This talk will report on a project exploring the production of voice for children participating in community circus classes. Reflecting on the conceptual and methodological challenges of researching this non-verbal, non-narrative medium, I will consider how we might listen to how voice is produced through children’s engagements with the objects of circus practice—juggling balls, aerial silks, unicycles, to name but a few. Drawing on the concept of enchantment and its Latin root cantare – to sing (Beaman 2021), I will consider how voice might be conceptualised as a posthuman, transrational process of ‘singing together’, enabling researchers to listen to unsayable forms of knowledge which do not speak for themselves.  

Dr Lou Harvey is Associate Professor in Education at University of Leeds. Their work in intercultural and peace education focuses on expanding the concept of voice to engage with the communication of the unsayable, using methods and approaches at the intersection of language and the arts, and with a commitment to a collaborative and neuroqueer ethos.