Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities [Paperback]

Generating more questions than it answers, Community Listening invites readers to learn about listening that is deeply enmeshed in specific community sites, stories, and relations. Contributors bring their lived experience as listeners in, to, and alongside the communities whose praxes they surface in chapters that enrich and complicate the deep interrelationship of listening and storytelling. Affirming that storytelling is the vessel through which community listening is made, unmade, and remade, the stories in this collection probe what it means to listen from community vantages and to bring such listening into academic conversations. Collectively, the contributors to this multidisciplinary collection advance scholarship that has community as the locus of iterative knowledge seeking and sharing.Generating more questions than it answers, Community Listening invites readers to learn about listening that is deeply enmeshed in specific community sites, stories, and relations. 

Beyond its obvious pedagogical value, Community Listeningis an important contribution to the scholarship on listening because it pushes back against idealized notions of community built on the false promise of harmony or consensus. Instead of offering an ideal to aspire to, the collection imagines community as an open, unanswerable question that must be revisited again and again.

Writing on the Edge

Jenn Fishmanpursues teaching, research, and leadership opportunities across three areas of academic work: undergraduate research, longitudinal research, and community literacies. A recipient of the Braddock Award and PI of several grant-supported projects, her publications include The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (with Dominic DelliCarpini and Jane Greer, Parlor Press), Telling Stories: Perspectives on Longitudinal Research in Writing Studieslãš