Launch First Issue of Soapbox: Practices of Listening
Soapbox Issue 1.1 Launch: Practices of Listening
28 February 2019, 20:00 – 21:30
SPUI25, Spui 25-27 | 1012 WX, Amsterdam
On February 28, student-run journal Soapbox will launch their first issue with a celebratory evening at SPUI25.
The event will feature a discussion with the authors of Soapbox 1.1. Presenting a variety of perspectives on the concept and practices of listening, these graduate researchers will come together to discuss the common thread of their work: perhaps it is less what we say that affects our social and political condition, than the various ways in which diverse practices of listening take place. For these writers, acts of listening are not simply an individual choice, but rather subject to infrastructural distributions of listening channels – aesthetic, technological, and political – amplifying voices from some directions and muting those from others.
While we may have always been talking, the practice of listening is undergoing a transformation. For this event, Soapbox, a graduate journal for cultural analysis, invites the authors of this first issue to discuss their work on the conditions, practices, and policies of listening in political protest, speech to text software, and audiovisual ‘time crystals’.
New practices of listening come at us from all sides, complicating rules, relations, and expectations set in place by the old. Emerging forms of political activism and the cacophony of digitally distributed voices make the act of directing attention itself politically saturated, while speech recognition software and audiovisual distribution platforms tether the listener to the listened to in new and unexpected ways. Presenting a variety of perspectives on and examples of listening, these graduate researchers share one idea: perhaps it is less what we say that affects our social and political condition than the various ways in which what we call the practices of listening take place. For them, acts of listening are not simply an individual choice, but rather subject to infrastructural distributions of listening channels, both aesthetic, technological, and political – amplifying voices from some directions and muting those from others.
Soapbox is an open-access platform for cultural analysis, run by students from the University of Amsterdam. Its website and each biannual issue both give the floor to students, PhDs and young researchers, publishing forward-thinking and experimental work on a broad range of cultural artefacts, concepts and phenomena.