Dr. Ralina Joseph, presidential term professor of communication and the founding director of the Center for Communication, Difference & Equity at the University of Washington, will discuss her ground-breaking research on radical listening to journalists’ work.
This talk focuses on radical listening, a critical communication of race skill and strategy that holds personal stories of racialized power differentials alongside narratives of histories, structures, and institutions. Radical listening is a key skill for journalists who seek to report deeply on communities of which they may or may not be a part of. Radical listening can also soothe what I call racial exhaustion, an embodied experience for both people of color (who are tired of their race stories not being heard) and white people (who are tired of having to listen to race stories). In this talk I illustrate the theory, method, and practice of radical listening. I ask how do we radically listen to each other when, for listeners of color, racial exhaustion emerges from deep personal, familial, historical, institutional experiences of trauma, and for white listeners, racial exhaustion comes from viewing racial trauma from the outside? How does radical listening work in practice for journalists and lay listeners alike?