What does it mean to listen, and to be heard? That question travelled with d@rts this season, from a dance studies conference in Seoul to the ISME World Conference in Montreal. Below, we share highlights from both stops.
d@rts in Seoul
On the 20th August 2026, Prof. Ralph Buck presented an invited paper at the Korean Society for Dance Studies. His presentation, titled Dance Studies, Health, Wellbeing and Dialogue, saw him using the "Decolonise This…" educational game developed by Work Package 7 in the Dialoguing Arts Education project (Project: 101132352).
The three projects form a cluster of Horizon Europe initiatives on Cultural Literacy, exploring how arts and education can foster dialogue, inclusion, and social change. The symposium offered a valuable opportunity to share emerging findings, identify connections across the projects, and strengthen collaboration within the Cultural Literacy cluster.
Ralph outlined how holistic wellbeing can be supported through dance pedagogies that rest upon a Māori indigenous concept of Hauora. He then introduced the "Decolonise This…" game to highlight the importance of reflecting upon values, bias, and assumptions we hold when we teach and plan our teaching. He spoke to the need to give unheard voices agency in the planning process within educational contexts, and that the game can help people feel heard and help others to listen. The game reiterated his driving values that advocate for diversity and inclusion in arts education.
Academics and students from a range of Korean universities played the game, and quickly became engaged in its process and dialogic nature. Feedback from participants was very positive, with many academics asking "how can I get a copy of this game?"
“The game is great. We need these discussions in Korea. The game format provided a structured safe space to offer diverse views and enter difficult conversations.”
— Dr Gawon Yoo
The game fostered a range of peer-to-peer discussions and energised the conference. d@rts was alive in Seoul, with a range of dance scholars engaging with the role of arts education in fostering wellbeing, inclusive of notions of inclusion and cohesion.
An Ear for the Unheard: dialoguing@rts at the ISME World Conference
Christian Rolle presented results from Work Package 3 of the dialoguing@rts project at the 37th World Conference of the International Society for Music Education (ISME), held in Montreal, Canada, from 26–31 July 2026. His contribution, "An Ear for the Unheard," was part of the panel "Sounding Unity and Building Bridges Across Music Education: An Exploration of Sonic Practice." Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Novi Sad, Serbia, and at KreaLab in Ulm, Germany, the presentation explored listening, silence, and the unheard as dimensions of sonic and political agency.
In Novi Sad, collective silence has become a powerful practice of civic protest — thousands of people standing together without speaking or making music create a striking political presence: the absence of sound becomes collective articulation. At KreaLab in Ulm, artists and residents explored their neighbourhood through listening walks, shifting attention towards what was already there but often went unnoticed, while creating opportunities to make one’s own sonic world perceptible to others.
Both examples suggest that listening can be more than heightened acoustic awareness: it can become a practice of attunement, imagination, and response-ability, making suppressed, unnoticed, or unrealised possibilities perceptible.