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Listening - a radical Pedagogy

23 March 2010 , 5 pm

To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a ‘self’ can take place.

Nancy (2007)
Organised in conjunction with the Identities research theme and Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol

Speaker: Professor Bronwyn Davies

Room 4.10, 35 Berkeley Square, BS8 1JA

Familiar concepts of listening, such as listening for meaning, or listening to judge the correctness of the other’s understanding, or even listening in order to know the identity of the other, are integral to the habitual repetitions through which everyday pedagogy is practiced.

Bronwyn will open up the concept of listening, drawing in particular on Nancy’s analysis of listening, as an active process of opening oneself to the resonances of the other: “To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a ‘self’ can take place. To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other” (Nancy 2007: 14).

The supposedly closed system of the teacher’s self is made vulnerable in the act of such listening. She can no longer be the one positioned solely as manager of correct or legitimate forms of knowing (Davies 2008, 2009). Allowing the resonance of the other to register in one’s body involves opening oneself to an ongoing process of Deleuzian differentiation, to becoming other, to a process of evolution that takes one beyond the already known.

Biography:
Professor Bronwyn Davies is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and visiting Benjamin Meaker Professor with The University of Bristol Identities research theme/Institute of Advanced studies spring/summer 2010.

Her research works with narrative, discourse and pedagogy, at the intersections of the social sciences, the performative, visual and literary arts, and philosophy. The distinctive features of her work are, on the one hand, her development of innovative social science research methodologies, and, on the other, its strong base in the conceptual work of poststructuralist philosophers such as Butler, Deleuze and Foucault. She is well known for her work on gender, for her work with collective biography, and her writing on poststructuralist theory. Her recent work has focussed on the development of a critique of neoliberalism as it impacts on subjectivities at work, with a particular focus on university work.

View flyer for Listening a radical pedagogy event (PDF, 98.9 Kb)

View Bronwyn Davies events timetable March- April 2010 flyer (PDF,76.1 Kb )

Booking information: Please book by contacting Lucy.Stephens@bristol.ac.uk by 16th March 2010.

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