In February 2014 Julian Brigstocke and Tehseen Noorani will be starting a new project titled Participation's "Others": A Cartography of Creative Listening Practices", funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. We will post more details soon, but here's a brief summary of the project's aims and objectives from the funding proposal.

"Participatory democracy and research are often described in terms of ‘giving voice’ to marginalized subjects. But what happens when research communities attempt to attune themselves to forms of agency that do not possess a conventionally recognised ‘voice’ to be amplified? What new engagements between participatory research, artistic invention, and political agency are needed when ‘voice’ has to be created rather than simply amplified? Or rather, when new methods of ‘listening’ need to be invented?

Recent arts and humanities scholarship has done much to uncover the essentially ‘hybrid’ nature of community, recognizing the ‘entanglement between past and present, living and dead, fantasmic and real, self and other, human and non-human’ that is characteristic of any community. However, these innovations are only beginning to be connected to the agendas of participatory research. Whereas much research informed by ‘new materialist’ philosophy stops at acknowledging and representing the multiple forms of non-human agency that make up community life, this project draws together methodologies for including novel forms of agency into participatory practices. 

The project aims:

• to advance practical and theoretical knowledge of the creative methodologies needed in order for participatory democracy and research to be extended to non-human and non-living actors;
• to demonstrate the essential role of arts and humanities approaches in challenging technocratic approaches to participation and demonstrating the creative work needed for participatory research to be genuinely empowering and transformative;
• to build a trans-Atlantic community of researchers and practitioners in this area."