Samantha Dick, Lainy Malkani, Julia Schauerman - Reflective & Responsible

This episode was recorded live at a symposium titled ‘Listening Together: Practices for Community-Centred Listening’. The symposium was hosted by the research centre Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice at London College of Communication in February 2025. Our regular host Hannah Kemp-Welch chaired a panel with two artists: Beverley Bennett, who organises ‘gatherings’ to challenge the hierarchies inherent in workshop settings, and Sam Metz, who’s work with non-verbal participants invites listening ‘through the body’. The panel considers the question: what can we learn about listening from socially engaged artists?

Hector MacInnes works in socially engaged art, sound and research. His practice includes spoken word, sonic fiction, installation, text, tech, music, radio, speculative design and organising things, often in collaboration with other artists and a diverse range of communities. Hector was born and grew up on the Isle of Skye, and his projects are deeply rooted in an ongoing interrogation of belonging, identity, legitimacy and lived experience of the more-than-urban, themes he’s brought to his practice-based doctoral research into the concept of the field, anthropocene rurality, and the ‘New Weird’. In this episode, Hannah Kemp-Welch talks in depth about a project Hector has been working on in a prison (HMP Inverness), and the particular sonic environment in which this work is situated.

Joanne Coates practises as a socially engaged artist, using photography to ask questions about rurality and wealth inequality.Her work explores gender, class and disability, drawing on her lived experience. Projects often involve participation and varying levels of collaboration with communities. In this episode, we speak about Jo’s recent work with young women in the Yorkshire Dales and Orkney, Scotland.Alongside and intersecting with her practice, Jo works as a part-time farm labourer and runs a project called Roova, bringing together artists and communities to forge connections in rural landscapes.

Angharad Davies is an artist and architectural researcher, and a member of public works. Her research examines the communities that exist around local, publicly accessible spaces. She believes in architecture as biography, and writing as an architectural process.
In this episode, we hear about her long term work with communities at Rurban in Poplar, London, and the activities and approaches they use to build relationships with local residents.

Nisha Duggal is an artist working across various mediums, exploring expressions of freedom in the everyday. She is interested in the transformative qualities of making and doing, engineering situations that uncover deep-seated primitive impulses to connect.
In this episode, she tells us about Held, a multi-platform project in which she guided people to make pairs of simple, clay sculptures formed from the space within the palms of their hands. The crafting enabled her to connect and share conversations about place, land and belonging with participants.

Paul Crook is an artist, and also head of Communities and Learning at South London Gallery. We talk about his work with young people in both community art and gallery education settings, and creative strategies to facilitate listening.
Paul uses mind maps to think with young people about artworks and programmes; one young person comedically calls him a ‘Democracy Scheduler’.

Arc Theatre is an Essex-based company that uses Forum Theatre and participatory drama activities to consider tough issues with audiences.
Originally founded in 1984, Arc specialises in producing and performing original, live theatre, and delivering interactive, multi-media awareness programmes. They work with children and young people in schools and with groups ranging from pensioners to asylum seekers in community settings.
Natalie Smith joined Arc Theatre in 1992. She has performed in and facilitated over 50 of the Company’s productions and programmes and is now their Education Director.
In this episode, we talk about the role of listening in this work, particularly in projects with young people.

Artist Jorge Lucero is Full Professor of Art Education in the School of Art + Design. For eight years he was the Chair of the Art Education Program. Now he serves as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. Lucero studied at the Pennsylvania State University and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Prior to being at the University of Illinois, he happily taught art and art history at the Chicago Public School Northside College Prep. Jorge Lucero has performed, published, lectured, exhibited, and taught widely in the United States and abroad.
In 2023, Lucero was named the National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) Higher Ed Educator of the Year.
‘Conceptual Art and Teaching’ is a project initiated by Jorge Lucero who joins Hannah Kemp-Welch for the tenth episode of Ways of Listening to consider listening within critical pedagogy and as a daily practice.
He draws attention to both the humility and the ‘slowness’ needed for listening.