Listening as a Shared and Social Practice conference

The University of Regina, in collaboration with the University of Saskatchewan, is delighted to present the first Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies (GLASS) conference in Canada. This two-day virtual and in-person hybrid conference is a practice-based endeavour that addresses the potential for social and epistemological changes resulting from questions of being, knowledge, and agency when one engages a methodology of listening. It further considers resonances between work in Sound Studies across these landscapes as both unique and interconnected. Foregrounding practice-based research and research-creation offers increased access to an area born of the sensorium and opens potential exchange with and beyond scholars.

GLASS Canada: Listening as a Shared and Social Practice gathers practitioners and scholars working in Sound Studies in both the Great Lakes region (an area surrounding the largest freshwater system on earth, defined beyond Canadian and U.S. borders), and the Canadian prairies (a topography formed by and adjacent to the recession of a glacial lake, whose area exceeded that of all the contemporary Great Lakes combined). Sound Studies, broadly construed, is any scholarship for which sound is a methodology of research or object of study. The conference keynote speaker, xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator and writer Dylan Robinson, has been central to opening generative discussions of decolonization in listening practices and Sound Studies that persistently deepen practical concerns about the inability to listen to other beings and the role it plays in the continued recreation of the colonial now.

Listening as the core tenet of communication is not bound by audition—one can perceive an other entity without hearing a sound via attunement. This proposes social benefits through the ethical and responsible position one assumes when attending to others. Listening as a Shared and Social Practice will focus on how listening practices are co-constitutive and world making, embodied and embedded within our social, multispecies, and geologic ecologies. How does listening happen in various bodies, including the land? What roles do we play as listeners in our communities? How can we take up the work of decolonizing listening and resisting extractive processes? What explicit and implicit roles do each of us play in this endeavour?

We seek proposals for performances, participatory workshops, interventions, and/or presentations for short and long group conversations. With a focus on generative encounter, we encourage formats that embrace risk and experimental practices.

Please submit a 250-500 word proposal by August 15th to lindsey.french@uregina.ca.  Describe the content and format of your intended offering (reading a paper, extemporaneous lecture, roundtable with collaborators, seminar-style workshop, Q&A, etc.), your spatial and technical needs, and your preference for virtual or in-person presentation. Please include a short biography (150 words).

We will communicate with applicants by August 29.

GLASS Canada

The GLASS Canada 2022 conference organising team is Lindsey french (University of Regina), jake moore (University of Saskatchewan), Jeremy Morris (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Jennifer Smart (Northwestern University), Shannon Holmes (University of Regina), and Sarah Abbott (University of Regina).