Together with Mónica Brito Vieira (York), Sean W. D. Gray (Harvard), and Toby Rollo (Lakehead, Canada), I published a Critical Exchange in the journal Contemporary Political Theory titled
The Nature of Silence and Its Democratic Possibilities
It consists of four contributions and an introduction.
- Silence as a Mode of Political Communication: Negotiating Expectations – Theo Jung.
- Interpreting Silence: A Note of Caution – Sean W.D. Gray.
- Two Political Ontologies and Three Models of Silence: Voice, Signal, and Action – Toby Rollo.
- Silent Agency – Mónica Brito Vieira.
A pre-publication online version of the text can be read here, the published version here.
The Critical Exchange proposes a reconsideration of the multifarious forms and functions of silence in the political field, which cannot be reduced to the effects of silencing or of secrecy alone, but also encompass silent resistance, denial and a multitude of performative practices constitutive of individual or group identities.
My own contribution concerns the current state of research into political silences and some of its weaknesses. It proposes a re-orientation focused on the role of expectations, starting from the premise that communicative silence functions as the expressive omission of an expected signal.
Julian Scott: Empire of Silence, Swiss Expo 2002.
Many thanks to my co-contributors, but especially to Mónica for inviting us to York and for organizing this publication.
As a group, we are working on another special issue on this topic, currently under review at the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
Theo Jung 
In 2003, this journal published a groundbreaking article entitled ‘‘Silence: A Politics’’. The author, Kennan Ferguson, wrote against the traditional understand-ing of silence as ‘‘inimical to politics’’. It was time, he claimed, to consider the full-breadth of possibilities of political agency that lay in silence, for the politics of silence was irreducible to domination and the possibilities of resistance it engenders: i.e., to silencing (denial of agency) and silent resistance (reactive agency). Silence could also be positively constitutive of selves, individual and collective.The challenge to revisit the agential potentials of silence was launched, but it would take some years before poli tical theorists took heed of it. This is starting to happen now. However, to address the possibilities of agency in silence, political theorists are feeling the need to return to basics: the nature of silence, and the relationship between silence and speech. These are also the questions driving this critical exchange: In what ways is silence like speech, and in what ways is it different? What can the comparison between silence and speech tell us about the nature of silence, the best ways to identify and study it, and the potentials and dangers it opens for democratic politics?