Samenvatting

We, Rajni and Laura, have been writing letters to each other for several years including in the context of collaboration on a large research project concerned with interspecies relations and the notion of "radical equality". For Listening across difference: letters of love/questions of radical equality we arranged a series of writing sessions where we wrote letters to each other in relation to the words 'radical', 'equality' and 'radical equality'. We wrote at the same time, but different places. We did not exchange or read each other's letters until the end. The letter-writing has enabled us to reflect on aspects of our evolving (work/life) processes which in many ways feel like the core of the "work" we have one together, but that often go unnoticed by listeners and readers within the more presentational aspects of the projects. In particular, the ways in which power structures are negotiated with care and awareness between us. The choice of the form of an exchange of letters was partly inspired by Royona Mitra and Broderick D.V. Chow's The UCLA Letters: On Dismantling Whiteness in the Academy (2019). Like them, we are interested in how the process of letter writing enables a kind of dance of thinking between the conceptual and the personal. But we listen across difference differently. As two scholars of colour, Mitra and Chow's letters present their shared and diverging perspectives on how to address the Whiteness of the UK academy. As a non-binary artist of colour and as a white cis-woman researcher, our letters try to feel their way into an intimate and honest dialogue across difference.