Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018

This edited collection focuses on the ethics, politics and practices of responsiveness in the context of racism, inequality, difference and controversy. The politics of difference has long been concerned with speech, voice and representation. By focusing on the practices and politics of responsiveness?listening, reading and witnessing?the volume identifies vital new possibilities for ethics and social justice.

Chapters focus on the conditions of possibility, or listening as ethical praxis; unsettling or disrupting colonial relationships; and ways of listening that highlight non-Western traditions and move beyond the liberal frame. Ethical responsiveness shifts some of the responsibility for negotiating difference and more just futures from subordinated speakers, and on to the relatively more privileged and powerful.

1. From Voice to Response: Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference (Tanja Dreher and Anshuman A. Mondal)

2. Locating Listening (Tanja Dreher and Poppy de Souza)

3. On Liberty on Listening: John Stuart Mill and the Limits of Liberal Responsiveness (Anshuman A. Mondal)

5. Freedom and Listening: Islamic and Secular Feminist Philosophies (Allison Weir)

6. When the Students Are Revolting: The (Im)Possibilities of Listening in Academic Contexts in South Africa (Anthea Garman)

7. Who Laughs at a Rape Joke?: Illiberal Responsiveness in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines (Nicole Curato and Jonathan Corpus Ong)

8. Watching to Witness: Responses beyond Empathy to Refugee Documentaries (Sukhmani Khorana)

9. Facing Vulnerability: Reading Refugee Child Photographs through an Ethics of Proximity (Anna Szorenyi)

10. The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics and the Artful Business of Creating Spaces for Kardiya to Hear and Feel Across Difference (Lisa Slater)

11. Silence as a Form of Agency?: Exploring the Limits of an Idea (Bina Fernandez)

12. Noble Speech/Thunderous Silence: Toward a Buddhist Alter-Politics (Shinen Wong)

13. Indigenous Research Methodologies and Listening the Dadirri Way (Lisa Waller)

Tanja Dreher is an ARC Future Fellow, UNSW Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor in Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her work on the politics and ethics of listening has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Information, Communication & Society and Continuum.

Anshuman A. Mondal is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia, UK, and is author of Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie.

Centers responsiveness as a theoretical frame in debates on the politics of difference across various fields (in literary and cultural studies, media and communication studies, politics, sociology, philosophy), which usually emphasize the politics of voice/representation/expression

Focuses on the intersection of debates that are normally discussed separately, in particular the overlapping concerns of “multiculturalism” and “Indigeneity”

Engages with non-western concepts and epistemologies, thereby enacting an ethical responsiveness to forms of knowledge and ways of being other than the western, secular epistemology that underpins most social and political thought