Non-Utilitarian Listening

MA Seminar taught at the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts program at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Summer Semester 2024.

„Non-Utilitarian Listening,“ as a theory seminar, provides an exercise on investigating knowledge, that is, how scientific practices have systematized and validated extraction as the only possible mode of organizing and reading the world. As a proposition, „Non-Utilitarian Listening“ rehearses thinking with listening as a way of making worlds, that is, as a practice that does not extract what is given but instead one that gives. This is a Seminar on the (im)possibility of listening to be thought from merely a sonic standpoint. It understands listening as an implicated practice of sense-making that, in many ways, outlines what it is that we think and feel to be „human“, and our assumed and entrained relationship of exteriority with nature and everything else.

Full Syllabus (PDF)