Listening to Stories, Storying Listening

This review of Jenn Fishman, Romeo García, and Lauren Rosenberg’s Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities explores what listening practices and research may look like when deliberately orientated toward story and community and contextualizes the discussion in our own experience pursuing community-oriented dissertation projects. The collection of essays situates community listening as both rhetorical skill and method while arguing that it is not defined by any one listening stance. Authors in the collection expand the meanings and methods of community listening, tailor their praxes to their unique research contexts, and engage with the collection’s themes of hauntings, possibilities, stories, and negotiating self and community. This review, which braids perspectives through a process called dyading, argues that Community Listening demonstrates how community listening brings a dynamic yet balanced approach to disciplinary understandings of community-oriented research processes.