Listening as Intervention

I’m drawn to Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s new materials environmental rhetoric for many reasons, one of which involves her call for us to “listen better” to the troubled/troubling ways we dwell amidst—and are implicated within—environmental change and destruction.  I think of “listening better” as a valuable extension of “deep listening,” as both approaches to sensed/sensing dwelling provoke us to listen beyond or through the distracting, attention-hijacking hypercultural noise that edges into our daily routines and obfuscates our material connections to land and other non/humans.  

Before enrolling in this course, I had never really thought about the vital role listening plays in digital rhetorics and composition. Yet, between Arola’s call for us to cultivate digital landscapes as always already constellated with land, bodies, senses, and relationships, and Shivener and Edwards’ reminder that “bodies of all kinds (land, water, non/human) are entangled in data center ecologies,” I’m beginning to understand listening not merely as a passive act of attention, but a deeply rhetorical, embodied/inter-bodying act that pulls at the troubled seams between the digital and the lived. (178) [JZ-17]

[Arola, 2018; Shivener and Edwards, 2020; Jennifer Clary-Lemon, 2023]