4. Listening Ahead
There is no way, in the space of this conversation, that we can take up all or even most of the possible threads of story from these 35 minutes. We hope that you will find opportunities for reflecting on your own understandings of what it means to be a college student, about what it means to have the support of a family and a community and to bear the responsibility to make good on that help, about what it means to hope that an institution (of which you have never been a member) listens to your children and cares about them. We hope you also will find opportunities to hear resonances and dissonances in Liberty's experiences—ones that may supply details that may help you imagine different outcomes from those you have experienced. And we hope that you will consider our roles in conveying these experiences to you. Have we been characters in the story, or have we emerged as (the) storytellers? We have spent quite a few years thinking about the events presented in these 35 minutes of video. We trust you may find a few worth considering, as well.
However, our business here is to discuss this work as an instance of soundwriting with a specific focus on voice. More specifically, we want to return this work into a discussion about preparing students to conduct similar inquiries. With this in mind, and having just spent a half hour with Liberty, let's return to our question with a bit more specificity: What does it mean to "have" Liberty's voice—in this way, as she has spoken it? In what follows, we want to keep in mind both the metaphoric senses of Liberty's voice (the degrees of agency, entitlement, empowerment, and identity with which she speaks) and the literal/aural senses of Liberty's voice (the sound, presence, and products of her speaking). We also want to keep in mind the varying roles of agency that shape both how we hear Liberty and, as Jacqueline Jones Royster (1996) reminded us in the epigraph in our introduction, how Liberty (as a participant in interviews, as an emerging collaborator, as an interviewer, as a researcher, and as the person who dragged these folks with the microphones and cameras into the homes of her loved ones) appears to hear us. We will not consider these elements directly; instead, we will move through several models for handling voice in the works of two researchers who inspired our work: Deborah Brandt (2001) and Kathleen Stewart (1996). We will discuss how these researchers and their studies led us to consider our master question: What does it mean to "have" a voice? And we will discuss how these considerations led us to devise a different sort of methodology that would license different methods put to different ends.
Ultimately, we are interested in what attention to the sounds of voices—both sounds that we recognize as language and those that we do not recognize as language—does to and for our research: What (all) do we consider to be data, how will we (need to) share that data with our audiences, what (all) will we make from the data we collect, what are the roles of the researcher(s), who (all) emerges as the authors, who (all) speaks, who (all) hears, who (all) has the final say, and to what ends?
As with all research, ours began by speaking back to research that preceded ours. Our conversation—our voices—first responded to the voice of Deborah Brandt, whose approach to voice helps us to understand the terms of decisions about representing the stories of others.