OPEN CALL: Beyond Listening 2025 –Walking-With Changes (CENSE)

23–26 September 2025, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Submissions due 10 February 2025
Building on the 2023 Beyond Listening: Agency, Art, and the Environment symposium in Budapest and the rich range of subjects discussed there, we invite you to submit a proposal in response to this open call for a follow-up event in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in 2025.

How can we escape from listening paradigms that are based on expansive, colonial, violent, and extractivist approaches? What can we learn from current ethical and political applications of acoustic ecology, acoustic anthropology, and bioacoustics? What can we, as sound artists, scholars, activists, and listeners, do beyond simply witnessing another wave of reports on declining biodiversity and the ongoing collapse of our planet’s systems? How can these ever more tangible transformations taking place on a planetary scale be addressed locally and collectively, beyond the act of listening?

Addressed in Budapest, these and similar questions remain relevant. Therefore, we invite scientists, philosophers, activists, artists, and others to continue listening-with these questions, rethinking them in a manner of being-with, and reposing them through walking-with, while focusing on changes that accompany our everyday lives, but also those that are less obvious and only surface as time passes.

We are looking for topics that address the potential of sonic ecology in these areas: 
• Walking-with changes: rethinking walking as a method of inquiry, approaching listening-with your feet, soundwalking; 
• Listening-with and beyond disciplines: employing the convergence of art, science, and technology in sonic ecosystems; 
• Staying-with solastalgia: experiencing distress induced by environmental change in our home environment; 
• Resonating-with lessons learnt from listening to the Anthropocene, addressing inequality, discrimination, and social justice; 
• Being-with other-than-human sonic environments (ecoacoustics and bioacoustics) and engagement with environmental activism; 
• Rethinking-with local and regional, historical and contemporary epistemologies and ethics of environmental awareness.

We welcome proposals for papers, presentations, peripatetic lectures, performative lectures, and other unconventional formats to be presented in person at the symposium. We especially encourage challenging, innovative—even provocative— contributions which go beyond traditional formats of papers and talks that dominate academic conferences and symposia. In the selection process, we will prioritise experimental, engaging, and hands-on proposals. We envision the symposium as a place for thorough and significant engagement with and dialogue about the issues that are in our collective interest.

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