RESPECTING TIME AND SILENCE: AN ETHICAL, POLITICAL, AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL POSITION OF CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE LISTENING

Abstract

This article discusses the temporalities and silences of memory as ethical, political, and epistemological dimensions of culturally appropriate listening, particularly in contexts shaped by ethnic belonging, coloniality, and historical experiences of invisibilization. It is grounded in the understanding that silence does not represent the absence of communication, but rather a complex mode of meaning-making, deeply intertwined with power relations, trauma, memory, and epistemic exclusion. Drawing on critical epistemologies and scholarship on trauma, alterity, and knowledge production, the article challenges institutional listening practices that rely on universalizing expectations of narrative coherence, linearity, and immediate intelligibility. Through dialogue with situated experiences—especially those of the Romani people—the article argues that many forms of silence have historically emerged from the denial of legitimacy to certain peoples, knowledges, and ways of being. At the same time, these silences have been re-signified as strategies of protection, continuity, and the intergenerational transmission of collective memory. It is therefore argued that culturally appropriate listening requires more than institutional techniques; it demands an ethical shift in conventional forms of recognition, capable of embracing multiple temporalities of memory, non-linear modes of processing lived experience, and historically marginalized epistemologies. More than ensuring opportunities to speak, culturally appropriate listening entails recognizing the right to exist of those who, for centuries, have been compelled to silence parts of themselves in order to be acknowledged as fully human.