Participation's "Others": A Cartography of Creative Listening Practices

Participation's "Others": A Cartography of Creative Listening Practices asks how participatory research might be extended to become better able to 'listen' to voices that do not fall within the boundaries of the traditional individual human subject, such as past and future generations, non-human life, radically decentred minds, and objects and technologies. There is a growing recognition that addressing the mounting ecological problems facing environmental, social and mental life requires challenging the place occupied by the individual living human subject as the paradigmatic form of political and artistic agency. Addressing these global challenges requires inventing new ways of listening to alternative voices.

This early career researcher-led project will build an international network of expertise in order to add value to the multiple and varied Connected Communities projects that challenge anthropocentric assumptions about the stakeholders of participatory research. The project will synthesize results from at least 15 related projects that address this theme, building a multimedia cartography of diverse projects that share the problem of how to involve agents who do not possess an ordinary 'voice' in participatory democratic processes and research co-production, and how to establish legitimate forms of authority to translate and speak 'for' these actors.

The project will facilitate international collaboration to build new methods, approaches, case studies, frameworks and literatures around participation's "others". Activities include workshops in the UK and USA, residential 'slow thinking' retreats, and a symposium. At least six community partners and independent artists, in the UK and USA, will take an active part in the design of the project activities and outputs. The outputs will include an interactive online map, a collection of essays, and a public art project, as well as conventional academic outputs, all aimed at extending the legacy of Connected Communities research. The interactive maps will chart current and previous research projects that invent methods for engaging participation's "others", with search functions specifically developed in line with the plurality of modes of participatory inquiry identified in the workshops. This online resource will help orient, provoke and inspire current and future trans-disciplinary teams in formulating new research projects in a post-human context. A collection of short, accessible reflections on the project will be edited along the model of the well-received "Problems of Participation: Democracy, Authority, and the Struggle for Common Life", which was published by this research team as part of an earlier Connected Communities project. The public art project will be led by the artists at the retreat and will stimulate broader engagement with the inventive methods drawn together.

This project takes place in a context of climate change, resource depletion, and growing global mental health problems. Part of the reason for the continued failure to address these problems is that key stakeholders (including non-humans and future generations) are not sufficiently taken into account. At the heart of this project is the conviction that, while dominant research paradigms have given rise to remarkable improvements in a range of areas, they have failed to address how changing communities can remain within sustainable and healthy limits. The impacts of transforming research practices in order to listen better to participation's 'others', then, are potentially very large. The project also has a number of more specific beneficiaries.

(1) Key beneficiaries include the 6 community organisations and arts practitioners directly involved in the project. These collaborators are particularly interested in developing new methodologies for including excluded stakeholders, and in 'up-skilling' in methods of post-human participatory research and artistic practice. Such up-skilling provides the necessary ground for genuine and sustainable interdisciplinary co-production. They will also benefit from expanded international networks.

(2) The novel application of the coproduction paradigm promises to be useful for a much wider body of community groups, think tanks and policy-makers who work at the interface of human, non-human or inter-generational communities. The project incorporates activities specifically designed to provide stakeholders with: (a) practical resources, (b) theoretical tools, and (3) artistic devices that will enable many different stakeholders to engage with the project at an appropriate level.

(2a) Community groups, policy makers, and thinktanks will benefit from the creation of a searchable online map of techniques for including participation's 'others', which will equip users with practical tools for generating new ideas, correlations, cross-fertilisations, shared hypotheses and research agendas. The mapping resources will be available online, presenting examples of methods and approaches for conducting participatory research and signposting users to existing projects depending on how the maps are searched.

(2b) People and organisations occupying 'hinge' positions between communities and academic researchers will also benefit from an accessible, jargon-free book of short essays on participating with non-humans and more-than-humans. Contributions aim at stimulating discussion of participatory methods and participation's 'others', building on the success of the 'Problems of Participation' book that emerged from our previous Connected Communities project "Community Authority, Knowledge and Performance in Participatory Practice". These essays will benefit community organisations and other stakeholders by introducing, in an accessible fashion, a vocabulary for articulating the importance of developing new practices of creative listening. 300 copies of the book will be printed and distributed to community groups and think tanks. It will also be published as a free e-book, and we will post the essays on our landing page on the OpenDemocracy website, which has over 215,000 unique visitors a month.

(2c) The project will also engage a much broader general audience through a public art project. This public art project will take the form of a 'technology of transformation', provoking new framings of who and what 'counts' in participation. The artists-in-residence at the retreat will lead this, and both its form and aims will be co-determined as the retreat progresses. Where the mapping tools provide the practical resources, and the collection of essays will develop the conceptual arguments, this public art project will provide the aesthetic tools for sensitizing a broad audience to the activity and relevance of the non-human and more-than-human in research practices.