Routledge, ISBN 978-1032391304, English, 316 pages, 2025, UK

The centrality of the ‘listening body’ is a concept in sound studies that continues to gain momentum, possibly because of the ‘disembodiment’ that we experience during our long visual engagements with screens. The politics of listening, and even more in a situated dimension, seem to serve now a shared need of reclaiming our acoustic space, as opposed to the already intruded visual one, and as a space that does not need big infrastructures, or any digital medium, or network, to be activated and experienced. This anthology of texts is then timely in this context. Collectively edited, it is divided into three sections (Methodologies, Apparatus and Culture), it hosts a diverse range of scholars from inside and outside academia, and suggests alternative strategies of listening, including those to be experienced in critical sites or with other species, for example. Moreover, through the contributions there are several invitations to act, from scores and diagrams, to instructions, exercises, and meditations. The current political value of listening can also be seen in the editors’ attempt to define the field of ‘listening studies’. And if our bodies, then, constitute the ‘primary technologies of listening, recording, and sonic archiving’, a collective discourse can initiate vital relational and situated practices and methodologies.