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Recent political theory in the area of deliberative democracy has placed listening at the normative core of meaningfully democratic deliberation. Empirical research in this area, however, has struggled to capture democratic listening in a normatively relevant way. This paper presents a new, theoretically informed instrument for measuring and assessing listening in deliberation. Here, I tackle the observational challenge of measuring the act of listening itself, as opposed to either the preconditions or outcomes of listening. Reviewing existing measures, I show that each, in isolation, fails to capture the most democratically meaningful aspects of listening. The paper argues, however, that existing and novel measures can be usefully combined to allow researchers to capture different degrees of democratic listening. Using Rawls's concept of "lexical priority," I aggregate relevant components of listening into a normatively significant lexical scale. The paper describes this novel measurement and highlights how it can be used in empirical research on democratic deliberation.

In our response to "Deliberating Public Policy Issues with Adolescents," we address the matter that students seem to be reluctant to changing their minds, opinions, and initial positions in classroom deliberations and instead see such deliberations as an opportunity to perform and publicly announce their preexisting views. We argue that this calls for an increased focus on teaching students how to listen to each other and that such a focus should come in the form of teaching them apophatic listening. We also propose pedagogical practices that could be used for teaching students this particular deliberative skill.

Abstract
Storytelling in solidaristic communities can foster agency and challenge oppression. However, power imbalances among community members can undermine that potential by contributing to the production of loneliness, where a person loses their sense of self and their sense of belonging within the solidaristic community. To prevent loneliness and to protect the liberatory potential of storytelling, we consider how what we call solidaristic listening might be supported. We first consider, but ultimately reject, empathy as a central feature of solidaristic listening. Despite its popularity in feminist philosophy, empathy is often unable to maintain the relational distance needed between conversation partners to appreciate their differences. Instead, we suggest an ongoing embodied, relational approach to foster solidaristic listening. We draw on three philosophical ideas to motivate our account: visiting the perspectives of others (Arendt 1992), visiting as a reciprocal exchange that requires multiple trips (Simpson 2017), and solidarity as traveling together (Medina 2013).

This paper is written through the combined experience of my own artistic practice and periods of immobility during 2010-2011. With it, I aim to draw attention towards physical, mental and political states of stillness and absorption. I will show how a period of relative physical stasis impacted upon my own practice and prompted a counter project to the now dominant methodology of soundwalking. Through personal reflection, I will demonstrate how walking is not always an entitled right; how class, gender and geopolitical forces impact upon a walk; and how the methodology itself may even perpetuate a culture of pursuit and entrapment. In doing so, the paper re-evaluates the politics and aesthetics of soundwalking whilst optimistically proposing listening as a form of walking.