Audio Recording and the Co-written Self Reflections on an Experimental Methodology for Climate Justice

Abstract

We are members of an Ottawa-based climate humanities group focused on developing new feminist methods and practices of co-writing that unsettle the liberal self in order to build a more sustainable future. In this reflection, we focus on one of these methods: audio recordings. After using a cellphone to record one of our undisciplined conversations on co-writing, care, and climate justice, we individually listened back to the conversation and reflected on both the content of our conversation and our feelings and thoughts related to the act of listening back. We ask what impact the practice of recording our conversation has on us as climate scholars and activists. How do we listen to each other in person? How does our listening change when we play back the recording, especially in regard to how we orient ourselves to others? We also suggest a capacious definition of co-writing that follows from the recording method itself: our bodies in the room together; the words, “mmms,” and “yeahs” being spoken, heard, and then heard again later and differently; and perhaps most nefariously, the cellphone and all of its material relations, tucked under a plate of cookies on the table, recording everything we say. Taken together, our new method of listening and our extended definition of cowriting seek to create a strategy for actualizing feminist climate futures today.