Labour of Listening by Kate Lacey is the first episode of the new podcast series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, based on the 2022 symposium with the same title. In her contribution the author and Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of Sussex talks about the act of listening as a form of labor, about listening out and listening in and what it means to create a space, where speech and listening can take place.

The podcast series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening emerges from the spring 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, in collaboration with Vuslat Foundation. It features talks and performances by Bill Dietz, Jazmina Figueroa, Kate Lacey, Nour Mobarak, Dylan Robinson, and Aura Satz. The artistic and theoretical contributions to the symposium were devoted to forms and ethics of listening and how they are entangled with aspects of poetics, coloniality, gender, spectatorship, critique, and nonhuman worlds.

While hearing has, until recently, often been described as a passive act, listening is broadly understood as an active way of engaging with the other, with oneself and with nature. If certain assumptions subscribe listening and storytelling to womxn and elders, the broadcasted voice is often gendered as male. The talks of this series discuss such ancient and recent ideas about the politics and gender of sound, while addressing listening as a key methodology in reaching goals of political, ecological, and artistic equity, from decolonization and democracy building to issues of mental health.