"Deaf:Politics of Listening" - a Sonic Exhibition on Gender Violence in Higher Education

The gap between the promises of universities to resolve complaints and the reality has been the subject of Sara Ahmed’s research on complaints within universities in the U.K. (2021). This paper examines how Chilean universities process gender violence complaints and to what extent their protocols are able to resonate the voices of victims, thereby practising a “politics of listening” (Bassel, 2017) in the university. Despite the success of the Chilean feminist student movement and the subsequent implementation of equal opportunities offices and sexual harrassment protocols (Dinamarca and Trujillo, 2021), universties face challenges in institutionally channeling complaints with regard to gender violence (Barra and Montes, 2022). The paper discusses the experience of having curated the sonic research exhibition “Deaf: the politics of listening”– based on qualitative interviews with equal opportunities officers and officers – and aims to demonstrate the sonic dimensions of resonance and listening on a political level and the necessity to work with arts-based methods.