Listening‐as, Listening‐for, and the Politics of Perception—Theirs and Ours

Sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and other critical scholars of language are no strangers to the importance of listening in navigating a linguistically and broadly semiotically mediated world. Neither, for that matter, are everyday speakers. But how does one not only locate but also critically analyze listening? What happens to listening when professional listener-analysts transduce “it” into writing—an account about how they, or others, listen? James Slotta's Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea (2023) and Kinga Koźmińska's Soundings and the Politics of Sociolinguistic Listening for Transnational Space (2024) are two recent works that confront these questions, encouraging us to attend to sounded experience and the politics of listening in distinct yet complementary ways. For Slotta, this involves decentering the primacy of voicing, speaking, and linguistic production as the key site at which politics, power, and social organization are (re)produced; for Koźmińska, this involves challenging the often-unstated assumptions that undergird the listening practices of sociolinguists and drawing attention to the open-ended, embodied, and material dimension of sounding out and being heard. In these ways, their works point up how listening contributes to the frequently high stakes and far-reaching consequences for how collective life unfolds: for how decisions are made, resources are allocated, and relational interpersonal alignments are forged—or blocked. And yet what the books leave readers with is less an intervention into method or theory and more an intervention into epistemology, specifically the epistemology of the professional listeners—sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists—who learn to listen-as and listen-for in particular ways as part of their processes of expert socialization and self-fashioning. In other words, what the works demonstrate are less what happens when professional analysts attend to how people listen, sound out, and are heard, and more the impossible ideological task we set for ourselves when we attempt to radically decenter metadiscourses, metapragmatic labels, and other meta-signs that focalize modalities of perception, particularly our own professionalized ways of analyzing the uptake of political organization. If this sounds like a damning critique, we want to be clear that it is not. It is also not a problem that is unique to the authors, or for that matter, to sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, or other critical scholars of language. It is, in fact, a problem that we ourselves share with all these individuals and groups. Of course, linguistic experts’ listening still needs to be critically interrogated not as a passing dispensation but as an ongoing process of reckoning with the intersectionally structured, dynamic ordering of power, positionality, and privilege, along with the analytic move to treat translatability and translation into English as an often unmarked ground for making analytic claims.1 However, this observation nevertheless raises important questions about how we can decenter meta-level talk about perception to reveal what listeners are listening-for or listening-as. By listening-for, we refer to goal-directed auditory perception that sets out to hear what is metaphorically behind a sound, not just semantics, but social indexical values, person types, histories, structures, and more. By listening-as, we refer to acts of stancetaking, role-inhabitance, or performance of a persona or person type that is enacted not through acts of voicing or material self-presentation (say, through commodity registers; Agha 2011), but through a genre of listening (Marsili-Vargas 2022). Our goal is to offer neither a critique that stops with the act of deconstruction nor to claim we have accomplished a task that is Sisyphean in its ideological design. Instead, through our discussion, we hope to point toward an epistemologically humble conceptual framework that does not aspire or claim to move beyond talk about perception but instead acknowledges that meta-signs mediate our knowledge of non-linguistic perceptual phenomena. Importantly, this mediation is always irreducible and inescapable at the same time as it is not coterminous with materiality or the non-linguistic aspects of perception writ large (Babcock 2023, 788). In the sections that follow, we first elaborate on how interdisciplinary scholars have paid attention to listening as part of a critical, multimodal, and even multisensorial politics of perception. We then offer an overview of the two texts that anchor this review essay, tracking how the authors emphasize how members of the communities of practice they engage in their respective texts listen-as and listen-for across contexts and projects, including the contexts and projects of paying critical scholarly attention to the constitutive, though shifty, role of language in social life. Before we continue, our own positionality as authors warrants further comment. Not all of us are linguistic anthropologists or linguists, but in our work, we all engage with the colonization and coloniality of perception across global sites. One of us is a scholar of music, but all of us are trained musicians, with varying degrees of professionalization. Perhaps most importantly of all, none of us are speakers of the languages used by communities of practice focused on by the books’ authors (Polish, Tok Pisin, Yopno), just the academic English into which the authors translate their interlocutors’ talk. As such, we reflect on these texts by way of a broader interdisciplinary orientation to the production and perception of sound mediated by our own socialized habits of listening and linguistic abilities. While it has not always been a primary focus, listening has not been entirely absent from sociolinguistic, linguistic anthropological, and other interdisciplinary study and theorizing. Sociolinguists have relied on close, careful, and technologically mediated listening since the field's early inception. We view technology here in an expansive sense as a material means for extending human capacities, extension of human capacities as techne—art or technique—and machine applications of techno-scientific knowledge (Chandras and Babcock 2025, 3), which includes not just devices like tape recorders (Bucholtz 2009; Labov 1963, 1966) or digital technologies like Elan and Praat, but also sociolinguistic interviews (Laforest 1994), minimal pairs, curated word lists and passages, and recorded conversations with a sociolinguistic interviewer (to summarize a helpful summary of traditional sociolinguistic methods from Koźmińska 2024, 52). As a core aspect of sociolinguists’ analytic practices, listening was not only focused on listening-for variation among communities of linguistic practice but also listening-for metadiscourses, metapragmatic labels, and other meta-semiotic typifications that index how listeners listen and what they (think they) hear. The caveat, “think they hear,” is important. In a particularly dramatic incident described by H. Samy Alim (2005, 187), teachers heard standard-register utterances (what he calls “White Mainstream English” or WME) as nonstandard when uttered by Black youth, but sociolinguists have long relied on metadiscourses about lexicon, phonology, other linguistic phenomena, and what listeners (think they) hear to guide them even in situations that do not involve overtly racist mishearing. Sociolinguists’ interest in perception has driven the development of concepts like the “sociolinguistic monitor” advanced by William Labov et al. (Labov et al. 2006, 2011; Levon and Fox 2014), which posited a cognitive mechanism by which perceivers attune themselves to variation. In this vein, decades of work on (the) sociolinguistic(s of) perception have tended not to critically interrogate the figure of the “listener” beyond a metaphor or abstraction (see Lynch 1998, for a critical overview) or have theorized cognition as lying in a domain that, according to the theorists’ own analytic terms, remains an inaccessible “inner” space. This is not monolithic, of course: Many scholars have attended centrally to the role of power, positionality, and history in shaping hearing—that is, interpretation of auditory signals—narrowly (Lo 2021; Thurlow 2023), as well as the theoretical morass that is the topic of sociolinguistic awareness, broadly—“how…diverse cognitive systems that incorporate social and linguistic information are related to each other, and what kinds of effects this has on our ability to use different types of speech in interaction” (Babel et al. 2025, 45; see also contributors to the Theme Series introduced by these authors. The series authors critically examine core sociolinguistic concepts linked to listening and hearing, like “salience,” “recognition,” “control,” “cues,” and “sensitivity”). Linguistic anthropologists have similarly relied on technologically mediated listening practices for as long as the subfield has existed, whether mediated by the field notebook and the interlinear gloss (Silverstein 2015) or the transcripts that have long displaced actual speech as the object of analysis (a critique alluded to in Murphy 2021, 2). While addressees, overhearers, audiences (physically assembled, mass, virtual, or otherwise), and various other embodied receivers, human and nonhuman, have figured with varying degrees of explicitness in theorizations of naturally occurring talk, many core concepts in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have nevertheless continued to focalize production or have treated reception as secondary, even self-evident. actively constructs the very reality that it claims to be representing. [As enacted by Japanese male intellectuals, d]irectly reporting the speech of the [female] other became a textual device made possible by the realist imperative of verisimilitude, and the voice of the narrator became, in turn, an authoritative presence that, through ‘giving voice,’ silently reports, dislocates, and, thereby, constitutes it as other. (Inoue 2006, 51) Building on Inoue's conceptualization of the listening subject of Japanese modernity, scholars like Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores have extended her work to theorize the white listening subject of colonial modernity, and, more broadly, “racially hegemonic perceiving subjects…that are oriented to spoken language as well as other modes of communication and semiotic forms” (2017, 627–28). Rather than purporting to be about how members of an essentialized, fictional “white race” perceive difference cognitively, Rosa, Flores, and others have instead attended to how hegemonic perceiving subjects’ habitual metadiscourses of perception overdetermine the qualities, essences, or attributes purportedly index about their users, whether individually or as a group, as evidenced by linguistic and non-linguistic signs. Building on Rosa and Flores, scholars have emphasized the ubiquity, variety, and potential abstractness of hegemonic perceivers: states listen (Pak 2023), algorithms listen (Seaver 2019), and computing technologies listen (Semel 2022); listening practices get variously institutionalized and backed by power (see, e.g., Berman 2020; Marsili-Vargas 2022; Dragojlovic and Samuels 2023); and hegemonic perceivers do not just listen but also look (Babcock 2023; Nakassis 2023) and ignore (Babcock and Gershon 2025). Beyond this, scholars working at the intersection of disability studies and the critical study of language across (sub)disciplines have importantly drawn attention to the ableist presuppositions that undergird many accounts of reception. This is especially true for approaches that uncritically conflate listening—resting on a metaphor of audition—with reception or uptake writ large. Linguistic anthropologist E. 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