Listening to Voices: Creative Disruptions with the Hearing Voices Network

In the context of mental health services, voice-hearers feel the effects of academic language-use in their everyday lives through 'othering' languages and stigmatising labels. This project seeks to learn how to listen to 'others' and to counter oppressive structures of language-use by building a trans- and inter-disciplinary network of expertise in listening. It brings together voice-hearing networks, independent artists and academics to develop a suite of resources for creative listening practices. These stakeholders will collaborate to design the project activities and outputs.

'Listening to Voices' asks 'what would it be like to learn to listen together/differently?' How might creative listening practices enable individuals and communities to become more attuned to the voices of 'others' previously marginalized, repressed or ignored? It focuses on listening as the site of meaningful exchange and collaboration between the academy and those outside it, recognising that Hearing Voices groups in Scotland and N.Ireland are experts in developing innovative and carefully thought out listening practices in relation to multiple and complex voices. Similarly, the early career researchers facilitating the research are also experts in listening practices developed in three different disciplines: in this case focusing on a cross-disciplinary approach that relates to the multiple voices of (1) poetic, (2) musical and (3) narrative texts.

The aim of this exchange is to disrupt hierarchies of knowledge and power, where 'expert' academics conduct research on 'subject' communities and then create texts that reproduce aspects of this power structure. All co-created texts that result from this project will be subjected to the disruptive effect of 'other' voices, and creative means (musico, poetic, lyrical) will be used to display the results of those disruptions within the text itself. The Latin for 'text' is 'tissue' or 'woven' thing. The resulting guide to listening and all other outputs (including sound art works) will make visible the layers of meaning that represent the struggle for authority in the tissue of a collaboratively produced text, woven from the voices of voice-hearers, academics and artists. By making visible and audible the creative disruptions (in, for example, 'overwriting', erasure or annotations), these texts will foreground what is challenging and meaningful about the collaborative process and the politics of authority written over and into the fabric of the 'finished' text.

The resultant listening guide will be downloadable from the website. It will also be published in a limited printed run to be given out for free via Hearing Voices Networks. It will be made available to all project partners, and distributed at Intervoice 2015.

This data will form the basis for co-authored journal articles, which will use the innovative listening practices developed in the creation and disruption of the listening guide in order to re-imagine academic writing practices, in allowing 'other' voices within academic texts to become obvious and 'audible'. Academic practices can force the suppression of certain forms of voice but these voices resurface, for example, in the footnotes of academic texts which become places where 'other' voices (e.g. subjective, doubting, meandering, hyper-critical, comic) are allowed to be present. These places also clearly echo some aspects of voice hearing experience and therefore demonstrate resonance between the forms of expertise outlined above. This is not to say that the practice of footnoting is analogous to the experience of voice-hearing, but to foreground how academic texts claim to be objective, rational and authoritative, and place the subjective, personal and multiple at the bottom of a hierarchy of knowledge, yet academic footnotes reveal that these texts always already contain within themselves a kernel of recognition of precisely the kinds of knowledge they deem to be 'other'.

The project will impact directly on Hearing Voices Networks in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland; early career researchers; and artists who are collaborating in the project, by up-skilling the participants in good listening practices found both within and outside of academia, which provide the foundation for sustainable interdisciplinary co-production. By empowering a much wider range of individuals and communities in this practice, and in creative disruptions to 'authoritative' texts, the project fulfills and extends the aims of the Connected Communities Programme to encourage civic engagement and enable participation and resilience.

The Hearing Voices groups involved in the project will benefit from developing key leadership skills in designing and delivering the retreat, and by contributing to the content and shaping the form of the LtV guide, all of which is likely to result in improved health and wellbeing by building capacity and enriching feelings of achievement and self-worth. These outcomes will be measured via evaluation activities carried out with participating HVN groups and leaders in key meetings. The groups will benefit from the opportunity to publicize their activities by distributing the LtV Guide postcards, with the potential to attract new supporters and sustain their support structures. By increasing public awareness about voice hearing, the project will impact the wider public to help to reduce stigma and the social inequalities that follow, thereby redressing hermeneutic injustice and improving social cohesion.

The influence of 'Listening to Voices' project will reach far beyond the confines of academia. The free, downloadable version of the LtV guide to best practice in listening (along with the printed version disseminated by HVN groups) will be of practical value to voice hearers, mental health professionals, therapists, carers, facilitators, researchers, artists, writers, and those seeking to listen to human and non-human 'others'. The project website (disseminated via Intervoice and its network of at least 23 different international networks of voice hearers) will share tactics for creative disruption of authoritative texts, equipping community-based practitioners and academics with methods of resistance and fresh modes of engagement with hierarchies of knowledge and power, and changing organizational culture and practices for the better. Evaluation of the reach of the LtV guide, its usefulness and potential application will be measured using web-based survey and evaluative tools applied at the point of download of the guide.

The original methodology of inviting community partners to edit, erase and illustrate the texts collated by academics from their ideas about good practice in listening, together with the novel technique of presenting this 'disrupted' text to make visible the politics at work when diverse groups are brought together in collaboration promises to be useful for a much wider body of community groups, NGOs, and policy-makers. This potential impact will be made possible by participation at InterVoice, where leading researchers in voice hearing from around the world meet alongside representatives of international HV Networks. By raising awareness about the lived experience of voice hearers in the UK and best practice in listening, the project has the potential to increase the effectiveness of mental health public services and policy.

The academic outputs will impact upon theory-based researchers who do not actively collaborate with non-academic partners but seek to understand the effects of methods of listening, creativity and collaboration on community empowerment. The sound art will engage a much broader general audience by introducing them to listening practices and the relevant expertise of voice hearing networks and academics perhaps not previously encountered in everyday life.