Radical Listening: Collective Practices, Histories and Possible Futures (FREEPSY). In person.

We are delighted to invite you to join our collective stream on the theme of ‘Radical Listening: Collective practices, histories and possible futures’, which will be a part of the upcoming London Conference in Critical Thought being held at Birkbeck College London, 20th-21st June 2025.

The FREEPSY team will be hosting this discussion and we will hear from colleagues from across the world, scholars, clinicians and activists. 

Can ‘listening’ foster new forms of relationality in a collapsing world? What forms, formats, rituals and infrastructures of listening to one another have made life liveable, enjoyable or, simply, possible in recent times? 

This stream brings together colleagues from various fields of research and practice to share stories, archival material, ethnographies, speculations or theories around forms of listening to individual or collective experiences that offer a radical mode of witnessing and togetherness, especially in challenging contexts. The stream features papers, presentations and creative interventions addressing listening as an act of ethics and of care, where more than just recognition is at stake, rather, when a joint construction of a world-in-common can unfold. 

Psychoanalysis was first called a ‘talking cure’ by one of its very first woman-patients, Bertha Pappenheim, in the late 19th century Vienna. Since then, practices of talking, dialoguing and expressing oneself have gained space in mainstream clinical settings, grassroots organising as well as hegemonic twists of ‘self-care’ and ‘authenticity’. Less emphasis has been granted to listening, listening to others, listening together, listening to the world, etc.  With this in mind – and as a psychosocial research collective – we are interested in ways of listening ‘otherwise’ or radical forms of listening. What might this radical listening entail? How is it different from established spaces of listening which rely on specific frameworks, methods, epistemologies and ontologies (Olufemi, 2021)?  How is this listening bound up to political action? There is a rising interest in forms of radical empathy, or in the notion of ‘analysis everywhere’ (Caló and Pereira, 2024) and we would like to open this space to consider listening as a crucial political strategy of care and creativity.

Equally, and resonating LCCT’s emphasis on criticality, we are interested too in the ‘troubles’ of listening – ambivalences, struggles, impasses and how these are elaborated and articulated. What does it take, in relating and in infrastructures, to ‘listen well’, as black feminist Hortense Spillers frames it? 

The general LCCT programme can be found here: https://www.londoncritical.co.uk/