Policy engagement workshop on Sonic Storytelling and Storylistening

Open to Oxford University Staff and Students - If you wish to attend, please email naomi.waltham-smith@music.ox.ac.uk no later than noon on Monday 15 July. Spaces are limited due to the interactive nature of the sessions.

This event is the third in a series of workshops organized by Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith as part of her Oxford Policy Engagement Network Leaders Award. 

If stories are powerfully forms of testimony, persuasion, community-building, how can sound and music be mobilized in storytelling to inform and enhanced community participation in policymaking? What makes sound and music distinctive media for sharing stories? And as interest rises in the use of narrative evidence in policymaking, how should we be listening to stories, and what can music and sound research tell us about how to cultivate a discerning ear?

Stories have always been an important part of the dialogue between publics and policymaking. In recent years, though, increased attention has been paid in both academia and the policy sphere to the importance of telling and listening to stories from local communities as a methodology in public policymaking and as a strategy to increase community engagement, cohesion, and agency. Stories carry a powerful affective weight in ways that more traditional datasets do not. Sound and music have particular contributions to make to this affective dimension, while the art of listening will be key to ensuring that stories are used in ways that promote trust.

This workshop brings together researchers across a wide variety of fields, including musicologists, composers, performers, to explore the role of music and creative sonic practices in telling and listening to stories in diverse areas that inform policymaking from community arts and sonic heritage through collective memory and placemaking to sonification in science communication and storylistening in public reason.

Full details of the workshop can be found here: https://www.auralflaneur.com/open-workshop-3.

The workshop will be divided into two halves, each beginning with short panel presentations before breaking out into group discussion guided by a set of related questions. There will be further opportunity to chat informally with other participants over tea and coffee.

14:00–15:00      Stories, sound, and listening in science communication and public reason

Claire Craig CBE (University of Oxford)

Thomas Gernon (University of Southampton)
Pre-recorded presentation from Miriam Quick (Loud Numbers)
Response from Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Oxford)

Small-group discussion 

15:00–15:15      Tea/coffee

15:15–16:25      Sharing stories in sound

Gascia Ouzounian (University of Oxford)

Samantha Dieckmann, (University of Oxford)
Noel Lobley (University of Virginia)
Laudan Nooshin (City, University of London/Charcoalblue)

                        Small-group discussion

16:25–16:30      Closing and next steps

More details of the full series can be found here: https://www.auralflaneur.com/open-workshops. The series is designed to raise awareness of the potential for research on music, sound, and listening to engage with and inform public policy. The workshops bring together academics from multiple disciplines with NGOs, grassroots and other civil society organizations, lawyers, and others working to influence policymaking. There is a focus on making time for discussion with the aspiration that we can work together to overcome the challenges in respective areas, including by considering how diverse academic work or expertise can be brought together and harnessed in socio-political and legal contexts. From these conversations, we hope to identify possibilities for collaborative opportunities and to expand the range of policy areas for which music and sound research is recognized as relevant and productive, beyond the sphere of the creative industries, health and wellbeing, and music education.