Abstract

This provocation centers on the question, ¿Dónde comenzamos? Working at the tension between community and academic listening, I argue that community listening departs from individualism and mere presence as the genesis for listening. Rather, it re-situates the individual within constellations of stories, genealogies, ghosts, and hauntings. It invites, in a Derridean way, a politics of responsibility and justice towards the past, present, and future. Specifically, this provocation dares its readers in writing and rhetorical studies to take community listening seriously; to find solace both with the inability to extract and foreclose upon all knowledges and the inaccessibility for some of community listening.