Activity: External talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Description
This creative contribution explored the participatory potential of soundmapping, guided by an alternative cartography of sound: participatory listening research. Participatory listening research is a way of listening with others to the environment to generate new knowledge and discoveries, whilst embracing different listening experiences, practices, and positionalities (Prosser, 2022). This approach values the plurality of listening, grappling with power imbalances, who is excluded and how these exclusions can be overcome. Through doctoral research, I developed a set of methods to interrogate residents’ sonic experiences of gentrifying neighbourhood change at the English seaside (Prosser, 2022). I shared non-digital techniques for mapping our experiences of listening together that focus on a range of sound stimuli: sound layers, memories, sparks and surprises. I offered the opportunity to try out these listening tools alongside sharing participants’ listening-maps from a recent community-partnership project.