Listening to Others

In the 2026 Mangold lecture, Prof Seth Whidden asks what it means to listen to others. Language is often imagined as a bridge between people: a means of expression, translation, sympathy, and understanding. It also has limits; it may fail, exclude, simplify, or speak too confidently on behalf of those who have not been heard. “Listening to Others” explores what happens when we attend not only to voices, but to the spaces around them: silences, interruptions, misunderstandings, and forms of expression that do not fit easily into words. The lecture begins from a question at once literary and deeply human: who gets to speak, who is heard, and under what conditions? It considers how language can create connection across difference, but also how it can impose itself on others. When does speaking for another become an act of care, and when does it become ventriloquism or possession? What changes when we stop asking how to give voice to others, and begin asking how to listen more carefully? Moving from nineteenth-century writing to contemporary questions about identity, ecology, disability, sound, and creativity, the lecture considers linguistic communication as an ethical practice. Understanding depends not simply on more speech, but on more attentive forms of listening: across languages, cultures, histories, bodies, and ways of being. At its heart, “Listening to Others” proposes a poetics of humility, patience, compassion, and giving, in which language becomes not a tool of mastery, but a shared space for relation and recognition. Image: Alfred Stieglitz, Listening to the Crickets (c. 1900). The Art Institute of Chicago (CC0 Public Domain designation)