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Listening and Becoming Through Sound Audio Autoethnographic Collaboration As Critical Communication Pedagogy
Listening and Becoming Through Sound Audio Autoethnographic Collaboration As Critical Communication Pedagogy
To cite this article: Deanna Shoemaker & Karen Werner (2020) Listening and becoming through
sound: audio autoethnographic collaboration as critical communication pedagogy, Review of
Communication, 20:4, 355-366, DOI: 10.1080/15358593.2020.1819557
Author’s Image. Mosaic alleyway by Isaiah Zagar, near 1020 South St. Philadelphia, PA.
Please see the online full-text version to access the audio file. Alternatively, the audio can
be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2020.
1819557
CONTACT Deanna Shoemaker dshoemak@monmouth.edu
© 2021 National Communication Association
356 D. SHOEMAKER AND K. WERNER
CCP offers a model of teaching and learning as “working together to create generative,
transformative spaces” where we can (re)consider and work to (re)constitute “social, cul-
tural and economic relationships.”3 The “critical” in CCP includes both structural cri-
tique of unjust practices, norms, and discourses as well as enactments of activist
possibility; struggle and hope are both valued as necessary to social change.4 Importantly,
the ways power, culture, and identity are constituted within both mundane and discur-
sive forms of communication are not necessarily a given but rather relational and emer-
gent; thus, learning spaces can become sites for social justice.5 In our initial sound
collaboration, we strive to listen to ourselves and our troubled worlds in new ways,
listen more deeply, include more perspectives, expand what counts as “voice,” and
disrupt the primacy of our own voices as well as ways of seeing. Our sound-based and
relational “gatherings” of human and nonhuman expression are in part a response to
human-induced climate change and a catastrophic loss of empathy and connection
among both human and nonhuman beings. In this work, we reach toward fluid rever-
berations of identity that allow for “more complex and nuanced understandings of
power, privilege, culture, and responsibility.”6
CCP positions dialogue as both a relational metaphor and a critical method of teach-
ing and learning. Our experiments in (re)sounding rely on dialogic audio processes as
“loving inquiry and unflinching self-reflexivity” that invite engagement across ideological
and experiential differences.7 As a way of being and moving in the world, Fassett and
Warren note that CCP “asks us to encounter the world with open minds and
hearts. . . to find ways of listening” to the voices and concerns of those (human and non-
human entities) around us rather than trump their voices with our own.8 Ultimately,
CCP is grounded in interaction and critical, ethical encounters that can function as
radical community building and a (re)imagining of our world.
In her “Poetics and Politics of Nonfiction Audio Storytelling” course, Karen Werner
finds that her students’ duet audio autoethnographies tap into often hidden and intimate
parts of themselves that, when articulated and cowitnessed through collaborative audio
storytelling, make academic spaces more humane.9 Werner claims that audio stories
can be a form of resistance within institutions of teaching and learning when we
realize “the full political, creative, and spiritual implications of autoethnography, of criti-
cal storytelling, of critical ethnography.”10 Tessa W. Carr and Deanna Shoemaker’s auto-
ethnographic performance, “Hauntings: Marking Flesh, Time, Memory,” opens with a
shared conjuring of intimate soundscapes from their everyday lives (“THE SIZZLE
AND SPATTER OF COOKING, / someone practicing guitar, [. . . .] the quiet hum of
crickets, / SOMEONE SIGHING IN SLEEP. . .”) to revalue fleeting past/present/future
joys and terrors experienced in and through our fragile relationships with others.11 In
this personal and political feminist performance about loss and discovery through
aging female-marked academic bodies, campus spaces are reframed and transformed,
at least momentarily, through these evocative, domestic, relational sounds and stories.
Grounded in Karen’s research on community economies and Deanna’s scholarship on
collaborative performance, community building, and social justice, our work in and
around sound reflects a desire to generate more “ethical spaces of exchange and relation-
ship” where our sense of a narrow self, especially within learning communities, can
“break open” into more expansive forms of knowledge production invested in “world-
making capabilities.”12
358 D. SHOEMAKER AND K. WERNER
As we fall deeper into the rhythm of our collaboration across soundwaves and over
time, a friendship is emerging. This relationship matters. The material resonances of
our voices, bodies, stories, and settings intensify into what we experience as an ambu-
latory, relational pedagogy. This is an intimate, moving, shape-shifting, and vibrating
practice that allows for coproduction of knowledge through commitment to exper-
imentation, ambiguity, creativity, play, repetition, and mutual discovery. We generate
audio prompts inspired by our various ways of collecting, our questions about what it
means to work collectively, and our embodied and conceptual engagements with
sound, voice, and resonance. These open prompts allow for audio autoethnographic
exchanges as a rich, reflexive dialogue. Karen starts by recording a sound-based
walking meditation that considers collecting steps as a moving practice. This impro-
visation “on foot” exemplifies thinking, learning, and composing in and through
sound and embodied space/place.13 Deanna is struck by the delicious crunch of
Karen’s brisk footsteps somewhere in Massachusetts and creates a late-night recording
reflecting on her own emotional experience of physical immobility after invasive foot
surgery in the dead of winter in New Jersey. After more swaps, we begin recording
our freewheeling virtual conversations as well. In this way, our generative process
of discovery opens up new and unexpected ways of making, being, and thinking
collectively.
As snow bombs repeatedly hit the northeastern U.S.A., our collaboration through
sound continues to unfold. Karen encourages Deanna to buy an external mic and
wind muff for her iPhone (tools for learning); Deanna listens and builds her capacities
by learning some more basics of audio recording and editing. Karen intuitively starts
assembling our solo and duo recordings into something wholly new; Deanna listens
to these multivoiced performances in sound and offers feedback, drawing on her
experience in devising and directing performances. Karen playfully reassembles all
the bits and pieces again and again as a recursive, nonlinear process. We keep recording
our conversations and then record these recordings, weaving them into our evolving
sound piece: speaking, recording, listening, reflecting, refracting, repeating. A brutal
winter slowly transforms into spring, and our growing collection of soundsharings
becomes a cacophony of entangled, intra-active human and nonhuman life in our see-
mingly separate yet deeply connected spaces.14 Initially animated by human-centered
questions about collecting and collective (im)mobilities, what emerges are orche-
strated, intimate assemblages of human and nonhuman sounds stretched across and
attuned to the dramatic movements of winter, spring, and summer. As we virtually
explore place-based audio as an embodied CCP, we revel in the uncertainty, joy, and
chaos of our evolving process.
The space in this journal is only one representation of our pedagogical collaboration in
sound. Laid out below, the transcript of our audio performance looks like poetry. We
insert brief prose commentary in places for context, and to keep this dialogue going.
This work is telling us something. It is its own being. We are collaborating with it. We
invite you to surrender to the sonic experience of this ongoing experimental autoethno-
graphy. Let your eyes dance lightly across the page and then let the human and nonhu-
man sounds wash over and through you as you listen to our 7 ½ minute sound art.15 We
start with a question. Wait, birds come first:
REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 359
birds
D: What is this?
D: Willing to move
K: Movement ...
um hmmm
birds
D: Counterpoint
Reconstitution ...
What is collaboration?
New
World.
***
D: Just all the different kinds of stepping, stepping up stepping out, um, stepping into—
exhale, chuckle
K: funny uh broken mirror in the best sense you know of like, these um,
D: It’s hard.
laugh
D: um hum
crutches
footsteps
D: um
K: What is a self and two voices becoming a self? (overlap) D: There’s all kinds of ways of
moving.
bird
D: unseen
pause, birds
birds
***
from the material world.17 Listening as a relational and performative doing draws us into
the world in more complex and just ways. “Sight isolates, sound incorporates,” Walter
J. Ong reminds us.18 Visual optics often separate and reduce the “we” through represen-
tation, objectification, categorization. Tuning into “dissonant and harmonic resonances”
speaks to Barad’s notion of intra-action as entangled agencies in and between people,
things, materials, discourses, and time. Intra-actions suggest that responsibility and
accountability are distributed between and among constitutive agencies.19 This perspec-
tive is both a CCP, and like any meaningful pedagogy, an ontology, a way of being that
rejects hard boundaries and tears down human made walls to reveal the artificial and
destructive boundaries we have invented. Paulo Freire insists that pedagogy is more
than a teaching method; it is “a way of living in and seeing the world.”20
Barad reminds us that nothing is predetermined, including agency—rather it emerges
relationally, through performative doings.21 Inspired by her work, our audio autoethno-
graphy attempts to conjure the cohabitating matter around and within us and just
beyond our doors. There is an urgency here—what and how must we learn? There is
much at stake in our own pedagogical approaches and embodiments of knowledge
that will determine how we teach and learn and create with the next generation of crea-
tors and thinkers. We are heartened by the radical words of Gloria E. Anzaldúa:
Many are witnessing a major cultural shift in their understanding of what knowledge con-
sists of and how we come to know … [moving towards] the inner exploration of the
meaning and purpose of life … beyond the subject object divide, a way of knowing and
acting.22
The owls, wrens, peepers, and wind drown out our human voices. A windchime
expresses its material woodiness in relation to the wind as a material force, which ani-
mates the tree branch to which the windchime is attached. Audio uniquely captures
how we are all bound together and to the world in these troubled times. Listening to
the dissonances and harmonies of this collective and entangled WE is both a doing
and being that blurs lines between autoethnographic documentation and creation, trou-
bles false binaries of subject and object, and enacts CCP’s values.
Experimental forms of collaborative aural storytelling and audio refraction and assem-
blage in sound can shatter our overreliance on the visual, distort our constructed sense of
time and space, deconstruct dominant narratives, and reveal multiple possible perspec-
tives, overlaps, and recursive loops. Playing with a refracted form of assemblage, includ-
ing different qualities of recording, handling noises, and strange cuts, we push on
autoethnographic documentation and/as coherent ways of narrating self, experience,
process. Visual modes of representation and their underlying assumptions are produc-
tively troubled through the use of sound-based practices. In thinking of our form as
assemblage, we boldly embrace fleeting material, affective, sensory, posthuman traces.
If soundwaves are tactile undulations that penetrate and flow through matter, we (auto-
ethnographers, teachers, students) must become tuning forks listening more deeply to
the layers of resonance and dissonance within and around us.
K: One of the things about radio is
crutches
footsteps, sigh
water running
D: What is collaboration?
pause
footsteps
D: Ruff ruff!
D: okay
birds, sigh
D: What is this?
K: um also …
Beyond self?
Counter point
water sound, um
D: Voice is a space
windchimes
K: It’s less transitory in a way—you know, like you see it, you can go again and again and
again and look at it.
water running
D: A kind of deep—yeah!
D: Mmmm … wow
***
and listenings, and provocative prompts before Karen’s visit, we were able to support the
creation of 90+, 1–2 minute audio portraits that used voice and found, self-made, or pre-
recorded sounds in evocative ways. These mini stories in sound were “quilted” together
by Karen for a 90-minute public broadcast on our college radio station at the end of her
weeklong residency.
Working quickly created a heightened level of intensity that opened up interesting
spaces of vulnerability and immediacy. The cumulative flow of making the audio work
collectively felt exciting, risky, and full of uncertainty. Students went off by themselves,
worked together in small editing suites, stayed after class and talked with us, sat on
floors in hallways, stepped outside, ran to their dorms, went to the ocean, and came to
open lab hours to create their portraits. They recorded themselves in their academic
spaces: at the water fountain, walking up and down stairs, riding the elevator, sitting
in bathroom stalls, singing, making funny mouth noises, tapping on a desk….We all gen-
erated funny, fragile, weird, and meaningful fragments of overlapping identities that con-
stitute our campus community. Student audio stories revealed that they are worried,
anxious about their futures, heartbroken, far away from home, depressed, in love,
angry, empowered, philosophical, ill, passionate about their sport, first-generation stu-
dents, lonely, having identity crises, claiming their identities, and deeply connected to
the ocean, trees, fall leaves, the wind, music, their dogs, their home countries, strange
radio.…We were struck by how vulnerable and sincere participants were and how
willing they were to jump into multimodal, collective communication practices and
pedagogy.23 Arguing for mixtaping, everyday anthologies, and DJ practices as alternative
writing/compositional practices, Adam J. Banks wants “students to always feel empow-
ered to create their own narratives and counternarratives and … to share content in net-
works far beyond the classroom.”24
This weeklong communication-based pedagogical collaboration highlighted our
uniquely collegial community and our students’ generosity, which feels urgent within
this moment of crisis in higher education. Our final time on-air in the college radio
station with two amazing student engineers who also made audio portraits was a poign-
ant experience as we (re)listened to all these rhetorical performances resonating with and
against each other as listeners called in and texted about the work. This polyphonic
broadcast continues to linger as it is rebroadcast and shared in classes and within families
and circles of friends. As a resonance of our initial duo collaboration, this radiophonic
quilt weaves together many more voices and identities as a learning community to
listen and interact in more inclusive ways, experience the interrelational self through
others’ sounds and stories, and feel the communal waves that remix us into becoming
something more expansive, together.
Notes
1. Chris McRae and Aubrey Huber, Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning: A Prac-
tice Session for Pedagogy (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2007), 22.
4. Ibid., 26.
5. Ibid., 40.
366 D. SHOEMAKER AND K. WERNER
6. Ibid., 41.
7. Ibid., 56.
8. Ibid., 131.
9. Karen Werner, “Autoethnography as a Way of Being (Radiophonic),” International Review
of Qualitative Research 10, no. 1 (2017): 97.
10. Ibid., original emphasis.
11. Tessa W. Carr and Deanna Shoemaker, “Hauntings: Marking Flesh, Time, Memory,” Text
and Performance Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2017): 71–72.
12. Werner, “Autoethnography as a Way of Being (Radiophonic),” 97–98.
13. Louis Bury, “On Writing on Walking (Composed on Foot, Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 2:48
pm),” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5, no. 4 (2009): http://liminalities.net/5-
4/walking.pdf.
14. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2003): 801–31.
15. In addition to this journal's website, the audio file is available at “What Is Collaboration?”
karenwerner.net, n.d., https://karenwerner.net/audio-stories/1/0.
16. Karen Barad, “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview
with Karen Barad,” in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, ed. Rick Dolphijn and
Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 48–70.
17. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 803–804.
18. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen,
1982), 71.
19. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.”
20. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary ed., trans. Myra Bergman Ramos
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 25.
21. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.”
22. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Now Let Us Shift … the Path of Conocimiento … Inner Work,
Public Acts,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (London: Routledge, 2002), 541.
23. Adam J. Banks, “Dominant Genre Emeritus: Why It’s Time to Retire the Essay,” CLA
Journal 60, no. 2 (2016): 179.
24. Ibid., 188.