A while ago, we collaborated with MIT Colab on the Listening to the City initiative. A couple of projects came out of this collaboration. One is a two-day conference called Listening to the City: Engagement, Exploration + Intervention through Sound, bringing together ctivists, artists, residents, researchers, students, teachers, and community practitioners with an interest in sound as a creative mode of inquiry, a tool for democratic engagement, and a means for social change. We had the honor of co-hosting this conference with MIT and Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) in Cambridge in May 25-26, 2017. Read this MIT Arts’ great review of this conference.
Another outcome of this is a toolkit developed with the collaborators who came together through the conference and beyond. This toolkit documents sound-based methodology and practices that we know have played a role in researching and influencing social change at various communities including sound walks, sound mapping, policy theater, audio postcards, etc. Thanks to the MIT Colab team led by Allegra Williams for developing and organizing the content of the hand. Download and read the Listening to the City Handbook: Community Research and Action through Sound and Story.
We’d like to thank National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for their generous support that made this project possible.
