ResearchWorks: Listening, Belonging, and Memory

(Photo: Sally Nash and the Del Turner Quintet © Veterans' Voices http://veteransvoicesglos.co.uk, from the front cover of Listening, Belonging, and Memory by Abigail Gardner)

This is a talk about Listening, Belonging, and Memory, a book about listening to voices. Sometimes these voices tell stories about themselves, or about the music they like, sometimes these voices come across the radio, or are archived in national sound collections. Sometimes the voices tell stories about their pasts, sometimes images tell stories about the past because the voices are gone. Sometimes you have to strain to hear the voices through swathes of silence and story. And it is these two, silence and story, that lie at the heart of the book, how they interweave, how they are activated, maneuvered, reconfigured, and denied. This is a process that is also about foregrounding the ordinary, listening for resonance and experience from spaces and people whose narratives have slipped beneath accepted historiographies, expectations, and statistics. It is about listening in action, and observations from the ‘field’ of digital storytelling. And it is about listening online, a practice which extends to social media threads, newspaper articles and UK government policy statements. Listening is done with age, and as witness, in place, and in time and the talk reflects on how listening may be changed by where we listen, when and who to.

Speaker

Professor Abigail Gardner is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Gloucestershire’s School of Creative Arts. She has written on music, gender, ageing and ‘inheritance’, and her latest book Listening, Belonging and Memory (Bloomsbury) was published in August 2023. Other publications include Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (2019), Aging and Popular Music in Europe (2019), PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance (2015) and Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (2012, with Ros Jennings). She is Editor of the IASPM journal, The International Association for the Study of Popular Music and has led European listening projects, such as ‘Mapping the Music of Migration’ www.mamumi.eu , produced short documentaries and digital storytelling initiatives. She is currently PI on a sound, environment and ageing project called ‘SAGE' which is trialling the use of natural sounds in care homes.

Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.