. Creative practices (including music, sound arts, and recording; digital art/creative technologies; communications media; and film) offer a rich experiential ground for understanding, critiquing, and deploying listening as a crucial strategy, skill, technique, and force to address the competing cross currents of social transformation that mark Canadian society and Canada-in-the-world.
Check out our Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Toolkit for Community-Engaged Arts Activism, created through seed funding from the Carleton University Multidisciplinary Research Catalyst Fund.
- Introduction
- Listening Bibliography and Resource List
- Arts Institutions in Change: A Collection of Contemporary Canadian Institutional Policies and Strategies for Change
- Introducing Critical Pedagogy: Basics and Transformative Approaches
- Survey of Community and Arts Organizations in Canada for Social Justice
Events
Upcoming LiSTEN events:
- We’re working on a new guided soundwalk critically examining protest and colonialism in Canada’s capital city. Stay tuned for spring 2025 events!
Past LiSTEN events: