Listening Is . . . Description of a Listening Life World
A program to clarify and elaborate our description of listening, and to expand our sense of its practice in daily life situations and cultural contexts.
This panel topic came up because, out of the 20+ papers I have posted on Academia.edu, the paper most frequently accessed by far is “What is Listening” (formerly the introductory essay of my book with Deborah Borisoff, Listening in everyday life: A personal and professional approach, 1991, 1997). One outcome of this panel could be a paper (multi-authored) that is a compilation of the presentations and to be posted on Academia.edu to add other views to my current paper.
I would like to propose that ILAer's from different functional approaches to listening answer the question “What is Listening?” by completing the title “Listening Is....” with a paper of 2-5 pages, not defining (de-fine, means literally of the end, to kill, and stake something down), but rather describing what listening is as an integral part of their life, but not only their individual life, but as part of their lived, lifeworld, the situations they haunt and the cultural contexts they inhabit. They can respond to the question: how listening happen or work/operate, function, in your daily life, in your everyday world? They should try to avoid the standard concepts and focus more on describing just what happens, in one’s field of awareness, including social/cultural, media, work, etc. situations/contexts.