Listening Without Borders, a BAAL Book Prize nominee
Professor Magdalena Kubanyiova's latest book has been shortlisted for this year's prestigious BAAL Book Prize.
Professor of Language Education at the School of Education, Maggie Kubanyiova, has been shorlisted for this year's prestigious BAAL Book Prize for her publication Listening Without Borders: Creating Spaces for Encountering Difference (Multilingual Matters, 2024). The book, co-edited by former School of Education PhD researcher Parinita Shetty, has been praised as ‘provocative and timely’. Professor Kubanyiova discusses the book’s genesis and objectives in a short interview with the School of Education.
Listening Without Borders is a book that compelled us to cross all kinds of established boundaries to live up to our commitment to relational research. I am delighted that the generosity and risk-taking of so many, including our 42 contributors and the publisher, have been recognised by the British Association for Applied Linguistics. It is a huge privilege for this book to appear in such a fine list of research contributions to the field. Being shortlisted also sends a very hopeful signal of openness towards the kind of interdisciplinary inquiry that prioritises listening over delivering an argument. And that in itself is a cause for celebration.
Can you tell us about your latest book?
Listening Without Borders has grown out of an interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Research Council network entitled ETHER (Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other). The book reflects the richness of perspectives brought into the network conversations around a core question: ‘How do people of conflicting worldviews, memories and future visions encounter each other ethically rather than reductively?’ Contributors are, among others, linguists, community activists, architects, artists, philosophers, poets, teachers, curators, musicians, dancers and sign language interpreters. Each brought a distinctive set of themes, contexts, theories and practices that spoke to the central question. The book therefore touches on a whole range of (often difficult) issues in relation to, for example, societal polarisation and stigma, racial injustice, colonial injury, a rise of fascism, genocidal trauma, environmental consequences of the Anthropocene, anti-immigration sentiment, persistent exclusion of minoritized groups from full participation in society, erasures of certain bodies from public spaces.
Such an interdisciplinary treatment already makes the collection unique. But it is an unusual publication in another sense too: the reader won’t find in it a traditional set of chapters. Instead, the book presents a polyphonic flow of diverse voices in conversation with one another. What is even more radical is that the book never attempts to offer a conclusion. This is because my co-editor, Parinita Shetty, and I felt that we needed an approach that departed from the typical academic genre in order to do justice to the complexities of ethical encounters when imaginations and ideologies might clash on the one hand and to live up to our own ethical commitment to listening on the other hand. Not performative, selective or judgmental listening, but listening that is based on co-presence, indeterminacy and attentiveness. We took up this challenge in the way the exchange was originally set up in online seminars on which this book is based, but translating it into a book publication was another matter entirely. Whether we succeeded is for others to judge. One of the reviewers of the book kindly noted that the result is a “a kind of love story” and that is indeed how it felt to be working on it and how it feels to me personally every time I dip back into it.
Can you give an insight into the process leading up to publication?
The content is an outcome of a layered collaborative process. The book features a range of conversations that took place over the course of online ETHER seminars. This includes 30 provocations (polemics as blogs and video-presentations that participants submitted prior to each seminar and which are available in the public domain), 15 conversations that the randomly paired up provocation authors were invited to have with each other, and a range of other forms of dialogue (including dedicated conversation sessions led by appointed conversationists, keynote speeches followed by a Q&A, and the parallel chat box which included comments, questions, musings and mini-conversations among ETHER participants).
Working on the book was not dissimilar to working with extensive qualitative data in a research project. We made extensive notes of themes that resonated with us in each seminar and discussed these in regular team meetings throughout the project. When Parinita and I began to work on the book in earnest, we re-listened to the entire audio-recorded material several times, re-read and annotated transcripts and brought our observations to regular editorial meetings. We started to notice that specific issues were being repeatedly invoked across the seminars. Similarly, in our ears, different contributions started to speak to each other around larger themes even if the actual exchange never happened in the same time-space. These larger themes eventually became our organising framework and, at the same time, shaped our ethical agency when making difficult editorial decisions about what to include, what to exclude and how to order the material to practise what we preached within the confines of a short book.
Our editorial process was guided by a set of commitments. The first was the commitment to staying open to the polyphony of voices in order to preserve the difference of each contributor’s perspective. Our aim for the book was to create a space of possibility to dwell in the presence of different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives ethically: without judging, categorising, patronising, dismissing, or explaining the other. We also brought an anthropological sensibility to our work which orients to participants’ perspectives, contextualises them in the settings of their original practice or research and puts them in a larger conversation with each other around common themes. This has resulted in an attentively – at least we hope so - presented mosaic of reflections rather than a replication of what was said and in the order in which it was said. The fragmented and multimodal format aims to highlight the different kinds of interacting and thinking that emerged while at the same time resisting the urge to make the reader too comfortable. As soon as the text gives an appearance of an answer, it throws the reader back into the flow. Finally, each contributor had multiple opportunities to feed back. Everyone had access to the full manuscript with an opportunity to make any changes they wished. We respected the right of everyone to refuse participation in the book project and acted on any requests to withdraw part or entire contributions. We have also done our best to address feedback received from the contributors in two rounds of feedback workshops. Throughout this process, we were also in touch with the wonderful team at Multilingual Matters, our publisher, to ensure that the constructive feedback from peer reviewers was fully incorporated into the final manuscript.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
This sounds like a simple enough question! And as will be clear by now, a book that refuses conclusions might not lend itself to an easy answer. As editors, we point the readers to specific juxtapositions because we saw them as meaningful at the time of listening, but we cannot prescribe what the readers should see in them or indeed what we should see in them when we approach the book in the future and with a new set of experiences. We do not set borders on the readers’ moments of being taught in the presence of these particular contributors and ideas. Having said that, this book, through all the processes and relationships that have shaped it, has taught me about the profound value of sustained ‘listening without borders’ in the presence of others. I hope the readers, too, will come to experience the generative power of attending to difference as opposed to attempting to evaluate, resolve or even celebrate it. I also hope that they will come away with a sense that it might not be necessary to understand the language of others in order to attune to it or that forming a view about others can sometimes paradoxically stop us from seeing them. I certainly continue working with these insights in my own research and teaching.
Are there any people in particular that you would like to read the book?
We created this book in the belief that it really can speak to pretty much anyone with an interest in and commitment to creating inclusive environments, whether this is in classrooms, workplaces or neighbourhoods. It can serve as a resource for an additional layer of reflection to accompany educational, civic and arts organisations in their efforts to diversify their workforce, engage diverse audiences and decolonise their artistic repertoires, cultural collections and outreach work. There are no easy answers to any such questions and, as noted, it wasn’t our aim to offer any. But I believe that the book’s content can sensitise those charged with such responsibilities into issues, stories or voices that can often remain unheard and unaddressed in the rush to tick desired boxes to win arguments or funding. The resource will also be useful as a reading material for students and academics across a range of social science and arts and humanities disciplines to expose them to interdisciplinary conversations while providing an opportunity to participate in them, to introduce them to alternative modes of inquiry, engagement with others and writing, and to inspire them as they shape relevant questions for their future research or practice. The conversations in this book can also be used as a springboard to designing new and context-relevant teaching, professional development or community resources for anyone working in such settings wishing to respond to the central question concretely and creatively and as they judge appropriate for their circumstances.
What is next for you?
I have already alluded to the many possibilities that the book has opened up. Its ethical framework has already informed a number of initiatives I am currently working on, focused on arts and language. An example of the former is a collaboration led by Opera North and the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds and with colleagues in the School of Music around the Creative Case for Sanctuary. Now that the University has been awarded the Sanctuary status, the question of how we create spaces for encountering others ethically rather than reductively is particularly crucial. I can already see, through this initiative as well as through my involvement in cross-Faculty doctoral supervision in collaboration with the School of Fine Arts, that bringing the ethical framework of Listening Without Borders into a sustained conversation with the arts and the cultural sector in general can have quite profound consequences for how we think about, enact and structure our relationships.
Maggie Kubanyiova (right) and her collaborator, an artist and poet, Sophie Herxheimer (left) in a conversation on mobilising language creatively to reduce stigma. Photograph by Mark Epstein
The second area of my research that has stemmed from Listening Without Borders and which I am actively working on expanding, theoretically, methodologically and practically, is around language. My research is located in a sociopolitical context of societal divisions in which the language of minoritised speakers is stigmatised, seen as deficient and often erased from public spaces, resulting in fractured community relations. As an educational (socio)linguist at the Centre for Language and Education Research and through my engagement with the University-wide interdisciplinary network Language@Leeds, I work with the fundamental insight that people enact their ethical relationships through language and communication. Yet, attempting to encounter another person while holding ideas about their language that, in essence, call their personhood into question is an example of profound ethical failure that deepens segregation. Working with my collaborators at the intersection of linguistics, ethics and arts, we continue to explore ways in which language can be mobilised creatively to recover the possibility of ethical encounters in places of separation and stigma.
Find more information about Professor Kubanyiova's latest research project AHRC project Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other (ETHER) here.
