During this session we will listen to an audio collage composed of data collected as part of the research project “Cultures of Listening in Crisis: enhancing professional listening to adults and children in situations of need/risk”. This invites you to listen to your own listening, i.e. listen darkly, and explore what you do with what you hear.

The method of dark listening (Motzkau, under review), was developed to explore the permanent crisis in UK child protection practice, evident in troubled listening spots indicating this to be a crisis of listening (Motzkau & Lee 2022). In 2024/25, participants (20 UK social workers) self-recorded audio diaries, reporting day-to-day experiences of listening and being listened to within professional practice. Excerpts from these diaries were selected, re-recorded by voices actors, and the recordings used to compose an audio collage, in collaboration with a sound artist. This collage was used as a prompt at Listening Workshops attended variously by groups of social workers, senior managers and policy makers, to initiate safe reflection, discussion and transformative collaborative thinking about the meaning of listening; as well as about the levers and barriers to productive listening within social work and wider safeguarding practice. These sessions were recorded and analysed further.

‘Dark’ is commonly seen to have a negative connotation: e.g. ‘dark net’; ‘dark empaths’.

This traditional evocativeness of the dark as bad/uncanny is itself a result of the way dominant discourses obscure the minor, the other, the inaudible, diverting our attention from it to return us to the safe binary of enlightened insight (light equals good), implicitly bolstered by colonial epistemologies. If this is true, I suggest that we need to reclaim ‘dark’ as a realm of critique/emancipatory action. This means turning from the visible to the audible, to listening; we need to consider the inaudible, the dark in listening, as something that denotes/holds the obscured, the unenlightened, that is, phenomena and experiences that are not thrown into relief by traditional pattens of sense making/knowing, but that resonate within; that are continuously unheard, unable to speak within our listening.

The participatory method of dark listening (Motzkau, under review) is inspired by ‘Audio Obscura’, an artwork by Lavinia Greenlaw (2011). She defines dark listening as ‘listening to what you cannot hear’, a way of attending to “the point at which we start to make sense of things”; with Audio Obscura “an attempt to arrest and investigate that moment, to separate its components and test their effects” (ibid, 2011, p. 7). Similarly, as a method, dark listening is an intervention that temporarily suspends/arrests participants’ motions of sense making and thereby makes them listen to their own listening, i.e. it alerts them to the cultures of listening they employ/are embedded in, opening them up to scrutiny (Motzkau & Lee 2022).

Listening to the collage, as well as presenting data and analysis from this research, this talk will consider the politics of listening (Bassel 2022) and analysis in research and practice, and the implications of re-presenting/performing and composing with sensitive data, with participants in a participatory manner (Sotelo-Castro & Shapiro-Phim, 2018).