The Listening Body: Sound Walking, Wearable Technologies, and the Creative Potentials of a Vibrational Pedagogy

Wearable biosensors are becoming increasingly prevalent and agentic social technologies, used primarily to serve dominant medical, health, and commercial agendas. This chapter explores alternative possibilities of wearable sensory technologies as creative media for walking-based research and pedagogy with young children. Drawing on experimental practices of urban sound walking developed in a project called the Listening Body, we describe a series of walks that explore the use of wearable technologies as devices for collectively attuning to the more-than-human environment. In these sound walks, wearable technologies augmented our collective capacity to sense the urban environments we encountered with children, while also generating data related to the vibratory relations between bodies and environments in movement. Bringing together theoretical perspectives from bioaesthetics, posthuman media ecology, and biosocial studies in education, we outline some of the implications of wearable technologies as creative media for a vibrational pedagogy that extends beyond the limits of the human sensorium.