Conducting a personal listening audit as a practice of critical self-awareness

Abstract

In order to conduct what I’m calling a personal listening audit as a practice of critical self-awareness, this dissertation utilizes rhizomatic autoethnography to contribute to the scholarly landscape in the field of listening studies (Worthington & Bodie, 2020) and listening rhetoric (Ratcliffe, 1999, 2005; Blankenship, 2019). In doing so, I show what one can learn about themselves by “listening to their listening” as a method of self-research. By analyzing my listening practices over a series of interviews with fellow graduate students in RhetComp, I explore the following questions: 1) What can I learn from paying close and critical attention to my listening?; 2) What is/are my listening identity/ies? as in, who is the “I” that listens?; and 3) How do/can I begin to listen better? My study starts from the assumption that how we “know the world or gain knowledge of it” (Denzin & Lincoln, qtd. in Pitard, 2017, pg. 3) is situated, in part, within the contexts of our personal experience. As such, I establish rhizomatic analysis as the fundamental epistemology of this dissertation and share a narrative evolution of my study to contextualize my research questions. Next, in order to place my study in the context of an already existing scholarship, I give an account of the interdisciplinary field of listening research and define rhetoric’s premiere theory of listening, Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening (1999; 2005) as well as Lisa Blankenship’s rhetorical empathy (2019). Next, I provide a definition of autoethnography as a method and an account of my study design. In order to gather data to analyze for my study, I elected to conduct virtual qualitative interviews with graduate student-instructors in RhetComp, asking them questions about their own experiences with being heard (or not) throughout their programs. Recordings of these interviews as well as notes taken in the moment and reflective post-interview memos provided me with a rich data set that allowed me to analyze my listening practices as my participants answered my questions. Finally, this study concludes with a rhizomatic analysis of my data, distributed across three rhizomatic threads which can be read in any order. I organized these chapters into an analysis of the behavioral, affective, and cognitive aspects of my listening. Behavioral addresses physical, observable behaviors that I embodied while my participants spoke. Affective addresses data that resonated emotionally. Cognitive addresses unobservable aspects of my data such as wonderings or errors in listening. These rhizo-chapters provide an account of significant takeaways that are blended with scholarship, memories and personal experiences, creative fiction, and participant data.