Precarious listening

This article attempts to hold thought open in a textual space that often forecloses thought. The authors present arguments but work them through poetry, memoir, pictures, and exposition. They frame this work in particular as an improvisation around—and intervention into—more familiar practices of collective biography, narrative, and art therapies and situate it as a new pedagogy for collective academic practice. The article emerged from a project in which the authors produced an aesthetic practice and attempted an ethics of listening while recognizing that academic experiences more often venerate speech. The authors write a collective text but sit apart within it as well as together, thus emphasizing singularity and collectivity, locatedness and the body. They take their work and themselves within that work as precarious, tentative, and uncertain and are concerned to ask questions that might keep thought open rather than provide answers.