Listening Structures

Listening Structures

Yasmine Boudiaf

A suspension of thoughts just existing.

Taking consistent themes, grouping them, making links between them.

Taking real-world phenomena and imagining positive and negative versions.

Displaying sources of knowledge and comparing their validity.

The path ideas take in order to produce meaningful interventions.

A space to acknowledge silences, omissions and redactions. For unvoiced thoughts and dismissed feelings.

Research in practice

I developed these listening sculptures as a way to provide a space for ideas to sit and develop during group discussions.

As a researcher within and outside of academia, restrictions are imposed on the way I can conduct research. These explicit and implicit forms of control can originate form any one of a number of actors involved in the infrastructure of a research project, such as a funder, an academic institution, an agency, a principal investigator, a legal team, a finance administrator, a contributor, or my own inclinations.

Part of my role as a research assistant in Infrastructural Interactions included transcibing audio recordings. I was aware of what a typical audio transcription looked like, in terms of structure, punctuation and commonly used terms to describe audio phenomena. I wanted as much as possible to keep to good practice and to do my job well. And yet, on listening to the personal testimonies and conversations of the contributors, I became hyper aware of my role as a form of censorship, that all transcribers participate in when making decisions on what should and should not be included in the final transcript. Whilst I included all the words that were said, I made editorial decisions to omit what are generally not considered relevant to the objective of the research task. The implication being that what is not included in the final transcript therefore has no value. I would contest that such omitted content has value beyond what is prescribed as relevant to a research task. I wanted to honour the omitted content and make visible the hidden emotional labour involved in such a task with a statement at the bottom of each transcript:

I apologise for omitting laughter, discourse markers and filler words. It’s not that they’re not valid, they are – they add colour and humanity to the conversation – they just don’t serve the purpose of this exercise.

Sincerely,

The Transcriptor

Typically in practice-based research, participant content would be captured, analysed, interpreted, reduced and added to by the researcher. In this linear process, the final form becomes somewhat detached from the original contributors' intent - they lose control, they are not there to reattach meaning at the point of reporting. A distance is immediately formed, increasing with time and number of mediums the content flows through.

Whilst it’s considered good academic practice to maintain the integrity of original sources, this is not always realistic, because of the sheer volume and complexity of content to analyse. The role of a researcher is not to just collect and present raw data, they use personal judgement to add context and curate output. They navigate systems of ethics and values imposed by their institutions and funders. Some contributors, for example, may not want to be attributed, some contributions are left out of the reporting altogether. The researcher makes decisions on how content mutates, influenced by internal as well as external forces.

Entanglements and AI Justice Matrix workshops involved gathering materials form participants in the form of audio, text and video, sometimes live, sometimes not, soetimes in a group setting, sometimes alone.

A source of influence often left out of this process is that of other participants. There may be group discussions, but the researcher leads the discourse, and the participants are under their gaze. It’s difficult to discern what effect this may have on the participant’s output.

Listening

Having a space that participants add thoughts to anonymously as they arise may help to reduce participants’ inhibitions.

There are inherent power asymmetries and roles that individuals have during group discussions. What would listening look like when these roles were no longer visible, and participants were not confined by conversational dynamics (such as waiting for your turn to speak)? The listening becomes detached from any person yet at the same time, everyone becomes the listener, as each participant is presented with the output at the same time.  

This distributed listening becomes active distributed listening when participants have access to the platform where contributions are collected and are able to manipulate them. These contributions, or thoughts, take on a life of their own; they are picked up and moved around by anyone, built on, manipulated and challenged. Half-formed ideas can manifest, and be made whole by someone else.

This side-system of qualitative data gathering adds value to a research project through capturing contributions that would have otherwise remained as thoughts in participants’ minds. It can also continue to exist beyond the lifespan of a research project, in acknowledgement that not all meaningful contributions can be captured in a prescribed session.

Using the Listening Structures

These are diagrams made of geometric shapes to aid in collective idea development. As ideas travel through these structures the nature of these ideas changes, providing a geometric framework for them to develop.

FLOATING THOUGHTS: A suspension of thoughts just existing.

COMMON-ING: Taking consistent themes, grouping them, making links between them.

SPECULATION CHAMBER: Taking real-world phenomena and imagining positive and negative versions.

EPISTEMOLOGIES: Displaying sources of knowledge and comparing their validity.

JOURNEY TO INTERVENTION: The path ideas take in order to produce meaningful interventions.

DEEP FISSURES: A space to acknowledge silences, omissions and redactions. For unvoiced thoughts and dismissed feelings.

The Listening Structures are drawn on a non-extractive collective drawing pad, Excalidraw. The original pad should not be edited, but rather a copy should be made and populated so that the original stays empty and useful to others, however, new, empty structures can be added to the original pad that others may find useful.

1. Visit https://excalidraw.com/#json=6497964574900224,Ps6Si-EVmnSHpavjSZKVPg 

2. Click “Export” 

3. Click “Export to Link” (wait a while until there is a pop up window with a new link)

4. Copy and paste the link into a browser window and edit your version of the structures as you like.

References

Cite as: Boudiaf. Yasmine. 2021. "Listening structures". In Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care, edited by Helen V Pritchard, and Femke Snelting. Brussels: The Institute for Technology In the Public Interest. http://titipi.org/pub/Infrastructural_Interactions.pdf