RESPONSE: DIALOGIC LISTENING AS ATTENTIVENESS TO PLACE AND SPACE

Abstract

This response examines the preceding seven essays in this issue of the International Journal of Listening through the lens provided by the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, illuminating a question that shapes the identity of each essay. In this response, I have grouped the seven essays together into three sections. The first section, “Listening: Active Attentiveness,” explores essays shaping the coordinates of listening. The second section, “Listening: The Architecture of Place,” anchors listening in the particularity of place. The final section, “Listening: Imagined Space,” ties listening to communicative contexts involving a large and disparate public. The scholars in this volume remind us that active awareness of our own bias and that of others is what allows new insights to emerge. As we listen, we are both situated and responsive to the architecture of place and imaginative spaces, which shape our listening to ourselves and to the Other. Our attentiveness, our sense of place, and our imaginative engagement with the sociality of space move listening from mere acquisition of information to the enlargement of the human condition.