Broken Narratives: Listening with & through another’s voice, another’s voices
This talk will reflect upon a question that has arisen from over two decades of working with people who hear voices, primarily as part of the Hearing Voices Movement. The question of how to listen with and through another’s voice, another’s voices has been a key orientation of various practices and technologies of listening developed within peer support groups within the movement. These groups have enabled people to enter into the arduous process of experiencing themselves as “voice hearers”, leading to profound transformations in the phenomenology of the voices and the stories and narratives they are able to tell. The process of telling a story about one’s voices that is located within life events, life histories and, often traumatic disavowed histories emerges from a collective, shared process, which I have described as a form of mediated, distributed attention. The processes of change and transformation do not originate with an individual voice hearer, who becomes an intermediary, but not necessarily the agent of change and transformation. The lecture will reflect upon the question of what kinds of technologies of listening and attention can we develop to extend these processes of recovery, which do not necessarily end in the eradication of voices. The talk will provide examples, which draw from Lisa’s ethnography of peer support groups, work on “diasporic vision”, as well as drawing on personal examples and materials from growing up with a Mother who hears voices.
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