HOW WE MAKE IT: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community Main Menu Navigation Explaining the HWMI Collective & SCALAR Introduction Megan Moodie Lingering Introduction to subsection Aligning part of syllabus of the body Crafting Photo of HWMIC Authors HWMIC members: top, left to right: Megan Moodie, Cynthia Ling Lee, Pato Hebert, Marina Peterson, Nikita Simpson; bottom, left to right: Rachel C. Lee, Tammy Ho, Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, Charles L. Briggs, Sharon Daniel

Aligning Is Deep Listening

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Aligning Is Deep Listening
Megan Moodie

It’s April 27, 2022. Charles Briggs is introducing his work-in-progress on the COVID-19
pandemic to the How We Make It Collective.


“I said I was never writing about pandemics again,” he tells us. “I really thought I was done.”


But it seems that no matter what he tries, Charles is drawn into the ethnographic investigation of forms of communicability—and that includes pandemics, but also the way we communicate about them, the way we attend to one another (or don’t). Right now, at the time of this meeting, it’s the COVID-19 pandemic; Charles is listening to the messages traveling around middle-America (the heart of “Anti-Vaxx” country), where he has just spent several weeks interviewing people. He has also been listening to the struggles of essential farmworkers in California’s Central Valley, where the suffering is enormous because the medical care so woefully inadequate. Charles also, with great care and empathy, trains his attention on those within our group, where several of us are long-haulers or live with other chronic illness.

Without ever naming it as such, Charles, a virtuoso, teaches us all about Deep Listening. Deep Listening is never just about registering or recording a story—that acquisitive form of ethnography or oral history in which a story is valuable as an example of a kind of story, ready-made to be cataloged. It’s also about listening that changes us. Listening that asks us to rebuild our dearest-held theories and methods. Listening that is not afraid to ask the same question many times, in that child-like way, because the answer will always teach us something new. Listening that respects silence and the refusals it may pose. Listening that knows many of the things we hear will never reconcile with one another—they never could.

We will need so much more Deep Listening to make it through.

How do you recognize its practitioners? Like Charles, they begin most of their sentences “[Name] taught me so much about…”
 

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