Online International Reading Group for Listening
Building on the existing Reading Group for Listening initiated by the Bureau for Listening and the Laboratory for Sound at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, this reading group expands the format into an international, collaborative online group for shared study and exchange around listening as an artistic, critical, and social practice.
The group will gather bi-monthly online, following the core principle of collective reading, listening and discussion: each session begins with a shared, aloud reading of a selected text (no preparation needed to participate), followed by an open discussion aiming more towards the questions and potentials of the text, rather than how to ‘understand correctly’. Spending time and attention together, listening to the text and each voices, while having a space for ones doubts and wonderings is the central vision for the reading group. This format emphasizes listening not only as a subject of inquiry but as a method of being together, cultivating attention, reflection, and co-learning across disciplines.
Each gathering will be hosted by a different international partner engaged in practices of listening, who will contribute by choosing and presenting a text for collective reading and frame the session through their situated approach to listening. In doing so, the project creates a rotating, distributed structure that reflects the plurality of listening practices across contexts.
The International Reading Group for Listening aims to foster a transdisciplinary and inclusive community, connecting diverse voices and perspectives while deepening the collective exploration of listening as a shared, evolving practice.
Session 2 – 27th of October 6-8pm (GMT)
Sign-up via the link to receive the link for the session two days before.
Hosted by:
Mark Peter Wright is an artist, researcher and writer. His practice mixes critical theory, sound and experimental pedagogy across installation, publication and performance. Wright is the director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), an interdisciplinary research centre dedicated to sound arts practice and theory based at the London College of Communication, UAL. His recent book Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice is published by Bloomsbury (2022/23).
CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) is a world-leading interdisciplinary sound arts research centre arts based at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. It brings together students at all levels with research-active academics, practitioners, and global research projects. Over the last two decades, CRiSAP has played a key role in establishing sound and listening as vital scholarly fields within and beyond the arts and humanities.
We will be reading:
Session 1 – 19th of August 10:00-12:00 (CEST)
Sign-up via the link to receive the link for the session two days before.
Hosted by:
Peter Meanwell: curator and radio maker from Bergen, Norway who focuses on experimental sound, music, and listening with social and political themes. He currently directs Lydgalleriet, and was artistic director of Borealis – a festival for experimental music (2014-2025) and founded audio production company Reduced Listening in 2014.
Lydgalleriet: Norway’s only dedicated exhibition space for sound and listening practices. Founded in 2005, today Lydgalleriet hosts a yearly sound based exhibition programme and runs a listening library and community space, as a site for listening sessions, broadcast, workshops and conversations.
Ongoing list of references shared during the reading group sessions:
Books and edited collections recommended
- Stephanie Loveless, Tullis Rennie, Morten Søndergaard & Freya Zinovieff (eds.), Situated Listening: Attending to the Unheard.
- Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
- Liisa-Rávná Finbog, It Speaks to You: Making Kin of People, Duodji and Stories in Sámi Museums. DIO Press, 2023.
- Shawn Wilson , Research Is Ceremony.
- Candice Hopkins & Dylan Robinson (eds.), Listenings. 2025.
Articles / essays / papers
- Rauna Kuokkanen, “The Deatnu Agreement: A Contemporary Wall of Settler Colonialism.” Settler Colonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2020): 508–528.
- Hanna Guttorm, Lea Kantonen & Britt Kramvig, “Pluriversal Stories with Indigenous Wor(l)Ds Creating Paths to the Other Side of the Mountain.”
Dutkansearvvi Dieđalaš Áigečála 3, no. 2 (2019). - Suzanne Kite, “Listening Beyond.” EAR | WAVE | EVENT, no. 7 (Spring 2023).
- Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
- Raven Chacon, “A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak.”
- Raven Chacon, contribution to Convivialities.
Music / sound work – sounding references
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Ice.
QUESTIONS FOR LISTENING – READING GROUP – LINK TO DOCUMENTATION
Rather than documenting each reading group through a summary of what was said or what was learned, we gather the questions that emerge from the collective reading, listening and discussion. The reading group is conceived as a space for doubts, wonderings and shared attention, oriented towards the questions and potentials opened by a text rather than towards arriving at a “correct” understanding.
These questions, offered by the participants in the chat, become a form of poetic and reflective documentation: traces of what was heard, what resonated, what remained unresolved, and what participants carried with them from the encounter. They do not attempt to represent the session in full, but hold something of its collective movement of thought.
Accumulating from one gathering to the next, the questions form an evolving archive of listening; one that remains open rather than conclusive, and that can be returned to, carried elsewhere, or listened through again.