Voice Notes: Creative-Critical Practice and the Ethics of Answerability

Voice Notes: Creative-Critical Practice and the Ethics of Answerability, by Sarah Jackson

In this presentation, Sarah will examine the politics and poetics of the telephone call and its role in talking and listening across cultures.

Drawing on her recent work with refugee communities, she will explore the ethics and aesthetics of ‘answerability’ (Ronell 1989) and challenge the practices of muting that arise when ‘speaking for’ others (Alcoff 1991). Discussing Caroline Bergvall’s multi-form artwork Drift (2014) alongside the co-created AHRC-funded project Voice Notes (2023-2024), Sarah will consider forms of creative-critical practice that might open up an affective space in which we find ourselves – in the words of Butler and Athanasiou (2013) – ‘affected, undone, and bound by others’ calls to respond and assume responsibility’. In so doing, she will argue that the phone call not only has the capacity to ‘call out’ global injustices but also to ‘call for’ new ways of thinking about the voice in writing and research.

[Following/preceding the presentation, there will be a writing workshop for PhD students, during which participants will have the opportunity to compose their own voice notes as well as discuss decolonial methodologies and the kinds of critical reflexivity essential for collaborative research and practice. Places are limited.]

About Sarah Jackson

Dr Sarah Jackson is a writer, curator and critic. An award-winning poet, BBC New Generation Thinker and AHRC Leadership Fellow, her research explores the intersections of literature and technology in order to address questions of social and environmental justice. She is currently a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in the Cultural and Creative Industries at Northumbria University.