Disability and the ethics of listening

Abstract

For Christopher Newell (1964–2008)

The turn to listening in cultural studies, as a corrective to emphasis on voice and speaking, needs to engage with the varieties of listening to be found in the socio-political space of disability. While there are many different kinds of listening practices and concepts to be discerned in disability, these are yet to be systematically brought together and explored – let alone connected to the overarching idea of listening as a resonant problematic of culture, democracy and media. To offer a sense of these possibilities, I consider why this new, critical sense of listening is especially important for disability, discuss some established modes of listening and disability, identify emergent, alternative modes from new media practices in disability cultures, and imagine what an ethics of disability might look like.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the ARC Cultural Research Network, and its ‘Listening’ project, for supporting the ‘Disability, Democracy, Media and Listening’ work, and to Cate Thill for organizing this. I am also grateful for the comments on versions of this paper from Cate and other generous, critically astute ‘Listeners’, including the journal's anonymous reviewers.