Re-hearing parents as risks to children
Institutional listening practices in a California child welfare court
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2286451 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jessica López‐espino (0000-0002-4316-9960, Department of Sociology University of California Santa Barbara California USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 420-440 |
| Publication date | 2024-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1055-1360 • E-ISSN: 1548-1395 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/jola.12442 |
| OpenAlex | W4403437564 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 61 |
Building on scholarship on the politics of listening and the listening subject, this article proposes re-hearing as a listening practice where empowered actors assert that various qualities of personhood are hearable or perceivable in relation to what marginalized persons say, do, or are otherwise associated with. Although there is an expectation that in US courts lay actors can have a hearing and a voice before the law, I identify how practices of re-hearing shaped how parents and their narratives were heard (or left unheard) in a California child welfare court. My ethnographic research examined the listening and entextualization practices of judges, attorneys, and social workers involved in child welfare case management in California. I found that re-hearing practices co-constructed the continued marginalization of lay actors within contexts of state surveillance by attributing suspicion to parents and their silences in ways that exceeded and constructed evidence collected against them. Ultimately, I argue that child welfare courts and professional actors within them collectively comprise a listening institution that normalizes re-hearing low-income and racialized parents through frameworks of deficiency and risk
Active listening · Audiology · Political science · Sociology · Welfare · Child Abuse and Trauma · Communication · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies
Rules versus relationships
Brown Tide Rising
Representing Rape
Ideology in the Language of Judges
Signs of Difference
The Language of Law School
Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race
Whiteness as Property
Just Words
The Latino Threat
Vicarious Language
Captured on tape
Family Surveillance
Introduction. Public transcripts
Commercial radio
Giving and Taking Voice
Reproducing Rape
The alchemy of race and rights
Interorganizational Utility of Welfare Stigma in the Criminal Justice System
Transcription as embodied entextualization
What Does Language Remember
Mapping the Margins
In and Out of Crisis
Undoing Appropriateness
The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes
Getting Eyes in the Home
The ear from nowhere
Quoting from the case file
Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades
The politics of transcription
Language and linguistics on trial
Unsettling race and language
Accent, standard language ideology, and discriminatory pretext in the courts
Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or 'Lift-up-over Sounding
The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double
The Ethics of Listening
Professional Vision
Where has "Japanese women's language" gone
Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life
Jurisdiction
"Of Cops and "Karens
Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness
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Off-the-record
Raciontologies
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |