The ethics of listening to build community in the commons

Abstract

Bronwen Low, Chloe Brushwood Rose and Paula M. Salvio’s deceptively small book ‘Communitybased Media Pedagogies: Relational Practices of Listening in the Commons’ (2017) makes a thoughtful contribution to the work on digital storytelling as participatory youth media production. There are three themes in the book which expand our understanding of story work and that I would like to engage with in more detail: (1) the notion of intersubjective listening and whether or how it can be taught; (2) the stories and storytellers who ‘make trouble’; and (3) the question of audience and what it does to storytellers and the stories they tell.