Listening for Labour: Feminist Close Listening in the Literary Audio Archive – a talk by Karis Shearer and Deanna Fong

What kinds of labour are visible in historical accounts of literary communities? What kinds of labour are audible? Drawing on collaborative research with Deanna Fong on archival recordings from the SoundBox Collection held at the the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus), this talk interrogates how attending to the medium of sound recording can remap history by citing gendered affective labour as an important foundation to collectivity and community. In its account of that labour, the talk outlines and reflects on a practice Fong and Shearer have termed “feminist close listening.”