Listening with the Refugee

Listening with the Refugee is an interactive workshop hosted by the class Fugue States: The Politics of Refuge, Exile, and Fugitivity. 

How do contemporary political issues become particularly inflected when talking about transnational movement, borders, and the figure of the refugee?  We spend a lot of time watching so-called crises, trying to keep up with reading, staying informed, and keeping our ears and eyes open. The discussion of migration and refuge is saturated with visual images of refugee boats in the Mediterranean and camps in Greece and Turkey, and “migrants” everywhere are being called on to become storytellers. The scope of conversation on the experiences of  people of color forced to flee situations of war and violence is often a conversation of visual representation. When we talk publicly about movement and fugitivity, a participatory international politics often gets lost in the many images we see. But what happens when we turn to listening as an alternative way of understanding contemporary and historical categories of displacement and refuge?

Democracies are fundamentally made up of listening publics, and fall apart at the times when listening is forgotten, when listening is no longer part of the discussion. By engaging with different forms of listening to voices, music, and the sounds of other participants as they read aloud, this workshop attempts to turn to and constantly return to listening in the world.

Participants in this workshop will explore narratives surrounding the current “refugee crisis” through practices of attententive listening. By the end of the workshop, we will produce our own recorded stories (bring a recording device!) in response to what we have listened to which will be compiled by the organizers into a larger collaborative sound collage.