The project Listening in Spiral Time is led by Lectorate researcher Rajni Shah, and brings together three strands of their research into listening practices that prioritise slowness, non-linearity, and decoloniality. 

Listening Tables 
This project began in 2019 at the Acts of Listening Lab in Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal when Rajni was a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia. Listening Tables is an attempt to reorient learned and default group behaviours by literally reorienting the spatial and temporal relationships between us when we gather. Each Table invites those who do not normally have a seat at the table to come to the table, speak, and listen together, while others ‘listen in’ – followed by a shared meal during which the group reflects collectively. This project is also part of a long-term collaboration between Rajni Shah, Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro, and Leah Bassel provisionally entitled ‘Listening as Performance’ exploring practices of listening within Performance, Activist, and Migrant contexts. 

Grief and Listening 

Grief and Listening Room is a collaboration between artists Rajni Shah, Anna Arov, and Kai Hazelwood.  Our collective work centers BIPOC/people of the global majority and marginalised identities including queer and trans, as well as Disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent communities. Our work weaves community building, artistic practices developed in deep collaboration and partnership with the communities we come from and serve. We work collectively to hold space for grief and listening.

Rajni was also the lead researcher for the Grief Research Group at the ATD, and co-edited a special issue of the Performance Philosophy Journal on Performance Philosophy, Dying, and Grief.


Building the Impossible Bridge 
Supported by Platform2025, Building the Impossible Bridge is a monthly gathering for anyone who identifies as BIMPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, including mixed race) and who works with or for an institution. We gather to find solidarity, to collectively slow down, and to listen together towards decolonial futures. We acknowledge experiences of harm and erasure, we share stories and strategies for survival, and we dream - all within a space where Whiteness and coloniality are actively decentered. This project grew from a collaboration with Professor Royona Mitra, and the first gathering took place during ATD Research Month 2024.


Some thoughts about research:
Separation, categorisation, and segregation are arguably all human impulses. But they are also foundational to the colonial project. In my research, I embrace the complexities of themes that slip across received categories, and am curious to know where and why those received categories were made. I treasure oral histories and non-verbal communications alongside the written word; I aim to be expansive in my expectations, and explicitly value somatic knowledges that might manifest in ways that feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar; I learn about disability justice as a way to embrace the fact that ‘able-bodied’ is a myth that keeps us small and isolated; I actively cultivate valuing mess, and chaos, as inevitable and important modes of creativity. I like to interrogate the word ‘structural’ within the phrase ‘structural inequity’ and to acknowledge that the structures that hold us also shape us and hinder us.

What is research for me?

Research is dreaming

Research is waiting

Research is drawing while listening, and writing while drawing while listening

Research is tending to relationships

Research is mess

Research is overwhelm

Research is prayers

Research is planting

During the ten years since I began my doctoral research, I have understood that what I call ‘listening work’ (embodied attentiveness, not specifically related to the ears) is inevitably and intricately related to anti-racist and decolonial work. And it is always political. Some of my recurring principles include:

When organising a gathering, I ask how the invitation is being worded, who is being invited, and why.

I interrogate the ways in which the room is set up.

I interrogate the structures within which application and selection processes (including implicit ones) take place, and the languages which are considered valid or legible.

Listening work asks us to acknowledge the ways in which racism, coloniality, and other systemic violences, live inside us. They shape us. Listening work asks us to be with those shapes, not to erase them, because this is impossible, but to acknowledge them, and to learn to become collectively accountable for them.

Listening work asks us to acknowledge the ways in which we are always coming together across difference.

Listening work cannot happen without care, trust, and grief processes.

Links

What is grief doing in the academy? https://www.atd.ahk.nl/atd-lectoraat/research-month/atd-research-month-2024/what-is-grief-doing-in-the-academy 

Care Resources (created for attendees of Research Month 2024) https://www.atd.ahk.nl/media/the/docs/divers/2023/Care_resources_for_Research_month_Jan24-landscape.pdf 

Grief and Listening Reading List (created as part of Research Month 2024) https://www.atd.ahk.nl/media/the/docs/divers/2023/Grief_and_Listening_resources_list_0.3.pdf 

Artistic Research – New Pathways to New Knowledge? Conversation with Rajni Shah https://www.atd.ahk.nl/en/atd-lectorate/publications/artistic-research-new-pathways-to-new-knowledge/a-conversation-with-rajni-shah/ 

Series of articles on listening for a special issue of Sonic Studies https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/558896/1937426 

Blog post (on Rajni’s personal blog) about Listening Tables https://autumnbling.blogspot.com/2020/01/listening-in-time-of-urgency.html 

Experiments in Listening book  https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/experiments-in-listening-9781538144299/ 

Experiments in Listening zines (free, print-at-home) https://www.rajnishah.com/A4-EiL-zines