The uneven terrain of dialogical encounters and the spatial politics of listening

Abstract

The contributions to this forum have highlighted how the limits to scholarly dialogue are multiple and have had serious consequences for the ways in which knowledges are produced and debated in the academy, the media, and wider society. In this rejoinder to the commentaries on our article, 'The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue', we embrace the stance of affirmative critique in order to constructively engage with the important issues that our interlocutors raised. In particular, we consider questions of dialogical recognition, refusal, and the politics of listening as well as the need to strive not only to engage in dialogue but also to work toward changing the terms and terrain of dialogical engagement in order to produce a more equitable and just space of dialogical encounters in the academy.

Revisiting positionality and the thesis of situated knowledge

“…It should also be further contrasted with the recent insidious practice of attempting to silence progressive scholars in academia under the pretense of promoting ‘free speech’, while actually promoting racism and colonialism (cf. Rose-Redwood et al, 2018a, for a discussion). Finally, as Janz (2018: 124) reminds us, given that listening ‘is difficult to compel, hard to measure, and easy to mischaracterize’, it also enables effective silencing of participants in dialogue—scholarly and otherwise—through not listening.…”

“…Human geographers have a long record of remarkable scholarship on the foregoing matters, not least because of their sensitizing to feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist perspectives on the politics of knowledge, on the dynamics of power in everyday settings and in research contexts, and on the contingent, negotiated processes of the social construction of knowledge (Benson and Nagar, 2006; Clement, 2019; de Leeuw and Hunt, 2018; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Rose-Redwood et al, 2018a, 2018b; Simandan, 2011d; Sin, 2003). Without necessarily identifying it as such, human geographers have explored how this fourth epistemic gap affects different people in different ways, as a function of their race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, age, and other intersecting axes of social difference: who gets to speak, what do they get to tell and to whom, and who gets listened to, are all important questions that politicize and situate the fourth gap in social arenas as diverse as family life, everyday racism and homophobia, the legal system, academia, ‘the war on terror’, or international development.…”

“… 1. I conceive of the political not as a separate ‘sphere’ or ‘realm’ of social life, but as a dimension of social life (also, see Daley et al, 2017; Kuus, 2019). That is to say, all social phenomena, knowledge production included, are amenable to political analysis, and ‘depoliticization is itself a deeply political act’ (Rose-Redwood et al, 2018a: 165). As a dimension of social life, the political captures the dynamics of power relations, at a variety of temporal and spatial resolutions.…”