Accessing Disciplinary Hinterlands through Listening

In the context of this presentation the Hinterland is the place beyond the agreed methodologies, vocabularies and processes that stand as certainties of a particular discipline. Accessing this Hinterland is a stepping into the unknown, the unagreed, what we might not be able to talk about or grasp within disciplinary frameworks; what might not yield value or acceptance within its community of researchers and knowledge stakeholders. However, it is potentially also a place of opportunity, of new insights and cross-disciplinary production, which might yield much innovative thinking and doing, augmenting the conventional disciplinary knowledge process.

The discipline, in this context, is understood as the walled cities of knowledge. And we believe that sounding and listening as a form of activism and interference, can break through these partitions to hear possibilities, and resistance to them, and to make propositions about how else we could work together, how else knowledge could be produced. In this sense this presentation, jointly staged by Prof. Anna Barney and Dr. Salomé Voegelin proposes that listening to these disciplinary Hinterlands provides access to an unknown sphere that hovers behind and between disciplines and that offers opportunities for new thinking, cross-disciplinary collaborations and another way to see the frames given to us by academic infrastructure and expectation.

This presentation will introduce the audience to Listening across Disciplines I & II, two UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects, and involves them in a discussion of the cross-disciplinary potential of sound.