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This audio piece is an arrangement of voice notes sent on WhatsApp between myself and my friend and colleague, Peter Browning, while we were both doing fieldwork – Peter in Colombia, me in India – in 2018. The notes were not made to be shared beyond the original recipient: they are unpolished, rambling, raw. They are the antithesis of what we are socialised into producing in academia: tidy, refined, reflected. But as I relistened to them several years later, I became increasingly interested in how these voice notes capture elements of the research process that are often erased, edited out.

            The voice notes – particularly my own contribution – betray an unmistakeable anxiety attached, here, to uncomfortable questions I had about the ethical and political challenges of communicating my (critical, provocative) findings with the NGO that I had worked with. In short, I was worried. I was unsure of what to share, to whom, with what purpose; I was conscious that whatever decision I made, there would be particular consequences, and I struggled to find writing that articulated how I felt – despite the fact that, as the voice note shows, I was not alone with these concerns. The unfinished, the unsure, the unstable remain hidden from the research process, mere stepping stones along the path to a finished piece.

I have come to appreciate – rather than feel embarrassed by – the visceral vulnerability that is embraced by these voice notes. Although I’m wary of fetichising the communicative power of sound, the recording’s explicit rootedness in our voice and bodies produces a tangible affective quality. They centre the voice – both in the sense of an embodied, emotional production and in the sense of our respective positionalities. They retain, in a much more perceptible way, the markings of Peter, of Katy, allowing us a presence that is more easily obscured through traditional academic writing. This voice situates our shared concerns about our practice in the field within the context of who we are, where we are, why and how we are there. 

But it is not only voice that emerges as salient in these notes – it is voices. It is a tribute to the dialogical nature of research and the fallacy of the monological author. As sociolinguists, we know that our language practices are polyphonic, that we bear the traces of others in what we produce. And yet, scholarship remains tightly bound to particular practices of authorship that leave little space for an account of how our words, our selves, are shaped through our relationships with others. This voice note serves as a reminder of the fundamentally interactive nature of research, with a nod towards what is rarely offered the floor in academic work – friendship. In the context of cut-throat competition and individual advancement in the neoliberal university, reflecting on the role that friendship, dialogue and affect play in our work could be a useful springboard to radically rethink our relationship with/in/to the academy, rooted in an ethics of solidarity and care.