Participation's "Others": A Cartography of Creative Listening Practices

This project asks how participatory research might be extended to become better able to ‘listen’ to voices that do not fall within the boundaries of the traditional individual human subject, such as past and future generations, non-human life, radically decentred minds, and objects and technologies. There is a growing recognition that addressing the mounting ecological problems facing environmental, social and mental life requires challenging the place occupied by the individual living human subject as the paradigmatic form of political and artistic agency. Addressing these global challenges requires inventing new ways of listening to alternative voices.
The project aims to build an international network of expertise in order to add value to diverse Connected Communities projects that challenge anthropocentric assumptions about the stakeholders of participatory research. The project will develop a multimedia cartography of diverse projects that share the problem of how to involve agents who do not possess an ordinary ‘voice’ in participatory democratic processes and research co-production, and how to establish legitimate forms of authority to translate and speak ‘for’ these actors. The project will facilitate international collaboration to build new methods, approaches, case studies, frameworks and literatures around participation’s “others”.