Welcome to the website for my WWU Honors capstone project! This website is home to a multimodal essay on embodied listening, a term which comes from rhetoric studies. Embodied listening is not so much a concept or analytical framework as it is a way of being in the world. Though the essay will cover it in much greater detail, embodied listening is, briefly, a continuous process of attending to the way your body interfaces with the world. In other words, embodied listening calls for you to constantly be aware and think about how your body is responding to the world—but doing so holistically, recognizing that touch, for example, is intimately related to how hearing works (think the vibrations from bass played through a car speaker). Essentially, I want to examine this in the context of our ever-more-digital world—can we still have a satisfying and complete embodied experience over the internet? But I’ll explain this all much more thoroughly in the essay itself.

Before that, I’d like to offer a brief overview of the organization and navigation of this site. Below are three buttons that will take you to three separate versions of my essay—a multimodal version, a podcast version, and a text-only transcript. Let me explain why these three options are here. Embodied listening, as a multimodal practice that “offers flexible listening strategies that account for diverse bodies instead of proposing that all listeners should (or can) listen in the same way” (Ceraso 35), necessitates that we attend to and recognize the vast multiplicity of kinds of listening that different bodies enact. While a medium like print text offers limited amounts of multimodality, a website such as this one allows for a much greater variety of possibilities. In this respect, limiting my essay to one modality would be a failure to take advantage of the unique generative opportunities afforded by the internet, and indeed presents an accessibility barrier in that it limits access to folks who might prefer or need to encounter material within a specific modality.

In presenting my essay, then, I chose to adopt a multimodal approach that interweaves text, audio, and video, because each modality offers unique benefits—something like a stage performance, for example, is captured differently on video versus when described with text. I decided to focus on this particular multimodal approach, however, because it is what best works with my embodied experience of the world. In additionally offering the essay in podcast and transcript form, I hope to highlight the fact that the multimodal approach to this essay might not work for everybody, for a whole host of reasons, ranging from lack of access to technology like speakers to requiring a screen reader (for which a transcript of a video might prove more helpful). All that being said, feel free to click on whichever link works best for you.