Participatory Research

Funded by University of Manchester and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine

Deep Listening in A&E is a practice-led research project exploring how Deep Listening might operate as a methodological and reflective tool within the emergency department. Developed in collaboration with healthcare staff in a hospital in a major city in the north of England, the project introduces approaches derived from the work of Pauline Oliveros into a clinical setting, adapting them to the conditions and constraints of the Emergency Department.

Through a series of facilitated sessions, healthcare staff were introduced to Deep Listening and practised it during their shifts, keeping journals as a way of reflecting on their experience. This embedded listening within the everyday conditions of A&E, foregrounding how attention was continually directed, interrupted and negotiated across the environment.

Alongside this, a series of recordings were made within the department. Together with the journals, these provided a way of reflecting on the emergency department as a dynamic process, shaped through shifting attentional flows, rather than a fixed or stable setting. This work now forms the basis for ongoing practice and research.

Deep Listening in A&E positions listening as both an analytic and generative practice, asking how it might support reflection, care and new forms of understanding within highly pressurised institutional contexts.