Prof. Dr. Naomi Waltham-Smith 

Amid rising political disenchantment, politicians are often exhorted to listen to citizens and castigated for failing to. But to whom should they listen, when, and to what ends? This project will produce a monograph that investigates and tests a hypothesis at once ubiquitous yet under-examined: that today’s global political situation, with threats to representative democracy and resurgent right nationalisms, can be understood as a crisis of listening. Listening is often invoked metaphorically as a panacea for the ills of alienation and polarization without specifying if that means recognition, empathy, subservience, or something else. Notwithstanding growing interest in sound within the social sciences and humanities, listening is yet to find a place in the lexicon of political-philosophical concepts. Rather, it tends to appear obliquely—in the shadow of concepts such as voice, rhetoric, or reciprocity. Using unpublished archival materials, this project will excavate how a concept of listening is formed in the history of European political philosophy and in decolonial and Black radical theories and contemporary activist practices that engage critically with that tradition. To account for its significance in democratic politics today, the book will trace how listening is entangled with two far more familiar political-theoretical concepts—democracy and nationalism—and will elucidate how listening well is a much more complex and intricate affair than the trendy shortcuts of the populist playbook.