Listening, Belonging, and Memory

Gardner does for sound what Ellis did for vision in Seeing Things (2000), establish listening as witnessing, working through and in this book as thinking with your ears. Immersed as we are in podcasts, music streaming, radio, political speech, text-to-audio machine learning, and voices from the analogue past re-mastered, Gardner's book is very timely. Listening, Belonging, and Memory addresses the multi-modality of contemporary listening, but also the social justice rationale for proper and careful listening in an age of multiple and conflicting claims to free speech in our slogan-dominated visual culture. * Joanne Garde-Hansen, Professor, Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK * Abigail Gardner ponders the taken-for-granted act of listening, to understand its contexts and nuanced relationship to how voices and the stories they tell are heard, to belonging, to memory and thus to understanding history, community and indeed one's own self. This is a richly empirical book that listens to a range of voices and representations including those of war veterans, to migrants and their music, social media memorialization by the Auschwitz Museum of the victims of the Holocaust to everyday narratives recorded by public service broadcasting. Between sound, image, narrative, and silence (and the silenced) it is humanely attuned to and informative about the ways in which listening has been theorized and practiced. Central to this process is a lyrically expressed engagement with method as Gardner is vividly present in this book, her affective and accessible writing inviting us to understand the scholar's own act of listening as research, reflective about her own position and processes of listening to others in the act of telling. Informed by a committed Cultural Studies tradition, a feminist politics and a sensitivity and respect for ordinary life, Gardner is someone to listen with and closer to in comprehending contemporary memory practice and everyday historiographical work. * Paul Long, Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and Director, Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre, Monash University, Australia *