Listening, Belonging, and Memory

Abigail Gardner is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She is the author of Ageing and Contemporary Female Musicians (2020) and PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance (2015) and co-author of Aging and Popular Music in Europe (2020) and Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (2012), with Ros Jennings.

• List of FiguresPreface Acknowledgements Introduction: Life as a Listener1.Connecting Lineages2. Applying Connected Listening3. Listening Across Age(s)4. Listening and Belonging 5. Listening, Migration, Voice, and Place6. EchoesBibliographyIndex

Gardner does for sound what Ellis did for vision in Seeing Things (2000), establish listening as witnessing, working through and in this book as thinking with your ears. Immersed as we are in podcasts, music streaming, radio, political speech, text-to-audio machine learning, and voices from the analogue past re-mastered, Gardner’s book is very timely. Listening, Belonging, and Memory addresses the multi-modality of contemporary listening, but also the social justice rationale for proper and careful listening in an age of multiple and conflicting claims to free speech in our slogan-dominated visual culture.