When the stored representation of the meaning of a stimulus is accessed through the processing of a sensory input it is maintained in an activated state for a certain amount of time that allows for further processing. This semantic activation is generally accompanied by conscious identification, which can be demonstrated by the ability of a person to perform discriminations on the basis of the meaning of the stimulus. The idea that a sensory input can give rise to semantic activation without (...) concomitant conscious identification was the central thesis of the controversial research in subliminal perception. Recently, new claims for the existence of such phenomena have arisen from studies in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision, and visual pattern masking. Because of the fundamental role played by these types of experiments in cognitive psychology, the new assertions have raised widespread interest. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of the concept ‘student active forms of learning’. It aims not at conclusions, but at a perspicuous representation—a map for future navigation and understanding of the concept. From the perspective of philosophy of education, I characterize and discuss issues relating to student active learning in the paper. The context for my discussion is higher education. Further, I contrast student active learning to a form of learning that is allegedly passive, the lecture, which (...) traditionally is the main form of learning in higher education. I proceed by assessing arguments in favor of the two forms by way of a philosophical analysis, a main component of which is transparent exposition. Positive conclusions are not the main concern, but rather to demonstrate possibilities. Still, two results of the discussions in the paper are noteworthy: ‘student active learning’ is a weak construct, it being too general or even contradictory; the lecture is not passive, and a student-centered education, consequently, should not be construed as a dismissal of lecturing. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the phenomenologically grounded dynamics of hearing and listening as a possible approach to our sonic experience. Its starting point is the studies of contemporary urban spaces devoted to their sonic experience. The results of these studies and their interpretation will serve as a starting point for the introduction of dynamics of hearing and listening. In the next part of this article, I will focus on the elaboration of this relationship with (...) regard to the critique of Husserl’s concept of activity and passivity in his late work Experience and Judgment and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of being-in-the-world. Based on this, in the end, certain common features will be shown, connecting the thematization of activity and passivity with the relationship of hearing and listening. (shrink)

Watching, looking at, and listening to, are all things that perceiving agents actively do. Though the occurrence of these activities appears to entail perception of elements of the agent's environment, perception is not something that can be actively done by agents. This raises the question how perceptual activity and perception are related to one another. This chapter, through reflecting on a discussion of listening offered by Brian O'Shaughnessy, argues that listening to material particulars ought to be understood (...) as the agential maintenance of aural awareness of those particulars, with the aim of knowing what sounds they are making. He goes on to explore some of the consequences of these claims about listening for exercises of perceptual agency involving the other sensory modalities. (shrink)

Listening appears as elusive as it is crucial to democratic life, particularly in conditions of structural injustice. Dominant groups benefit from histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, common responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment. What lies behind this pervasive and persistent failure to listen to claims of structural injustice by more advantaged groups, and what does this mean for democratic engagement? This paper addresses this question via three interventions: first, it develops a novel account of listening (...) that reveals why listening to claims of structural injustice often proves difficult. Second, it examines how inhabiting positions of relative advantage shapes whether and how people listen to such claims. Finally, it explores the implications these challenges have for the design of democratic processes that seek to engage advantaged groups regarding structural injustice. To develop this account, I draw together current scholarship regarding listening and structural injustice with original fieldwork of recent and current efforts to engage more advantaged communities regarding a specific form of structural injustice: specifically, interviews and observation of the ten organizations across Aotearoa New Zealand most active in efforts to engage communities regarding socio-economic inequality in the country. (shrink)

This paper seeks to redress a predominant focus on speaking over listening in theorising the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI). Frequently, where listening is discussed, the focus is on encouraging children to be active listeners. This means of describing the listening that occurs in the CPI has lost some efficacy as the language of active listening has been co-opted as a management technique focussed on making the speaker feel heard with little emphasis on the (...) intentions or outcomes for the listener. Thus, on a cynical reading, ‘active listening’ can become reduced to performative physical indicators of listening (such as eye contact and body language), overlooking the ethical-epistemic commitments of the genuinely engaged listener. Here, rather than formulating new terms to describe listening, I propose Iris Murdoch’s account of attentiveness as an apt descriptor of the effects of truly involved listening on the self that seeks to attend to the unfolding content of the CPI and as a way of characterising the qualities of a CPI where such listening is achieved. Here, attentiveness is presented as a concept that captures the unique facets of listening as a challenge to individual participants concerned with contributing effectively to the dialogue as it unfolds within the CPI and those facilitating the dialogue. The paper briefly explores some implications for practice contexts, proposing three interventions to cultivate attentiveness in CPI participants and in facilitators (especially if they are undergraduate or postgraduate in Philosophy because philosophical identities might become a barrier to attentiveness). At its conclusion, this paper repositions listening in the CPI as a productive risk with a particular form of ‘aliveness’ aptly captured by the term attention. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 294-298 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Pp. xiv + 354. $22.95 paperback; (...) $59.95 cloth. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer. University of South Carolina Series in Rhetoric/Communication. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1997. Pp. xii + 408. NP. The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Ed. Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe. Calgary, Alberta: U of Calgary P, 1999. Pp. 279. NP. These three books, all published within the last five years, are both reflections of and important contributions to the growing scholarship on women's roles in rhetorical history as theorists and as practitioners. Indeed, the titles listed in chronological order--Reclaiming Rhetorica, Listening to Their Voices, and The Changing Tradition--suggest the process of transformation that the study of rhetorical history has undergone in recent years. Both individually and together, these works are a healthful antidote to the rhetorical history most of us learned at our (male) professors' knees.The books share certain features. As edited volumes, they span rhetorical history, from its classical roots to modern feminist theories. Although some figures appear more than once in different volumes (e.g., Aspasia and Mary Astell), the constraints of brief chapters permit us only tantalizing glimpses of each woman and her activities. Like all edited collections, these books include a variety of viewpoints and voices. Despite the disparity that is inevitable in a collection of essays, the quality of the work in these volumes is uniformly high. The editors of all three collections have done a nice job of assuring that the contributors stay to the point and write well without sacrificing scholarly precision. For those seeking a simple history or detailed analysis of any particular figure or time, these books will not suffice. But for most readers who are unfamiliar with the full range [End Page 294] of women in rhetorical history, this reader among them, these volumes provide a delightful introduction to the resilience, creativity, and significance of women in our formerly unacknowledged rhetorical past.In her introduction to Reclaiming Rhetorica, Andrea Lunsford shares the intriguing history of the volume, which explains its eclecticism and its goals. Approached by students who wanted to explore the role of women in rhetorical history, Annette Kolodny offered a two-semester graduate seminar titled "Women Rhetoricians." For the class, the students did extensive archival recovery research, much of which is included in the published volume. Interestingly, the students were the ones who persisted in trying to bring their works, plus the other contributors' efforts, to publication. The resultant book is, then, as James J. Murphy says in his foreword, "not a history of women rhetoricians, or women orators, or women writers. It is, instead, a glimmer of possibilities, an array of glances,--an enthymeme."The essays range widely in time covered and in focus. For example, the first chapter is a consideration of Aspasia, who left no written record of her own. Her accomplishments and influence must, then, be constructed from references to her in the works of others. The authors, Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong, contend that both her gender and her non-Athenian roots played a role in the suppression of her memory. Returning to the theme of "dangerous femininity," the concluding chapter explores the work of a modern theorist, Julia Kristeva. In that chapter, Suzanne Clark demonstrates how Kristeva has challenged traditional notions of rhetoric and provides dialogism as an antidote to the constraints of earlier approaches to human interaction. The chapters between these two take a variety of directions. Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist dialogics stands alongside of the autobiographical The... (shrink)

For the work of listening can be understood as a collaboration with the musical work itself, and in this sense for Adorno listening, as will be discussed below, is an activity of co-composing or reconstituting the music. Certainly Adorno’s dialectical philosophical approach is at great variance with the 'empirical musicology'2 through which contemporary music studies explores these topics, but its contemporary relevance is all the greater in that it puts Adorno’s contributions in the larger context of critical social (...) theory and its commitment to sustaining the human capacity for a vision of emancipation. It is not my intention here to enter into a detailed consideration of the relationship between Adorno’s perspective and the work of contemporary musicologists and music theorists. Rather, my aim is to elaborate Adorno’s conception of the work of listening in some detail, in the context of his thinking about what he calls ›the new music‹ and its place in the history of Western art music. (shrink)

When we listen to music, what do we listen to and for? How do we listen? How well do we listen and how do we listen well? This paper suggests that ‘modes of engagement’ are the active, operational means by which listeners experience music and that listening experiences more often than not involve multiple interacting modes rather than a fixed mode throughout. Modes of engagement may be voluntarily employed or involuntarily adopted; they may be technical or descriptive; they (...) may involve explicitly musical details and relationships, or they may seem more peripheral to the music. In the end, though, successive, simultaneous, and interacting modes of engagement are said to define unique and meaningful trajectories through music as heard. (shrink)

Listening is crucial to reaching multicultural understanding. Borrowing from the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer we develop a hermeneutics of listening. To listen we must risk our prejudices, but these prejudices constitute our very identity. In this paper we attempt to answer the question, “Why Listen?” if listening is such a potentially dangerous activity.

Sense of agency refers to the ability to influence one’s functioning and environment, relating to self-efficacy and wellbeing. In youth, agency may be challenged by external demands or redefinition of self-image. Music, having heightened relevance for the young, has been argued to provide feelings of self-agency for them. Yet, there is little empirical research on how music impacts adolescents’ daily sense of agency. The current study investigated whether music listening influences adolescents’ perceived agency in everyday life and which individual (...) and contextual determinants would explain such an influence. Participants were 44 adolescents (48% female, 36% with training in music, mean age 14), recruited through local schools. The mobile Experience Sampling app MuPsych was used to collect brief self-reports of personal music listening experiences during daily life. This method assessed the change in the listener’s perceived control over both their emotional states (Internal Agency), and their external environment (External Agency), over five minutes of music listening. Also measured were changes in mood states, and contextual variables (social situation, concurrent activity, and reason for listening). The impact of music on the sense of agency was analyzed using multilevel structural equation modelling. There was no general increase of agency across all music episodes, but agency fluctuations were determined by specific individual and contextual factors. Music training predicted increases in both internal and external agency during music listening, and external agency increased more for male participants. Certain context features such as listening alone, paying attention to music, and listening for enjoyment were related to greater increases in agency. Increases in agency significantly correlated with increases in mood valence. Our findings confirmed the plasticity and situational embeddedness of the sense of agency. Music indeed can support agency, but the impact is dependent on specific individual and contextual factors. Sense of agency can be seen as a health resource and significant part of youth development, and current findings provide new insight into when and by whom such affordance is likely to be employed. (shrink)

Little is known empirically about the role of supervisor listening and the emotional conditions that listening facilitates. Having the opportunity to speak is only one part of the communication process between employees and supervisors. Employees also react to whether they perceive the supervisor as actively listening. In two studies, this paper examines three important outcomes of employee perceptions of supervisor listening. Furthermore, positive and negative affect are investigated as distinct mediating mechanisms. Results from Study 1 revealed (...) that employee perceptions of supervisor listening reflected supervisors’ self-ratings of how they listen to their employees and these perceptions were associated with the three work outcomes. Study 2 replicated the findings in a larger sample and found evidence for two explanatory mechanisms. Positive affect mediated the effects of perceived supervisor listening on organizational citizenship behavior and turnover intention, whereas negative affect mediated listening effects on emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. Implications for organizational research and managerial practice concerning workforce sustainability are discussed. (shrink)

This paper adds a phenomenological account to the discussion on what constitutes the favorable prospects of the peer-relation in the context of self-help. By drawing on Heidegger’s lectures on St Paul’s First Thessalonians, and engaging in dialogue with a fictive case, we show that more attention needs to be given to how meaning is enacted, rather than simply adopted, in the peer-relation; that is, away from experiential content towards the process of how experiential knowledge is transferred communicatively. This, we argue, (...) may clarify the underpinnings of the peer-relation and its emancipatory potential. Our findings propose a reconsideration of the role played by communicative activities in self-help. And, whereas storytelling has often been propounded as a way to facilitate agency among self-helpers, also the act of listening should receive more attention. By considering listening as an expression of agency, attention is reversed from self-narration on behalf of the person expected to be helped from it, to participation in another person’s story. The enaction approach to the peer-relation elaborated on in this paper invites the reader to rethink the value of talking and listening in helping relationships. (shrink)

Screenwriters and film directors have long been fascinated by the challenges of representing the listening experience on screen. While music has played a central role in film narrative since the conception of moving pictures, the representation of music listening has remained a special occurrence.In Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema, author Giorgio Biancorosso argues for a redefinition of the music listener as represented in film. Rather than construct the listener as a reverential concertgoer, music (...) analyst, or gallery dweller, this book instead shows how films offer a new way of thinking about listening as distributed experience, an activity made public and shareable across vast cultural spaces rather than an insular motion. It shows how cinema functions as not only a reservoir of established modes of listening, but also an agent in the development of new listening practices. As Biancorosso argues, many films have perpetuated a long-existing paradox of music as a means of silencing. Consider an aggressive score overlaying battle scenes or a romantic scene conveying unspoken intimacy. In the place of conversational exchange exists a veil of sound in the form of music, and Situated Listening explains why this function influences both the course of interpretation and empathy experienced by film spectators. By focusing on cinematic, physical, and emotional scenery surrounding a character, viewers can recognize aspects of their own lives, developing a deeper empathy for each fictional character through real and shared listening practices. (shrink)

The present article focuses on listening conceptualized as an active process of perception, with no fixed boundaries, directly connected to thought, and highlighting the ethical underpinnings of communication. Overall, listening is discussed as the primary and authentic characteristic of being with a double movement – towards the Other and towards oneself. A close link between obedience and listening is emphasized, which is demonstrated by emplying the Russian equivalent of the verb ‘to obey’ and the peculiarities of (...) its cases. The dynamic nature of listening is also discussed in terms of metaphor (transfer based on similarity) and metonymy (transfer based on contiguity). It is argued that listening reveals the liminal and sacred nature of communication. (shrink)

In the philosophy of music and in musicology, apart from ethnomusicology, there is a long tradition of focus on musical compositions as objects of inquiry. But in both disciplines, a body of recent work focuses on the place of performance in the making of music. Most of this work, however, still takes for granted that compositions, at least in Western art music, are the primary objects of aesthetic attention. In this paper I focus on aesthetic attention to the performing activity (...) itself. I begin by roughly characterizing what is involved in attending to the performing activity of musical performers. I then argue that such attention is essential to the full appreciation of the central compositions of the Western art music canon. Finally, I argue that, often enough, recordings provide a suitable vehicle for this sort of attention; listeners to recordings can use them to listen to musical performance. (shrink)

Summary In this contribution, I discuss the perceptual potential of certain genres of experimental and contemporary music, commonly grouped under the label “sound-based music”. The sonic patterns typical of this music are mostly associated, during listening, with visual and tactile sensory qualities and can evoke mental representations as shapes in motion. These are the result of physical-acoustic energies organized according to a perceptual grammar whose organization follows a series of Gestalt and kinaesthetic principles. The paper explores the nature of (...) the relationship between sound patterns of sound-based music and their mental images. Based on morphodynamic theory, it is proposed the emergence of cognitive image schemas, which are at the centre of this relationship. The image schemas depict the forces and tensions of our experience of the world (e.g., figure-background, near-far, superimposition, compulsion, blockage), as being the cognitive and experiential response to the incoming sound patterns. The sense of this music activates precisely the basic structures of sensorimotor experience by which we encounter a world that we can understand and act within, leading to a rich series of high-level associations and responses. (shrink)

In this essay, Mordechai Gordon interprets Martin Buber's ideas on dialogue, presence, and especially his notion of embracing in an attempt to shed some light on Buber's understanding of listening. Gordon argues that in order to understand Buber's conception of listening, one needs to examine this concept in the context of his philosophy of dialogue. More specifically, his contention is that closely examining Buber's notion of embracing the other is critical to making sense of his conception of (...) class='Hi'>listening. Gordon's analysis suggests that, in Buber's model, listening involves a kind of active attentiveness to another's words or actions, engaging them as though they are directed specifically at us. Gordon's discussion of dialogue and listening also indicates that the relation between speaking and listening is one of reciprocity and mutual dependence and that listening plays an essential role in initiating many dialogues by creating a space in which two people can embrace each other as complete individuals. (shrink)

I offer a novel interdisciplinary approach to understanding the communicative task of listening, which is under-theorised compared to its more conspicuous counterpart, speech. By correlating a Rylean view of mental actions with a virtue ethical framework, I show listeners’ internal activity as a morally relevant feature of how they treat people. The listener employs a policy of responsiveness in managing the extent to which they allow a speaker's voice to be centred within their more effortful, engaged attention. A just (...) listener's policy of responsiveness avoids unwarrantedly dismissing speakers’ messages on the basis of peripheral attention alone. (shrink)

This article approaches listening practices and the role of technological mediation within ecological sound art, building on findings through the artistic research practices of the two authors. Through documentation of the authors’ ecological sound art practices of aeolian guitar performance, curation, composition, performance on found objects and field recording, we argue that phenomenological variation is inherent to the use of technology across all these forms of performative responsivity, as well as in the analytical forms of listening enacted through (...) stimulated recall and micro-phenomenology. By unpacking the agencies at play in ecological sound art, we discuss how these artistic practices afford “unexpected ways” (Arteaga, 2017, p. 25) to knowledge. The article thus attempts to provide insight into human and non-human agencies at play in phenomenological approaches to ecological sound art and technological mediation, activated through listening. (shrink)

Proficient listening has been viewed as a critical skill in HEC (healthcare ethics consultation) from the inception of the practice, and it is included in the field’s set of core competencies that practitioners need to master to become a certified healthcare ethics consultant (HEC-C). Despite its centrality to the work of HEC, practitioners and trainees receive little or no formal training in the craft of listening, and there are few available resources that ethics consultants and trainees can access (...) to enhance their listening skills. This dearth of training in the skill of listening belies the enormous challenge of listening proficiently. Although many clinical ethics researchers refer to the need for “active listening” in HEC, the term is employed without description or instruction. In this article, I argue that a more helpful depiction of the requisite skill is conveyed by the term “diagnostic listening.” After describing the strategy of diagnostic listening, I introduce a novel technique for honing the listening skills needed for HEC: the ADEPT Model. The ADEPT Model is a tool that can begin to fill the training gap for this important skill. (shrink)

Women Activating Agency in Academia seeks to create and expand safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal stories and assemblages of agency. It provides readers with the opportunity to connect with the strategies women are using to navigate academe and the core values, linked to trust, relationship, wellbeing and ethics of care, they live by. The collection offers the stories of women academics from around the globe and across disciplines and showcases their efforts to meaningfully listen and converse in order (...) to resist self-audit and diminished identities. Reflections come from a range of responsive, personal and aesthetic techniques, including writing groups, guided autobiography, auto-ethnography, collective activism and slow scholarship. Chapters engage with themes and ideas such as agency, neoliberalism, ontological security, androcentricity, identity and collegial support, which manifest in unique ways for female academics. The focus in this volume is what really matters to women in the academy, as they share their efforts to 'be' themselves in their work, to 'care for themselves and others' and to 'count what isn't counted'. It aims to prove how collaborative storytelling and discussion can empower female academics to preserve and achieve these ambitions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Listening Dangerously”: Dialogue Training as Contemplative PedagogyJudith Simmer-BrownContemplative pedagogies in higher-education classrooms employ methods adapted from meditative practices in great religious traditions in order to enhance student learning and to fulfill the historic purpose of a liberal arts education: to discover the nature of human life. Our Western education systems were originally derived from religious settings in which questions about what it means to be human were paramount. (...) Over the centuries, through the influences of the European Enlightenment, modern science, and postmodernism, questions about personal identity and the meaning of life increasingly have been removed from our classrooms and deemed inappropriate for the university. Now, in a rebalancing of priorities in higher education, the pendulum is swinging the other direction, largely driven by the insistence of our students, who indicate the centrality of religion and spirituality in their expectations of college curricular and cocurricular offerings. The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California Los Angeles conducted a seven-year study that surveyed more than one hundred thousand college students, matriculating freshmen attending 236 diverse colleges and universities across the country, and reported this:The study reveals that today’s college students have very high levels of spiritual interest and involvement. Many are actively engaged in a spiritual quest and in exploring the meaning and purpose of life. They are also very engaged and involved in religion, reporting considerable commitment to their religious beliefs and practices. As they begin college, freshmen have high expectations for the role their institutions will play in their emotional and spiritual development. They place great value on their college enhancing their self-understanding, helping them develop personal values, and encouraging their expression of spirituality.1The HERI report goes on to say that three-fourths of college freshmen say they are searching for meaning or purpose in their lives; nearly half of the students surveyed say that they consider it “essential” or “very important” to seek opportunities to help [End Page 33] them grow spiritually. Two-thirds reported that they derive strength, support and guidance from their spiritual or religious beliefs.2 Now our students are asking us to return higher education to the meaningful journey that it was intended to be.However, it is not sufficient to assume that we have fulfilled our responsibility merely by making minor adjustments to the contents of our courses. Certainly, students are asking for information, but they are particularly asking for mentorship and methods of study that require introspection, silence, and aids to inner transformation. Methods like these were customary at the foundations of liberal education, where religious reading, memorization, contemplation, and debate were central to learning.3 In higher education classrooms throughout the country, similar methods are finding their way back into learning strategies, enriching the lives of our students.Of course, this does not mean that our students are asking for religious instruction, conversion, or proselytizing. We have been through all of that over the last forty years, and finally religious studies as an academic field has secured methodologies that bring critical perspectives to the study of religion. However, we have often stripped the classroom of exploration of the Big Questions and of equipping students for the journey of self-knowledge that is so essential in contemplating these questions. Given our history as a discipline, it is important to distinguish between religious or spiritual practice and educational pedagogy in the methods we are bringing into our classrooms. We must skillfully develop precise and appropriate approaches that remove any prerequisite of religious belief from our pedagogies, and design them to serve the larger educational journeys of our students. And it is important to address the ethical issues inherent in bringing contemplative practices into our classrooms. I have addressed these issues elsewhere,4 and in this paper I will take a different tack.Buddhist-Christian Contemplative Pedagogies?I propose this question: What kind of contemplative pedagogy would be most appropriate to introduce students to the priorities of the work of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies? Especially, how could our emphasis on “study, reflection, interchange, and practice arising out of Buddhist-Christian encounters”5 be reflected, not just in the contents, but... (shrink)

There are many theories surrounding infant imitation; however, there is no research to our knowledge evaluating the reliability of listener perception of vocal imitation in prelinguistic infants. This paper evaluates intra- and inter-rater judgments on the degree of “imitativeness” in utterances of infants below 12 months of age. 18 listeners were presented audio segments selected from naturalistic recordings to represent in each case a parent vocal model followed by an infant utterance ranging from low to high degrees of imitativeness. The (...) naturalistic data suggested vocal imitation occurred rarely across the first year, but strong intra- and inter-rater correlations were found for judgments of imitativeness. Our results suggest salience of the infant’s vocal imitation despite its rare occurrence as well as active perception by listeners of the imitative signal. We discuss infant vocal imitation as a potential signal of well-being and as an indicator of language learning and vocal communication skills as perceived by caregivers. (shrink)

Recently, calls have grown louder for more stakeholder democracy that is, letting stakeholders participate in the process of organizing, decision‐making, and governance in corporations, especially in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. Despite the relevance of the subject, the impact of customer involvement in CSR on their company‐related attitudes and behaviors still represents a major research void. The paper at hand develops a conceptual framework of consumer involvement in CSR based on the existing literature, theories of stakeholder democracy, (...) and organizational boundaries as well as drawing from the qualitative focus group interviews (N = 24). The framework is tested on a large scale, two‐time point field‐experimental study (N = 3,397). More specifically, consumer reactions to three degrees of customer involvement (i.e., information, feedback, and dialogue) are tested in two different CSR domains (i.e., company‐internal business process vs. company‐external philanthropic CSR). Results indicate that the customer involvement in CSR has a more beneficial effect in terms of strengthening customer outcomes in CSR domains that directly affect external stakeholders of the company (i.e., philanthropic CSR) than in domains that mainly concern company‐internal stakeholders (i.e., business process CSR). (shrink)

According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the (...) theory’s ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech- and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas’ recognized role in facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its “alerting capacity” and “corporality”, respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of my work in philosophy from my first book on Friedrich Schiller and the political sublime to my most recent project on listening to traumatic forms of violence. Starting with a reflection on the autobiographical character of philosophy, I propose to take up the question of an aesthetic dimension of philosophical critique, where aesthetics is understood as an always already embodied perspective on the world, on truth, and on philosophical activity, as well as an (...) always already political realm, where the distribution of sense pre-determines our approach and articulation of experience. Departing from aesthetics understood and deployed as critique, the paper moves on to ask about the specific frameworks of sense or grammars that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realms of memory-building and history-making—particularly in those contexts where historical, political, and institutional forms of violence produce silencing and erasure. Putting in dialogue the latter with decolonial studies, I interpret “traumatic violence” as a colonizing form of violence, understanding that one of its central aspects is that it is not only an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible as such. In this context, my project on grammars of listening seeks to carefully unpack these complex intersections while also explaining why I believe that a radical form of listening is an essential subversive/imaginative strategy against traumatic/colonial violence. (shrink)

Then you have a look around, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us—I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening by Daniel M. GrossNathaniel A. RiversBeing-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening. By Daniel M. Gross. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 260 pp. Paper $34.95. ISBN: 9780520340466.September 29, 2008. Radiohead front man Thom Yorke sits frustrated at his piano. Live on stage. He is trying to start a song, but something is tripping him up. The song is (...) “Videotape,” and he cannot start playing it. “Temporary loss of information,” he mumbles to an expectant crowd.The song “Videotape” is syncopated, meaning there is a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur” (Wikipedia 2021). Practically, it means that Yorke is joining a song already in progress: there is a beat before the beat that “starts” the song. Yorke, then, is starting the song not on the down beat but after the down beat—after the song has already started. He needs to hear something before he can play anything. He needs to hear the beat before he can sing. “Give me the fuckin’ hi-hats only,” he asks.Yorke is moved by the drum and a beat not his alone. It is a beat preceding him to which he must become subject. He needs to listen, but it is a particular kind of listening: a passive listening that makes him, as it were, “subject to the instruction of others” (Gross 137).Like Yorke on stage in 2008, I struggled to start and write this review. Not for any fault in the book, which is clear and concise, complex and compelling, but because I wanted to write a review that practiced the art of listening Gross cultivates:Active listening [“auditor-as-judge”], as it is understood by theoreticians and practitioners of persuasion from classical antiquity through today, only takes off at dusk like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, leaving behind obscurities of our daily lives including our susceptibility [End Page 190] to advertising, our political apathy, our immersion in common-sense, our lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change. We have much work ahead when it comes to the theoretical and practical nuances of listening in its passive dimensions.(137)This review practices listening to this call in this way. The worry remains that the genre of the book review tends toward what Gross identifies as active listening: the judge, the critic. I should probably be the “active listener-as-judge” (83). Surely, a good reviewer should protect future readers from a “bad teacher” (131). But how should a book review practicing passive listening read? Does it aim for learning? Surely. Credulity? Why not. Subjection? Hmm.... It is, after all, subjection that lies at the heart of Gross’s book. Subjection is the beat before the beat that is rhetoric, an art forever syncopated.There are many aspects of Gross’s argument, which I will hear out below, but key for me, and crucial for Gross’s argument, is his emphasis on passive dispositions (e.g., apathy, adherence, suggestibility, attentiveness, etc.) crucial to political formations and so vital to rhetoric. Being moved, toward which rhetoric (sacred rhetoric especially) bends, must admit not only to the prowess and power of the rhetor but also, necessarily, to the “basic vulnerability that lies at the heart of political agency itself ” (1). Indeed, “Rhetoric as a life science depends upon those lives affected” (8). Because of this dependence (and dependencies saturate the arts of listening), “rhetoric offers much more detail because it is the traditional domain where subjection is both theorized and practiced” (3).To articulate this offer, Gross works through what he describes as the “orphaned materials of modernity [that] often turn out to be vital strains of a different geology altogether” (12). Gross is here describing his own historiographic methodology. There are other things to hear in and about rhetoric. The core of his argument isn’t simply that listening is a practice important to rhetoric, with listening understood as a kind of critical facility—what Gross calls “active listener-as-judge” (83–84). Listening, for Gross, through his approach to Heidegger, bears upon being and becoming... (shrink)

As a performative activity, music has the potential to help explain the interpretive and rhetorical work of lawyering. As an aesthetic creation that reflects and shapes individual identities and social bonds, music is a cultural force that may contest or enhance political and legal power. The papers in this special issue contribute to the expanding field that pairs law and music by examining how music has affected legal practices and legal thinking in particular historical and cultural instances.

This article articulates a fundamental crisis of disciplinary philosophy—its lack of disciplinary self-consciousness and the skeptical problems this generates—and, through that articulation, exemplifies a means of mitigating its force. Disciplinary philosophy organizes itself as a producer of specialized knowledge, with the apparatus of journals, publication requirements, and other professional standards, but it cannot agree on what constitutes knowledge, progress, or value, and evinces ignorance of its history and alternatives. This situation engenders a skepticism that threatens the legitimacy of disciplinary philosophy. (...) The article proposes a response to this skepticism, rooted in the conditions that philosophers evince a specific kind of awareness of their own activity and its professional and cultural location, demonstrate this awareness by articulating it in the practice of philosophy itself, and recognize that precisely such articulation lies at the core of the Socratic idea of philosophy as a form of self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this chapter, a positive account of reader engagement with fiction will developed. According to this picture, the basic reader attitude towards fictional works is imaginative. But, in my view, engagement with fiction does not require any de se imagining on the part of readers; it requires only de dicto and de re imagining. The account of reader engagement is modelled on the attitudes of story-listeners to the stories to which they listen and the performers who tell them. In engaged (...) reading, however, the activity of story-listening is, in an important sense, truncated: reader engagement with the text occurs without the mediation of a storyteller. As a result, readers have to imaginatively supply a substitute – a fictionalized version of the author. (shrink)

Sound and listening are intrinsically linked to how we experience and engage with places and communities. This guide invites landscape architects and urban designers to become soundscape architects and offers practical advice on sound and listening applicable to each stage of a design project: from reading the environment to intervening on it. This book foregrounds listening as an affective mediator between subjects and multispecies environments, and a vehicle to think and conceptualise environmental design beyond prevailing visual and (...) human-centred modes. The guide expands landscape architects' and urban designers' tools and skills to assess existing soundscapes, predict how those soundscapes will be altered through their designs, consider sound as a creative and active part of the design process, and envisage how users might perceive and be affected by those soundscapes as they evolve in time. The volume sits in the interface of research and practice, and incorporates theoretical, methodological and creative contributions from acoustic ecology, ecoacoustics, bioacoustics and sound art. Each of the design stages is illustrated through project examples that demonstrate the many advantages of incorporating attentive listening and sound into Landscape Architecture and Urban Design Practice. The book shows how incorporating listening and sounding as part of the design process promotes slow and subtle ways of practice, adds social and ecological value through the reduction of noise pollution and by monitoring the health of habitats, and enables the design of soundscapes that complement the character and design intent of a scheme and elicit joy and wonder. The book will be of interest to landscape architects, together with other design professionals such as urban designers, architects, geographers and engineers, who play a primary role in the composition of the soundscape. (shrink)

Subjective and psychophysiological emotional responses to music from two different cultures were compared within these two cultures. Two identical experiments were conducted: the first in the Congolese rainforest with an isolated population of Mebenzélé Pygmies without any exposure to Western music and culture, the second with a group of Western music listeners, with no experience with Congolese music. Forty Pygmies and 40 Canadians listened in pairs to 19 music excerpts of 29–99 s in duration in random order (eight from the (...) Pygmy population and 11 Western instrumental excerpts). For both groups, emotion components were continuously measured: subjective feeling (using a two- dimensional valence and arousal rating interface), peripheral physiological activation, and facial expression. While Pygmy music was rated as positive and arousing by Pygmies, ratings of Western music by Westerners covered the range from arousing to calming and from positive to negative. Comparing psychophysiological responses to emotional qualities of Pygmy music across participant groups showed no similarities. However, Western stimuli, rated as high and low arousing by Canadians, created similar responses in both participant groups (with high arousal associated with increases in subjective and physiological activation). Several low-level acoustical features of the music presented (tempo, pitch, and timbre) were shown to affect subjective and physiological arousal similarly in both cultures. Results suggest that while the subjective dimension of emotional valence might be mediated by cultural learning, changes in arousal might involve a more basic, universal response to low-level acoustical characteristics of music. (shrink)

In ‘Listening to Other Minds’, Enrico Terrone provides an account of the mental activity in which we ought to engage to appreciate pop music. He argues that we should ‘play a game of make-believe’ in which we imagine that we can ‘hear … the mind’ of a fictional character. We should use this ability to grasp the thoughts and feelings that the mind contains, and thus undertake ‘exploration’ of the character’s ‘inner life’. This article argues, first, that only a (...) simplified version of the account is plausible; second, that its plausibility as a general account of pop music depends on a dubious conception of the ‘paradigm cases’ ; third, that its desirability as an account of a narrower range of cases is questionable; and, fourth, that it is motivated by unsuitable assumptions about representation in pop. (shrink)

This article offers a sonic reading of Gilles Deleuze’s political philosophy. It argues that Deleuze adopts a sonic-musical vocabulary to account for the affective and corporeal dimensions of politics or the ways that bodies and nonconscious forces shape political and epistemological experience. Suggesting that sonic expressions operate on both the musical and the linguistic register and inflect bodies before being consciously recognized, the article thus explores how the sound flows involved in political assemblages also find entrance into philosophical concepts. To (...) make this argument, the article traces several sonic figures – most prominently refrain, rhythm, and resonance – throughout Deleuze’s _oeuvre_ and puts those into conversation with sound studies scholarship. With this, the article makes two wider contributions. First, it traces connections between Deleuze’s early philosophical works and his later more overtly political collaborations with Guattari by way of sound to establish a notion of the political as an aesthetic-ecological field composed with and beyond human activity. Second, the article outlines parameters of a sonic political philosophy centered on affective involvement, embodied listening, and experimental thinking, thus also articulating the relevance of sound studies scholarship for political theory and Deleuzian philosophy. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of my work in philosophy from my first book on Friedrich Schiller and the political sublime to my most recent project on listening to traumatic forms of violence. Starting with a reflection on the autobiographical character of philosophy, I propose to take up the question of an aesthetic dimension of philosophical critique, where aesthetics is understood as an always already embodied perspective on the world, on truth, and on philosophical activity, as well as an (...) always already political realm, where the distribution of sense pre-determines our approach and articulation of experience. Departing from aesthetics understood and deployed as critique, the paper moves on to ask about the specific frameworks of sense or grammars that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realms of memory-building and history-making—particularly in those contexts where historical, political, and institutional forms of violence produce silencing and erasure. Putting in dialogue the latter with decolonial studies, I (re)interpret “traumatic violence” as a colonizing form of violence, understanding that one of its central aspects is that it is not only an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible as such. In this context, my project on grammars of listening seeks to carefully unpack these complex intersections while also explaining why I believe that a radical form of listening is an essential subversive/imaginative strategy against traumatic/colonial violence. (shrink)

Previous studies examining EEG and LORETA in patients with chronic pain discovered an overactivation of high theta and low beta power in central regions. MEG studies with healthy subjects correlating evoked nociception ratings and source localization described delta and gamma changes according to two music interventions. Using similar music conditions with chronic pain patients, we examined EEG in response to two different music interventions for pain. To study this process in-depth we conducted a mixed-methods case study approach, based on three (...) clinical cases. Effectiveness of personalized music therapy improvisations versus preferred music on chronic pain was examined with 16 participants. Three patients were randomly selected for follow-up EEG sessions three months post-intervention, where they listened to recordings of the music from the interventions provided during the research. To test the difference of EM versus preferred music, recordings were presented in a block design: silence, their own composed EM, preferred music, and a non-participant’s EM as a control. Participants rated their pain before and after the EEG on a 1–10 scale. We conducted a detailed single case analysis to compare all conditions, as well as a group comparison of entrainment-healing condition versus preferred music condition. Power spectrum and according LORETA distributions focused on expected changes in delta, theta, beta, and gamma frequencies, particularly in sensory-motor and central regions. Intentional moment-by-moment attention on the sounds/music rather than on pain and decreased awareness of pain was experienced from one participant. Corresponding EEG analysis showed accompanying power changes in sensory-motor regions and LORETA projection pointed to insula-related changes during entrainment-pain music. LORETA also indicated involvement of visual-spatial, motor, and language/music improvisation processing in response to his personalized EM which may reflect active recollection of creating the EM. Group-wide analysis showed common brain responses to personalized entrainment-healing music in theta and low beta range in right pre- and post-central gyrus. We observed somatosensory changes consistent with processing pain during entrainment-healing music that were not seen during preferred music. These results may depict top–down neural processes associated with active coping for pain. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how to conceptualise the kind of difficulties students in early childhood education encountered in articulating their thoughts and in listening to others in the initial stages of a CoI. With examples from their course diaries, we illustrate what sense it makes to consider the thinking the CoI promotes as centrally embodied, extended, embedded and enacted. We consider their difficulties, not as external obstacles to expressing their thought, but as difficulties that are internal to (...) thinking itself, in the sense that thinking implicates the skillful participation in a shared practice that involves us as embodied human beings, enculturated in a context that carries much of the meaning of our situation, engaged in activities that are centrally social, and dependent on interaction with others, who on a fundamental level shape what it is possible for us to think. (shrink)

We investigated the effects of everyday language exposure on the prediction of orthographic and phonological forms of a highly predictable word during listening comprehension. Native Japanese speakers in Tokyo (Experiment 1) and Berlin (Experiment 2) listened to sentences that contained a predictable word and viewed four objects. The critical object represented the target word (e.g., /sakana/;fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., /tuno/;horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., /sakura/;cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., /hon/;book). The three other objects were distractors. The (...) Tokyo group fixated the target and the orthographic competitor over the unrelated objects before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that they pre-activated the orthographic form of the target word. The Berlin group showed a weaker bias toward the target than the Tokyo group, and they showed a tendency to fixate the orthographic competitor only when the orthographic similarity was very high. Thus, prediction effects were weaker in the Berlin group than in the Tokyo group. We found no evidence for the prediction of phonological information. The obtained group differences support probabilistic models of prediction, which regard the built-up language experience as a basis of prediction. (shrink)

The military service of combat soldiers may pose many threats to their well being and often take a toll on body and mind, influencing the physical and emotional make-up of combatants and veterans. The current study aims to enhance our knowledge about the combat experiences and the challenges that female soldiers face both during and after their service. The study is based on qualitative methods and narrative analysis of in-depth semi-structured personal interviews with twenty military veterans. It aims to analyze (...) the narratives of American and Israeli female combat soldiers regarding their military service, with emphasis on the soldiers’ descriptions, in their own words, about their difficulties, challenges, coping and successes during their service and transition to civilian life. A recurring theme in the interviews with the veterans of both militaries was the need to be heard and the fact that societies, therapists, and military institutions do not always truly listen to female veterans’ experiences and are not really interested in what actually ails them. Our research suggests that conventional methods used in research relating to veterans might at times be inadequate, because the inherent categorization might abstract, pathologize, and fragment a wide array of soldiers’ modes of post-combat being. Moreover, female veterans’ voices will not be fully heard unless we allow them to be active participants in generating knowledge about themselves. (shrink)