Review of Multimedia in the College Classroom: Improve Learning and Connect with Students in Online and Hybrid Courses

[1] Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities edited by Jenn Fishman, Romeo García, and Lauren Rosenberg is a collection of chapters written by community-activists, -teachers, and -scholars who recount community listening experiences that encompass stories, hauntings, and possibilities. This collection of chapters is for readers who enjoy listening to and learning from others’ and their communities by “playful[ly] world-traveling” through their community accounts (María Lugones).

[2] In Part 1: Hauntings and Possibilities, readers will encounter the haunting stories of incarcerated students, digital crip voices, and archived Aryan Nation writers. Throughout these hauntings, readers take heed of community listening and its continuous (re)shaping of listeners and spaces. Akin to Sally F. Benson’s shaping in Chapter 1 as a teacher-scholar working in a men’s prison and utilizing “proximate listening,” wherein she juggles active listening with listener-speaker proximity, responsibility, and understanding, Ada Hubrig in Chapter 2 explores community listening and its shaping of digital spaces through hashtag activism and the intertwining of differences and bodies. Moreover, Patty Wilde, Mitzi Ceballos, and Wyn Andrews Richards in their Chapter 3 confront the ethical dilemmas and negotiate responsibility concerning the shaping of a higher-education institution that archives Aryan Nations authors and their hateful propaganda. As such, all three chapters explore the entangled messiness of community listening and its shaping of listeners, speakers, spaces, and institutions. However, while Chapters 1 and 2 specifically involve active community listening and engagement practices, Chapter 3 diverges from these previous chapters by taking a retrospective lens to community listening and tackles ethical dilemmas in order to change the current and future of their institution’s archival practices. Overarchingly, the authors in this section clearly inform readers about the haunting ways in which community listening perennially shapes listeners, speakers, spaces, and institutions.

[3] In Part 2: Stories of Sustaining Community, readers will discover three chapters that confront relationality and its sustainable possibilities for community. While Kyle Boggs in Chapter 4 appreciates the artwork of Jetsonorama and balances individual accountability and sustainable community relationality through “evolving dialogue” (99), Karen R. Tellez-Trujillo in Chapter 5 similarly examines the sustainability of relational listening between a radio show, its DJ Mike Guerrero, and its listeners. In both chapters, authors conceptualize specific listening acts, study the ways in which their communities attend to these acts, and appreciate the community building and sustaining effects of said listening acts. Relatedly, Alexandra J. Cavallaro, Wendy Hinshaw, and Tobi Jacobi in their Chapter 6 confront the sustainability of listening relationships between incarcerated writers and outside penpals in prison letter-writing programs. As such, readers of Chapters 4 and 6 will journey through disruptions of community listening, wherein artwork inaccurately represents the local community’s perspectives and prison institutions and their colonial cultures are challenged. Yet, while Chapters 4 and 5 coalesce with the maintenance of a cultural community through listening acts (artwork and radio station shows respectively), Chapter 6 deviates from these chapters by considering the boundaries between networks of community listeners and prisoners. Readers will find that this section’s largest takeaways are the authors’ clear and honest reflections of building and maintaining community partnerships through community listening and of challenging stable notions of what it means to engage with and listen to communities.

[4] In Part 3: Negotiating Self and Community, readers will explore four chapters that confront and destabilize the binary relationship of self versus community through community listening. Across all four chapters, community listening is examined as both method and methodology. For example, Chapters 7 and 9 depict authors and communities who utilize narrative storytelling alongside community listening methodologies to self-reflect and memorialize victims as well as collaboratively build environments of constructive dialogue between Americans with opposing political views, respectively. Shifting gears, authors of Chapters 8 and 10 utilize community listening as a method through which to navigate institutional and individual accountability as well as listening and reflecting in the moment, respectively. This section is ripe with clear and important takeaways for interested readers, such as the taking up of community listening frameworks and facilitating antiracist undertakings at PWIs by confronting Chapter 8’s critical questions: “How do we foster spaces that destabilize whiteness while we call in and remain open to being called out?” and “How do we simultaneously labor within institutional structures and challenge the logics of such structures that shape the tacitly accepted ways people and practices operate?” (193). Additionally, readers interested in learning more about co-curricular programs should pay special attention to the work in Chapter 10, concerning descriptive and forthcoming accounts of and experiences with developing community listening skills and making space for community visions and directions.

[5] Across this collection, Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities is a beautifully written series of chapters that critically integrates the individual and community through accounts of stories, hauntings, and possibilities. Readers interested in community service, engagement, and coalition building would benefit from listening well to these authors and their perspectives, as they provide valuable examples and experienced perspectives on the ways in which we might listen to and learn from the communities around us.