【by Ka-Wei Pang, June 2025】
I am old school. I like greeting each student with good morning as they enter the classroom in the morning. However, in recent years, only a few responded. It is not because students are impolite, but that many are cocooned in their own digital sanctuary with noise-cancelling earphones. This is how they retreat from the loud, overwhelming world. This tendency to detach from listening makes engagement more challenging, let alone fostering their sense of presence and connection in the classroom.
I am also curious about the new technology, the GenAI. What delightfully surprises me is how these chatbots exude positivity and goodwill in the chat. More than once our conversation ended with a positive note: “I’m here to help.” “I’m always here for a good chat.” “If you ever need anything—big or small—I’m right here. 😊✨” It is this presence in the here and now and readiness to listen that are reassuring, making us feel good, as if we are truly heard and not alone. No wonder many resort to AI chatbots for emotional support. (Salute to all the developers who endeavour to promoting a safe and kind digital environment.)
Reflecting on the reassuring “presence” of AI chatbots, I am reminded of how human interactions often lack the same attentiveness and care. No matter in the workplace or in school (well, the academia encompasses both), there has been so much focus on the visual, on speaking, and on tangible output, but how about listening? I don’t mean those listening exercises for language proficiency tests but deep listening that goes beyond hearing to active participation in genuine dialogue—engaged listening. All too often we hear without listening, read without understanding. Engaged listening is not solely auditory. In both hearing and deaf communities, engaged listening is about presence, understanding and meaningful engagement. Engaged listening is a process in which we nourish our attentiveness, empathy and ethical responsibility. It shows that we care.
Listening is a form of engagement that could bring about transformation both interpersonally and intrapersonally. If we understand “the public” as a contextualized notion that transcends dichotomies such as public/private, doing Public Humanities means engaging ourselves, engaging each other, the community and the public. If Public Humanities is committed to promoting care and connection, and cultivating humanities values in our communities, engaged listening is a praxis. We cannot care without listening. Therefore, engaged listening is a praxis in both being and pedagogy to build a better world that treasures dialogue, understanding, integrity and compassion.
Engaged listening as a pedagogy
Can we imagine a learning community where everyone engages and listens? Distractions are everywhere, staying focused and aware has become a rare skill. More often than not, the audience of a presentation session just snap the key points or infographics on the PowerPoint slide and immediately have their eyes glued on their electronic devices again, and participants in a discussion session tune out right after saying what they want. We all long for genuine and meaningful communication, but we are all frustrated. Feminist educator bell hooks puts forward the idea of engaged pedagogy, a pedagogy that builds a learning environment that encourages participation, partnership and integrity of both teachers and students.[1] In her book Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, hooks writes, “When we see the classroom as a place where teacher and students can share their ‘inner light’ then we have a way to glimpse who we are and how we might learn together.”[2] Teaching and learning has become increasingly challenging for everyone because students may be going through a rough patch we have no idea about, most young people are more comfortable and adept at communicating online than face-to-face, and there’s a wondrous online world at everyone’s fingertips. What can we do then? Perhaps we can learn to be good ethnographers!
We need to be good ethnographers. Ethnography is a form of inquiry where we mindfully observe, listen and understand by means of participant observation, in-depth interview, etc. Good ethnographers actively listen with an open mind, but not an empty head. Good ethnographers are attentive, observant, curious, empathetic and non-judgmental. Likewise, teaching and learning Public Humanities in a way is to engage ourselves with the same mindfulness as ethnographers. Let’s take in-depth interviews as an example. We see interviews as a site of dialogue where ideas flow and interact. When conducting interviews, especially for oral history projects, we listen to what’s said, as well as what’s not said. We also listen to our interviewees’ silence, emotion, and body language. And this can only be done when we are truly present and engaged. Deep listening like this not only deepens our understanding as educators and learners but also fosters reciprocal knowledge exchange in the broader public—where stories, perspectives, and lived experiences become the foundation of shared inquiry and collective meaning-making.
Conducting interviews is also a humbling process that fosters nuanced and inclusive intellectual dialogue. Listening to our interviewees, we curiously embrace uncertainties and the unknown. With a critical and reflective mind, we face squarely our own ignorance, as well as reflect upon our own position, biases and blind spots. As we listen to the stories during the interview, we understand better the interplay among lived experience, discourses and context. In transcribing, analyzing and writing these narratives, we learn to represent the stories ethically and compassionately. In representing these life stories—particularly life stories of the ordinary and the marginalized—we strive our best to let these voices heard and the stories justly understood, enriching and empowering the subaltern counterpublics and alternative publics. For instance, oral history projects featuring the older LGBTQ+ offer hope, courage and possibilities for their young counterparts to live on;[3] narratives from illness survivors remind individuals that they are seen and never alone. Life stories in Asia or the Global South can serve as valuable empirical texts for inter-referencing, allowing us to both draw insight from and provincialize the Euro-Americentric scholarship. That being said, conducting good interviews requires practice.
Conducting interviews needs preparation and hard work. That’s why I have reservations about sending students to conduct interviews before they are ready. Without proper training and practices, many may simply look for soundbites without listening to the stories, and easily cross the line without knowing it. We all know that there is a fine line between curious and nosy, and good ethnographers should maintain an appropriate boundary by being both sensitive and self-aware on the path of inquiry. To prepare students for this path of inquiry, we can begin with some experiential learning activities such as role play. Invite students to take turns playing the role of interviewers, interviewees and observers, followed by a sharing session about both their feelings and observations. In active learning, students can understand better the importance of engaged listening, know more coping skills in different situations, and be more aware of their own positions, their eye contact, verbal and non-verbal responses (such as their interjections, probes, facial expression, posture, gestures and body language). Engaged listening can improve not only their interview performance, but also their interview question design, fieldnotes writing in peer learning groups through pilot research try-outs. By cultivating this level of engagement, we bridge the gap between academic inquiry and public discourse.
When we build an engaged learning community, engaged listening will become the heart of both teaching and learning, no less important than visualizing and speaking. Ultimately, engaged listening transcends the classroom, shaping ethical storytelling, inclusive historical interpretation, and collaborative knowledge production across public humanities initiatives, reinforcing the value of presence and dialogue in all spaces of learning and exchange. Nevertheless, as with any profound practice, it brings with it challenges that require mindful navigation, good care and resilience.
Engaged listening is the weight
Engaged listening is rewarding, but it also comes with its own weight. When voices go unheard, those who listen may find themselves carrying more than their share of responsibility. Apart from new insights, inspirations and positivity, people may reveal heartbreaking stories, pour out their anger, grievance, anxiety, fear and insecurity to this ear. Listening to so much negativity, and various nonsense and absurdity in the world, one could easily burn out. Does it mean we should give up on engaging and listening? No, it doesn’t.
In building a care-filled community, we care about others and the world, as well as take good care of ourselves. Most of the time, such care work becomes a duty to females and feminists because care work is socially assigned to women due to gender norms, and that feminists actively engage in care work as part of their advocacy. In Sara Ahmed’s words, those who are willing to listen (to complaints) become what she calls “a feminist ear.”[4] Listening is often mistaken for passivity, but in reality, it demands deep strength—especially within a feminist vision of care that prioritizes empathy, connection, mutual support and empowerment. Yet, many of us, as adult or teacher, tend to feel obliged to give advice, so that we appear to be “helpful” and “useful.” But in fact, engaged listening can already be caring. In her book Matters of Care, Puig de la Bellacasa proposes the concepts of “thinking-with,” “dissenting-within,” and “thinking-for” to engage with care in an ethical way. By that, it means we engage with others, treasuring the interconnectedness; seek transformation and ethical engagement from inside existing structures, questioning and challenging the norms; and reflect carefully to avoid paternalism while taking responsibility for care.[5] Engaged listening itself, in this sense, can be a praxis of care, as it engages others relationally while resisting the impulse to impose knowledge from a hierarchical position. And this matters not only to others but also to us.
When practising engaged listening, we have to listen to within ourselves, not only others. Listening to others can be draining and sometimes rendering us powerlessness. As we maintain compassion and awareness alive in our heart, it is important to extend that same kindness to ourselves, nourishing compassion for ourselves as well.[6] Listening too much negativity may trigger our own negative emotions, and the best way is not to cover them up or running away from them. Vietnamese Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches us to take good care of these emotions with five steps: (1) recognizing the emotion is present, (2) accepting the emotion is really there, (3) embracing the emotion with mindfulness, (4) looking deeply into the emotion, and (5) realizing that we are more than just an emotion.[7] (The book Happy Teachers Change the World: A Guide for Cultivating Mindfulness in Education is a compilation of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s teaching on mindfulness practices that are helpful in teaching and learning.) This also resonates to the third step of Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life: as we acknowledge the struggles of others, we must also recognize our own pain and challenges, avoid self-judgment, understand human imperfection, so that we can cultivate our inner peace.[8] Only when we are in touch and at peace with ourselves can we create a compassionate community.
Still, it is always easier said than done. We therefore also need a good support network, just as the Buddhists practise dharma as a sangha. When peers engage in compassionate listening together, we create a shared space of understanding and empathy. This collective practice of engaged compassionate listening can share our emotional load, allowing each of us to feel less isolated with our burdens. It also helps to validate each other’s experience and emotions, creating a sense of community and solidarity. Moreover, peers can gain insights from each other’s experience, which can be valuable in navigating our own challenges. Knowing that others are genuinely listening and caring can alleviate the pressure to resolve everything alone. Such a supportive network nurtures resilience, healing us from burnout and emotional exhaustion.
As we restore dialogue—both within ourselves and with the community—we move beyond the impulse to deny or suppress negativity, instead embracing and transforming it. Through engaged and compassionate listening, we cultivate integrity and strengthen our connection to those around us. In essence, engaged listening creates a foundation of trust and open communication, allowing communities to thrive. It is in this shared space of understanding that genuine engagement takes root, paving the way forward.
Engaged listening is the way
Community engagement is at the heart of Public Humanities. It is a collective commitment to transform the public with creative projects of the community, for the community and with the community.[9] There is no way to do Public Humanities without engagement and listening. Through engaged listening, we recognize the sophistications of life and in life, move beyond rigid binaries, and understand the complexity and diversity of the publics. It is through this dialogue—grounded in humility, integrity, and reciprocity—that we challenge inherited academic authority, uplift community voices, and foster spaces where trust and shared inquiry can thrive.
In a world where visual and verbal expressions take centre stage, the act of listening often fades into the background. If we speak, write and act without listening, we risk fostering a world of self-absorption and disconnection, where voices are drowned out rather than uplifted. When we listen, we shift our focus from ourselves to others, and back to reflecting upon ourselves. It’s about self, and it’s at the same time beyond oneself. When we are fully present and engaged, we can hear the voices of the unheard, listen to the untold stories, and see the extraordinary out of the ordinary. More than a skill, engaged listening is a way and an embodied intersubjective process for dialogue, understanding and reconciliation. With integrity and compassion, we connect—not out of opportunism, but that we value others as precious subjects and testimonies of the community. To listen is to recognize that we do not exist in isolation—our voices, experiences, and humanity are interwoven, as Thích Nhất Hạnh calls “interbeing.”[10] It heals, empowers and transforms. It’s one of the first steps and a vital process for community engagement and inter/intra-community dialogue.
We long to be heard—so we must listen first. As the world is ever-changing, and the public is in the making, we can always be the change. As we engage with the community, we rethink the public and reflect upon ourselves. Through engaged listening, we do not simply observe or analyze; we participate, bringing theory into praxis to build more just, inclusive, and thoughtful publics. In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks redefines love as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.[11] Let’s envisage a world where everyone listens and embraces listening as the very foundation of humanity. Engaged listening is a praxis of teaching, learning, and being. To build a loving community, engaged listening is the way.
AUTHOR
Ka-Wei Pang is a lecturer in Cultural Studies at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are gender and sexualities, life stories, and health humanities. She is currently studying Thai Y-series and its transnational fandom. Her latest publications include “Queer Media from the Global South: The Emerging Girls Love (GL) Media Industry of Southeast Asia” (2024) in Feminist Media Studies and “Fandom meets artificial intelligence: Rethinking participatory culture as human–community–machine interactions” (2024) in European Journal of Cultural Studies (both of which co-authored with Eva Cheuk-Yin Li).
NOTES
[1] bell hooks, “Engaged Pedagogy,” in Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), 19-22.
[2] hooks, “Engaged Pedagogy,” 20.
[3] For those raised in a more accepting environment, it may be difficult to imagine so, but during a roundtable session in my course, a student shared how, as a sexual minority, he once couldn’t picture himself living beyond 25 years old—given the near-invisibility of older LGBTQ+ individuals in social media, media portrayals, and daily life.
[4] Sara Ahmed, “On Receiving Accounts from Others,” differences 35, no. 3 (2024): 14–33. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-11525257
[5] María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Thinking with Care,” in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 69–94.
[6] Thich Nhat Hanh & Katherine Weare, “Deep Listening and Loving Speech,” in Happy Teachers Change the World: A Guide for Cultivating Mindfulness in Education (Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 2017), 161.
[7] Thich Nhat Hanh & Katherine Weare, “Taking Care of Our Emotions,” in Happy Teachers Change the World: A Guide for Cultivating Mindfulness in Education (Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 2017), 133-135.
[8] Karen Armstrong, “Compassion for Yourself,” in Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010), 75-90.
[9] Tim Frandy & B. Marcus Cederström, “Introduction,” in Culture Work: Folklore for the Public Good (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), 4-7.
[10] Thich Nhat Hanh & Katherine Weare, “Letter to a Young Teacher,” in Happy Teachers Change the World: A Guide for Cultivating Mindfulness in Education (Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 2017), xxiii-xxv.
[11] bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000).