Listening Across

The question for the day was direct: if, when and how could a method like Endarkened Co-Composition work in clinical research across gynaecology, obstetrics and reproductive justice?

The ask of the room was not praise but friction. Participants came from developmental physiology, global maternal health, medical and social anthropology, musicology, community music, and the history of medicine, joining in person and from across the UK and North America.

The day opened with a meal, a welcome and a screening of Three Gold Threads. Three invited provocations followed, from developmental physiology, medical anthropology and narrative ethnography.

Three Gold Threads was made with seven women from Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and Palestine who had made new homes in Stratford-upon-Avon, in response to Shakespeare’s First Folio. The women wrote their own questions and recorded one another and their families, and those recordings became the piece’s text. Their Arabic and Farsi were left untranslated, as protection and care. Watch it on YouTube.

Together we found a common language for the methodology, reviewing three provocations on Endarkened Co-Composition:

• Opacity as ethic and aesthetic
• Listening as an act of regard
• Endarkened co-presence as a research praxis

The working sessions kept everyone together as one group rather than splitting into breakout rooms, so that those online and those in the room met on the same footing.