On Listening–with Mwenda Ntarangwi

How do we approach listening, as a mode of perception? How can we be attentive to what others say? Not so much to respond, but in order to understand. In today's episode, On Listening, our guest is Mwenda Ntarangwi, a cultural anthropologist who has taught in the USA, in Kenya and is currently working with the National Defense University in Kenya.  Ntarangwi has explored questions of listening, perception, and its engagement in knowledge production across his work in Kenya and the USA. Some of his publications include Gender Identity and Performance: Understanding of Swahili Cultural Realities Through Songs (2003); East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization (2009), Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology (2010), and The Street is My Pulpit: Hip Hop and Christianity in Kenya (2016). Our conversation focuses on his article “Listening to Disrupt Ethnographic Representations” (2021), published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.  Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production:  Ethnographic Imagination Basel:  Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Ethnologisches Seminar Universität Basel) in collaboration with the New Media Center #listening #ethnographicimaginationbasel #anthropology