Late Listening

This essay builds a concept of ‘late listening’, a mode of sonic witnessing and critical reflection responsive to the planetary polycrisis of climatic and biospheric disruption. It draws in particular on work from trauma studies and critical theory elaborating a ‘crisis of witnessing’ in the wake of Auschwitz, which here is given new reflection in the contemporary context of socially-caused planetary environmental change and its multiple fall-outs, including war. Late listening is intended as a transdisciplinary organizing concept for putting sound studies research and sonic art in dialogue with contemporary critical theory, in seminars, workshops, conferences, special journal issues, art exhibitions or film series.