Listening Field Autumn School

The Listening Field returns for a two-day school dedicated to the political agency of the listener.

In January 2026, the first Listening Field Winter School asked: What if listeners ran the world? This autumn, we continue the investigation with another question: What happens when listeners become a public?

Listening is central to many practices: artistic work, education, journalism, care, social work, organising, facilitation, and public life. But creating opportunities to speak does not necessarily mean that people are heard, nor that what is heard can have consequences.

What conditions allow listening to become participation? What happens when we listen together? How does something change as it passes from speaker to listener and from one listener to another? Under what conditions does a group of listeners become a public? And what becomes possible when listening is collective?

Over two days, fifteen participants from different fields will form a temporary listening public and investigate these questions together. Through conversation, listening protocols, collective walks, speculative exercises, and radio experiments, we will explore what changes when listening becomes collective: how listeners participate in constructing what they hear, how the conditions of listening shape what becomes audible, what a listening public imagines, and what it might do with what it has heard.

Radio will function throughout the school as a shared practice and working space. We will make short recordings, listening protocols, and field pieces for one another to encounter, allowing something heard by one person to pass to another and become available for listening again. A selection of these materials may later be broadcast.

The school is facilitated by Eszter Némethi & Julia E. Dyck as a space for shared inquiry. Participants bring different practices, experiences, and forms of knowledge into the room. These differences become part of the Autumn School’s research.

Who is this for?

We invite people from diverse fields whose work, research, or daily lives engage with listening as a method, a necessity, or a question.

This might include people working with:

– Community and participation
– Testimony, memory, or oral history
– Care and mediation
– Political organising and civic engagement
– Education and facilitation
– Journalism and interviewing
– Research
– Sound, radio, and performance
– Multilingual and intercultural contexts

We are particularly interested in bringing together people who encounter listening from very different positions: people for whom listening is an artistic material and people for whom it is part of the everyday work of meeting, supporting, teaching, interviewing, organising, facilitating, or working with others.

What will the two days look like? 

Saturday, 17.10.2026 / Day 1 — Forming a Listening Public

10:00–13:00 — Speak Like No One in Particular (workshop version), introductions, shared questions, and collective listening

13:00–14:00 — VEGETARIAN LUNCH

14:00–16:00 — Collective listening walk through Antwerp and reflection

Sunday, 18.10.2026 / Day 2 — Composing the Listening Field

10:00–13:00 — Listening protocols, radio experiments, and collective listening

13:00–14:00 — VEGETARIAN LUNCH

14:00–16:00 — World Café and collective conversation

Practical information

Dates: 17–18 October 2026
Location: Out of Sight, Somersstraat 31, 2018 Antwerp
Schedule: 10:00–16:00 each day
Working language: English; multilingual contributions are welcome
Group size: Maximum of 15 participants

Free participation / Free vegetarian lunch / Wheelchair-accessible space / Prayer room with a prayer mat / Calm space

How to apply

Please fill in the ONLINE FORM. You will need to include a short biography and motivation of 8–12 sentences, telling us:

– Who you are and what you do
– Why would you like to participate in The Listening Field Autumn School
– Where listening enters your work or daily practice
– A question, difficulty, or situation concerning listening or participation that you would like to bring to the group

Deadline: 5 October 2026

We aim to bring together a group with different practices, experiences, and approaches to listening. No artistic or technical audio experience is required. No previous participation is required. We are looking for people who are curious about the political and poetic dimensions of listening and willing to be present for the full two days. Participants from the Listening Field Winter School in January 2026 are warmly invited to return.

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The Public Community Library is situated between artistic research and public presentation. It is being co-developed in collaboration with Study Circle Antwerp within the On Mobilisation. Towards Multivocal Collaborative Futures project, co-funded by the European Union (Creative Europe programme).