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POLITICS OF BELONGING
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Discusses the social constructionist movement in modern psychology, noting that social constructionism views discourse about the world not as a reflection or map of the world but as an artifact of communal interchange. Both as an orientation to knowledge and to the character of psychological constructs, constructionism presents a significant challenge to conventional understanding. Although the roots of constructionist thought may be traced to long-standing debates between empiricist and rationalist schools of thought, constructionism moves beyond the dualism of these traditions and places knowledge within the process of social interchange. Although the role of psychological explanation is problematic, a fully developed constructionism could furnish a means for understanding the process of science and invites the development of alternative criteria for the evaluation of psychological inquiry. (100 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Suburban development in western Sydney boomed in the area during the 1960′s and 1970′s, and soon thereafter the label 'Westies' emerged – a derogatory term used to identify people from the west as Sydney's 'other'. Today, there is still a social and economic stigma associated with being from the western suburbs, even though in western Sydney you'll find thriving creative and professional communities, with the government describing the region's population as young, diverse, and dynamic. Cultural programs, local government place-making initiatives and the broad span of the University of Western Sydney's six local campuses characterise a place that is far from the 'Westie' stereotype. This begs the questions – how was the 'Westie' produced, and what have been its effects as a place identity? In exploring these questions, the aim of this paper is to work towards revealing new identity/ies for western Sydney.
The psychological and ideological processes of social categorization, differentiation and identification that adhere to how social groups negotiate and acquire identities for themselves, and those defined as different or ‘Other’, have been central to research in the social representations tradition (Augoustinos and Riggs, 2007; Chryssochoou, 2004; Duveen, 2001a; Howarth, 2006b; Moloney and Walker, 2007; Philogéne, 1999). In this chapter we seek to examine how representations of a new social group that has only recently settled in Australia – humanitarian refugees from Sudan – are represented and communicated in both formal and informal discourse by majority group members. We examine how essentialized traits are attributed to Sudanese refugees that position the group as not only problematic but also necessitating exclusion from Australian society. Our analysis suggests that these essentialized and indeed racialized representations are predicated on simplified representations of the African continent – a ‘war-torn’, dangerous place from which its displaced people should not be offered refuge due to their inherent social and psychological deficits. We use this very specific social and historical example to suggest that essentialized representations of the ‘Other’ have become reified and objectified ways of making sense of difference. Despite scientific and political challenges to the validity of essentialized categories such as ‘race’, such representations have remained resilient in everyday understandings of group difference. As Moscovici's theory of social representations (1984b, 1988) argues, such representations become so entrenched and objectified that their social and political origins become forgotten. People come to view essentialized representations of difference as ‘natural’ and common-sense ways of perceiving and understanding human variability and social diversity. Essentialism in psychological research In recent times in the field of psychology there has been a growing interest in the concept of psychological essentialism (Haslam, Rothschild and Ernst, 2000, 2002; Holtz and Wagner, 2009; Raudsepp and Wagner, 2012; Kashima et al., 2010; Rothbart and Taylor, 1992; Wagner et al., 2010; Yzerbyt, Rocher and Schadron, 1997).
Digital storytelling (DST) has been widely used as a means of empowerment for marginalised voices across community-based projects worldwide. This paper discusses uses but also limitations of the practice in the context of a Melbourne-based youth media program for ‘youth at risk’ called YouthWorx. Based on our ongoing, long-term ethnographic research, we explore the cultural production of digital stories as a co-creative process that exposes a range of controversies to do with the politics of ‘voice’, genre’s communicative potential and ethical considerations. Concrete examples from YouthWorx’s pedagogical work serve to illustrate the values of self-expression (‘voice’), critical reflection and collaboration that form part of broader social transformations generated by these creative practices. The critique of DST practice offered here connects with existing studies concerned with the socially contextualised processes of media education, and the theoretical shift beyond ‘the right to speak’ towards ‘the right to be understood’ (Husband, 2009). The paper recommends more analytical attention be paid to a dynamic social process of learning (of media, interpersonal competencies) and community-building, extending beyond the immediate DST situation, rather than narrowing the focus on end-result atomised media products.
This paper analyses several newspaper articles which appeared in the media following the murder of teenager Liep Gony who had come to Australia as a refugee from Sudan, and the subsequent restriction on the African refugee intake made by the former immigration minister Kevin Andrews. The paper considers several discourses which appeared in these articles, and which were indicative of the wider press coverage following these events. These discourses centered on whiteness as the normative mode of belonging in Australia (as a result of the ongoing denial of Indigenous sovereignty over the land), and the desired absorption of any non-white refugees into the dominant white culture. The paper concludes that such constructions of white belonging in Australia further deny Indigenous ownership of the land, and attempt to override any perceived differences in non-white immigrants and refugees, whilst at the same time constructing the nation as generous and free of racism.
This paper explores the issue of territorial stigmatisation through tenantdriven research chronicling the experiences of social housing tenants as they examined and reflected upon the Australian television series Housos. The television series aired on an independent, part publicly funded, television station in 2011 and depicts the lifestyles of fictional tenant characters on an imaginary social housing estate. The series presents satirical and exaggerated parodies about everyday life on the estate, drawing on a range of stereotypes of social housing tenants. Tenants are portrayed as feckless and antisocial individuals who engage in a range of irresponsible and sometimes criminal behaviour in order to avoid work and whose family and other relationships are dysfunctional. Public tenants are far from passive victims of stigmatisation and conducted the analysis presented in this study. They reveal a sophisticated understanding of how stigma operates through the media, various agencies, and the nonresident community. While economic and political forces, and changing modes for governing poverty, have resulted in geographical confinement of residents on estates, tenants reflected on their own 'real-life' experiences and provide accounts of deliberate and self-conscious use of 'negative' social status to produce positive collective identities. Alternatively, nontenant participants repeated common prejudices about public housing, and reflected on their belief that the system was not effectively preventing welfare cheats and 'bludgers' from loafing at their (taxpayers') expense.
Young People’s Participation in Tech City was a pilot study (October 2014 – January 2015) run by the Geography Department at The Open University (led by Dr Melissa Butcher), in collaboration with local organizations such as Hackney Unites, Our City and the Shoreditch Trust. The study was part of the Creating Hackney as Home project (CHAsH 2013-15, www.hackneyashome.co.uk) and funded by the OpenSpace Research Centre at The Open University. The growth of entrepreneurial sites like London’s Tech City brings with it challenges as well as opportunities for local residents. This pilot study took a particular focus on young people living in south Hackney and explored the opportunities and barriers to their gaining access to employment and training in Tech City. Intended benefits of this research are: 1) a better understanding of the barriers and opportunities experienced by young Hoxton/south Hackney residents for accessing training and/or employment in Tech City, and 2) a better understanding of the concerns of educators, employers and decision-makers in relation to Tech City’s capacity to generate locally-oriented training and employment opportunities.
Can the arts change how we view cities? How can we evaluate the broad social impacts of arts programs, particularly in elusive areas such as the local image of urban communities? This article examines the cultural renaissance of Western Sydney, long considered a crass, working-class cultural wasteland. In the last two decades, the region has experienced a proliferation of new artistic initiatives, and advocates now hail Sydney’s West as the true face of multicultural Australia’s cultural vitality. This article also documents how community arts and development programs have contributed to these shifting perceptions, analysing these contributions in terms of social impact evaluation. It argues that evaluating social impact expands the parameters of conventional evaluation techniques, which typically focus on program-level outputs and outcomes. It presents a case study of a Western Sydney community organisation, Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE), which, for 20 years, has delivered community cultural development and professional development programs for Western Sydney artists. Engaging with historically disadvantaged communities, the organisation has specialised in art forms that have resonated with the region, including hip hop, digital storytelling, and filmmaking, and in the process has played a key role in re-imagining Western Sydney as a cutting edge, multicultural hub of creative vibrancy.
Keywords: Western Sydney, community arts, evaluation, social impact
Sociologists have been debating the idea of community for over a century with some continuing to suggest that it has no relevance in the contemporary world. Attempts to turn to other terms - such as ‘social capital’ - have not worked and many scholars have suggested that the desire for community has increased in a world of global insecurities. Gerard Delanty’s work on the communicative construction of community is the best attempt to unpack the contemporary meaning of the word yet he underplays the dangers of community and he stops short of contemplating the ongoing importance of place. This article extends Delanty’s conception of community formation by suggesting a distinction between ‘grounded’ and ‘projected’ communities. It draws on the author’s research to highlight the importance of working more thoughtfully with the idea of community. It notes that the sociology of community has failed to take account of more than 40 years of community development practice.
This paper outlines the ways in which the conception of social integration and its practical realization have developed over time in Australia, and the various pathways that models of integration have followed. It makes a distinction between the approaches to inclusion of the indigenous population, the Australian Aborigines in broader Australian social life and social institutions, and those dealing with populations of incoming migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. Although there are similarities in the models of integration mobilized in both arenas, the differences and interactions are also significant and characteristic of what is specific about settlercolonial societies. The central models in both fields are assimilation, integration and multiculturalism, and the paper will sketch briefly how each model has operated both in theory and in practice, how they have succeeded and interacted with each other, how they have intersected with other types of concerns, such as citizenship, civilization and security, as well as what might be distinctive about the Australian
approach to social integration in comparison with other countries.
This essay explores the role of media production within a framework of urban citizenship. Urban citizenship is defined in terms of strategies rather than location: not as a “bundle of rights, but as a struggle for expanding the public sphere.” The possibilities of using media narratives and images to negotiate a place in the city are explored through a set of short films produced by participants in community arts projects in Sydney. I trace how media forms are a key to attending to the “unreal” materialities and temporalities of everyday dimensions of citizenship within states of exclusion.
Representations of asylum seekers, commonly referred to as ‘boat people’, became a central issue during the 2001 election campaign amidst claims that Australia was at risk of a flood of refugees. This article explores the intersection between populist politics and media discourse through analysis of media representations of refugees and asylum seekers.
Contemporary anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia is reproduced through a racialization that includes well rehearsed stereotypes of Islam, perceptions of threat and inferiority, as well as fantasies that the Other (in this case Australian Muslims) do not belong, or are absent. These are not old or colour-based racisms, but they do manifest certain characteristics that allow us to conceive a racialization process in relation to Muslims. Three sets of findings show how constructions of Islam are important means through which racism is reproduced. First, public opinion surveys reveal the extent of Islamaphobia in Australia and the links between threat perception and constructions of alien-ness and Otherness. The second data set is from a content analysis of the racialized pathologies of Muslims and their spaces. The third is from an examination of the undercurrents of Islamaphobia and national cultural selectivity in the politics of responding to asylum seekers. Negative media treatment is strongly linked to antipathetic government dispositions. This negativity has material impacts upon Australian Muslims. It sponsors a more widespread Islamaphobia, (mis)informs opposition to mosque development and ever more restrictive asylum seeker policies, and lies behind arson attacks and racist violence. Ultimately, the racialization of Islam corrupts belonging and citizenship for Muslim Australians.
Since 1976 there have been three waves of boatpeople travelling to Australia, the last beginning in 1999. Following the Tampa incident in August 2001 it has been Government policy to prevent boats carrying asylum-seekers from entering the Australian migration zone. Despite opposition from opinion leaders, the policy is popular with a majority of Australians. This is not surprising. Support for such a policy has been building throughout the 25 year period. This support is not based in racism as some critics allege; rather it reflects the importance of borders in maintaining a strong sense of national community. A new word has b edded down in Australia's political vocabulary over the last 25 years: boatpeople. A boatp erson is someone who arrives by sea, unan-nounced, without a visa an d with the intention of seeking political asylum. They have been dominating the news since late August this year, but we have had intermittent experience of them for a long time. The first were five young men who arrived in D arwin from Vietnam in a small wooden boat in April 1976. They had been two months at sea, travelled 3500 kilometres, and had found their way to us with the aid o f a page torn from a school atlas. 1 But they were not the har-bingers of a steady influx; rather boat arrivals since 1976 have come in three distinct waves: the first from 1976 to 1981; the second, from 1989 to 1998; and the third, and largest, from 1999 to the present.
Negative representations of parts of our cities are endemic in the Australian media, where certain suburbs function as motifs for failure--past, present, and future. Indeed, as one journalist put it after invoking the "interchangeable" triumvirate of Sydney's Mount Druitt, Melbourne's West Heidelberg, and Brisbane's Inala, "geography is destiny" (Wynhausen, 2006). This article critiques the discourses at play in the media and explores the possibilities and limitations of a pilot project wherein an urban place-based pedagogy is taken up as a mode of critical response as high school students begin to document in text and images what they love about "Our place." Further possibilities for engaging critically with place are explored in the concluding section of the article. (Contains 2 figures and 7 notes.)
Television occupies a central place in most Australian homes, and ‘TV talk’ is an important process in negotiations of individual and group identities (Gillespie. 1995). TV is the focus of many private, family interactions. As a ‘window on the world’, television is also a primary source of information about public life. Thus TV is deeply implicated both in interactions within the home, and in our understandings of the wider ‘home’ of the nation. This paper draws on discussions with diverse community groups in and around Cabramatta to explore the crucial role of TV in negotiations of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in Australia's most culturally diverse local government area.
‘Dog-whistle politics’ was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the Howard government used the ‘ Tampa crisis’ and September 11 to appeal successfully to popular xenophobia and insecurities. The notion involves sending a sharp message which, like a dog whistle inaudible to humans, calls clearly to those intended, and goes unheard by others. This article argues that this sort of ideological manoeuvre has been abetted by an analogous process in the tabloid press, in which ostensibly liberal, reasonable stories speak at the ‘inaudible’ level to those whose insecurity and ignorance leaves them susceptible to populist claims that their relaxed and comfortable past has been stolen away by cosmopolitan, ‘politically correct’ elites and the ‘multicultural industry’. Three examples are analysed: the stories of the women's gym and the halal hamburgers in Western Sydney, and that of the Muslim man threatened with dismissal from his Sydney North Shore professional job for praying in his lunch hour. Each was originally run as a ‘good news story’ or as sympathetic to Muslim protagonists, but provoked a backlash which generated extended ‘news’ and comment — much of it racist — and irresponsibly exacerbating community tensions.
The media representations of the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States and their aftermath bear strong similarities to the media coverage of ‘Lebanese youth gangs' over the last few years — both rely significantly on the metaphor of war. This paper explores two media narratives about Lebanese youth gangs which draw on this metaphor — the first deploys a simple us/them structure which, like the dominant Western reportage of the terrorist crisis, turns on a form of moral reduction in which the forces of good and evil are relatively clear. The accumulated imagery of Lebanese gangs, drugs, crime, violence and ‘ethnic gang rape’ articulates a dangerous otherness of those of Arabic-speaking background — echoed in the coverage of the terrorist ‘attack on America'. This simple narrative, however, gives way to a second, emerging narrative about Lebanese youth gangs which also relies on the metaphor of war but acknowledges the moral duplicity of both ‘combatants' — registering the culpability of the state and its police service but distancing ‘the ordinary Australian ‘from this culpability. The second narrative, like the first, tries to recuperate a moral innocence for the ‘ordinary Australian’, but in doing so underlines a crisis in Australian multiculturalism.
Since August 2001, Arab and Muslim communities in Sydney's western suburbs have been caught up in a spiral of signification that linked ‘gang’ activity in the area to the standoff over asylum seekers aboard the MV Tampa, a federal election campaign fought on the theme of ‘border protection’ and global news reporting of September 11 and the ‘war on terror’. Many people who live and work in the Bankstown area responded to this intense news media scrutiny by developing community-based media interventions that aimed to shift the mainstream news agenda. Through media skills training, forums, events and cultural production, Arab and Muslim Australians in the Bankstown area positioned themselves as the subjects rather than the objects of news. This paper analyses news intervention strategies in terms of media power and the politics of representation. I argue that the activities of those working with racialised communities suggest valuable models for the wider process of improving the reporting of cultural differences in multicultural Australia.
This book challenges the hegemonic view that economic calculation represents the ultimate rationality. The West legitimises its global dominance by the claim to be a rational, democratic, science-based and progressive civilisation. Yet, over the past decades, the dogma of economic rationality has become an ideological black hole whose gravitational pull allows no public debate or policy to escape. Political leaders of all creeds are held in its orbit and public language is saturated by it. This dogma has pervaded all spheres of life, ushering the age of post-rationality, especially in English speaking countries. The authors discuss several aspects of post-rational global capitalism still dominated by the Anglosphere: hyper-competition, hyper-consumption, inequality, volatile global financial markets, environmental degradation and the unforeseen effects of the internet-mediated communication revolution. The book concludes by discussing some utopian and dystopian future scenarios and asking whether the West can transcend its crisis of rationality.
This article explores public reactions to an event dubbed the ‘Sydney siege’, through an analysis of its media coverage. The event, where a Muslim man held 18 hostages in a Sydney café, was closely followed during its 22 hour duration and triggered an avalanche of public commentary. We analyse media articles, political leaders’ media statements and transcripts of press conferences published within the week of the siege. Using NVivo software, we code the key themes arising from the data and employ in-depth textual and discourse analyses of the most prominent themes: multiculturalism, Islam/Muslims and ‘community/solidarity’. Using the theoretical framework of the nation as an imagined community which needs its ‘Others’, we find that the ‘Sydney siege’ lead to emphasising hegemonic ideas of the Australian national identity and values that mark the boundaries of nationhood, community belonging and solidarity. Such ideas placed Muslims precariously at the national margin, applying a simplistic binary of the ‘good ones’ worthy of inclusion into the ‘good nation’ and the ‘bad ones’ to be excluded. We conclude that the public discourse following the Sydney siege affirmed Australian multiculturalism in a broad sense but also strongly implied the Otherness of Muslims.
In Australia, artists of ethnic minority backgrounds are generally offered marginal spaces in which they can express themselves. They tend to be called upon by the state to act as cultural brokers or offer representations of their supposedly neatly bounded communities in the name of social inclusion [Werbner 1997. Introduction: the dialectics of cultural hybridity. In: P. Werbner and T. Modood, eds. Debating cultural hybridity: multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism. London: Zed Books, 1–28]. The aim of this paper is to highlight how processes of racialisation and multiculturalist discourses produce specific vocational identities, namely that of the ethnic minority, community artist who uses their creative forms of expression to redress social inequalities. Drawing on the findings of an in-depth, qualitative study with young, male, Arab-Australian creative workers during 2011–2014, I suggest that this particular vocational trajectory is indicative of the classed, exclusionary and hierarchical nature of the creative industries. The paper pays close attention to the ways they use creativity strategically to deal with broader issues of race-relations and experiences of discrimination to suggest that these ethnic minority creative workers potentially become what Brubaker calls ‘ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ [2002. Ethnicity without groups. European journal of sociology, 43 (2), 163–189, p. 166] who live off as well as for their cultural difference.
There has never been a greater need for a sober, historically informed yet critical account of immigration policy in Australia. In this revised and updated edition, James Jupp, Australia's leading specialist on migration, surveys the changes in policy over the last thirty years since the seismic shift away from the White Australia Policy. Along the way he outlines the history of Australian immigration, compares the achievements of the Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments, and considers the establishment of the ‘institutions’ of multiculturalism and ethnicity. Jupp looks critically at the ways economic rationalism, the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, and the environmental debate have impacted upon migration choices. The vexed issue of refugees and asylum seekers is also covered in great depth.
Melbourne is Australia’s second most populated city, and in many ways a microcosm of broader Australian society. As a city, Melbourne is the proverbial ‘melting pot’ of cultures. This diversity is evident in the breadth of community radio stations that service the
Melbourne community. From ‘generalist’ stations serving a plethora of marginalized audiences to ethnic stations, youth stations, stations for seniors and Indigenous stations, Melbourne community radio is a vibrant and active mix of much that represents Australia – and the
contemporary global condition. This article draws on data collected during two national studies of Australia’s community media sector (Forde, Meadows and Foxwell 2002; Meadows et al. 2007) that focused on stations and subsequently their audiences. The research used a mixed methodology
of surveys, focus groups and interviews to build a picture of the role these stations perform for individual participants, local community groups, businesses and other organizations and audience members. The article engages with Melbourne fieldwork from these national studies, offering an
analysis of community radio in an Australian metropolitan centre. While not without their problems, Melbourne’s community radio stations and their audiences have created and developed a space and place for diverse groups to connect in ways that foster the sense of belonging so central
to the well-being of individuals and their communities. In this way, these stations perform a particular role in metropolitan Melbourne by combating the sense of isolation and anonymity that so often characterizes the urban experience.
L'A. porte son attention sur le racisme en Australie. Il evoque la situation politique des aborigenes dans ce pays et souligne que la communaute blanche s'efforce de reaffirmer son hegemonie politique. Il analyse la signification de la notion de «suicide racial» qui transparait dans le discours politique de nombreux hommes politiques blancs. Il montre que les populations aborigenes sont victimes d'un grand nombre de discriminations raciales alors que que les barrieres raciales entre les differentes composantes de la population australienne tendent a disparaitre avec l'arrivee de nombreux immigrants asiatiques. Il etudie les discours politiques australiens et met en exergue les specificites, d'une part, de la rhetorique raciste et, d'autre part, de la rhetorique qui vise a defendre une certaine tolerance ethnique
Yuval-Davis outlines an analytical framework for the study of belonging and the politics of belonging. Her article is divided into three interconnected parts. The first explores the notion of ‘belonging' and the different analytical levels on which it needs to be studied: social locations; identifications and emotional attachments; and ethical and political values. The second part focuses on the politics of belonging and how it relates to the participatory politics of citizenship as well as to that of entitlement and status. The third part illustrates, using British examples, some of the ways particular political projects of belonging select specific levels of belonging in order to construct their projects.
Listening as the act of aural consumption has commonly been the moment in cultural practice around which analysis has cohered. This has certainly been the case with the cultural objects of popular music and radio broadcasting. Where young people have been brought into the frame of such analyses, the impact of listening on the formation of the self has been highly pronounced – leading at times to public panic around particular musical genres and their associated socio-cultural practices, for instance around hip-hop, heavy metal and emo music. This paper investigates the combination of radio broadcasting and young people from the perspective of cultural production as a redemptive process. The taxonomy of a reflexive ‘listening to oneself ’; collaborative ‘listening to others’; and the empowering and responsibilizing process of ‘being listened to’ grounded in an ethnography of radio production is employed to explore the social processes of ‘learning to listen’ undertaken by the YouthWorx Media program that engages disadvantaged young people in media creation, while setting a scene for the project's evaluation.
Research and policy on media and cultural diversity routinely emphasize speaking or ‘voice’, whether in mainstream, community or diaspora media. An established tradition also examines representation and critiques examples stereotyping and racialization. This paper extends these discussions to focus on questions of ‘listening’. Attention to listening provokes important questions about media and multiculturalism: how do media enable or constrain listening across difference? Drawing on recent work in postcolonial feminism and political theory, this paper explores the productive possibilities of a shift beyond the politics of voice to explore ‘listening across difference’ in media studies and media advocacy work. To highlight listening shifts some of the focus and responsibility for change from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard in the media.
This paper explores the increasing experience of discomfort amongst migrant Australians and their children, drawing on two sets of empirical data-one about a sense of home amongst migrants and the other about incidents of racism towards Arabs and Muslims since 2001. The idea of comfort captures what Giddens calls ontological security, or the trust we have in our surroundings, both human and non-human. This sense of security, built on mutual recognition, is fundamental to our capacity for social agency. Migrant home-building constantly negotiates the displacement thrown up by the act of migration as migrants attempt to settle in a new country. Experiences of racism, especially since 2001, however, undermine the ability of migrants to feel 'at home', and hence their capacity to exist as citizens.
Tiffany Lee-Shoy is the Senior Policy Advisor on Cultural Development at Fairfield City Council in western Sydney. In this exchange with Tanja Dreher, Tiffany reflects on recent community development work using digital storytelling to create new ‘listening spaces’ for young Khmer-Australians and their parents and grandparents. The project, known as ‘Fairfield Stories’, involved training young people to use digital technologies to produce short documentaries about their lives to be screened, in the first instance, to family and friends. The project forms one part of Tiffany's wider commitment to developing citizens' media initiatives and civic engagement in Fairfield, one of the most culturally diverse Local Government Areas in Australia.
This introductory paper posits ‘listening’ as a rubric for reframing contemporary media theory and practice. We propose moving beyond questions of voice, speaking and representation to focus on often-ignored questions of listening as the ‘other side’ of communication. This article sets out the ways in which it may be possible to address the neglected question of listening, not in isolation but rather, following Susan Bickford's notion of ‘pathbuilding’, through explorations of speaking and listening, voice and hearing, logos and interpretation/deconstruction. The article argues for more receptive forms of public discourse and media practice, while seeking to place the recent problematization of listening in a critical framework. Through a survey of theorizations of listening and explication of their research agenda, the authors consider listening in relation to conflict and inequality in diverse practices of citizenship. A central aim is to push discussion of listening practices beyond individual, personal, and private forms of discourse and to identify a spectrum of listening practices that complicate the speaking/listening binary.