Listening Ecologies is a practice-based approach to sustainability learning through listening, sound, memory, and affect.
It asks how ecological and social realities might be understood not only through information or analysis, but through attention, perception, and lived relation.
My name is Felipe Ferreira. I am an Italian-Brazilian-American practitioner based in Antwerp, Belgium.
I work internationally with universities, cultural institutions, and mission-driven organizations to design learning experiences that move beyond the transmission of knowledge toward perception, relation, and situated understanding.
In this work, sustainability is not treated as a fixed set of solutions or behaviors, but as a lived and contested field—something that must be sensed, questioned, and continuously re-learned through experience.
Listening as practice
Listening is the central method of this work—not as metaphor, but as practice.
Through structured sound-based and reflective exercises, participants engage ecological and social systems through attention. In doing so, complexity, fragility, and interdependence become perceptible rather than abstract.
This practice is informed by affect theory and memory studies, particularly the understanding that knowledge is not only cognitive, but also shaped through embodied feeling, atmosphere, and relational intensity.
Memory plays a central role here—not as static recollection, but as an ongoing ecological process through which places, experiences, and histories continue to shape perception over time.
Sound and listening become ways of engaging these layered forms of memory, where personal and collective histories intersect with environments and systems.
Practice and research
Alongside facilitation, I develop sound-based and research-led projects exploring ecological memory, affect, and systems thinking.
These strands are not separate practices; they inform one another continuously, keeping theory and experience in active relation.
Teaching and facilitation
I have several years of experience in experiential learning across formal and non-formal educational contexts.
My work has included designing and teaching university-level courses in sustainability, culture, and social justice, as well as developing community-based and mentorship programs that support reflective, interdisciplinary learning.
Across these contexts, I focus on creating pedagogical environments where critical thinking, embodied engagement, and collective inquiry can emerge.
I have served as an adjunct instructor and curriculum designer at institutions including Portland State University and the Pacific Northwest College of Art, as well as in sustainability-focused seminars and capstone courses.
Academic background and writing
My academic work is grounded in interdisciplinary research in sustainability studies, environmental humanities, and critical theory.
I hold a Master of Science in Educational Leadership and Policy, with graduate certificates in Sustainability Education and Intersectional Studies, and a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies.
My published work includes Critical Sustainability Studies: A Holistic and Visionary Conception of Socio-Ecological Conscientization (2017), which explores how knowledge, discourse, and power shape ecological futures.
Closing reflection
Over time, these strands—critical sustainability studies, ecological pedagogy, and sound-based practice—have converged into a single question:
How might sustainability be understood not only as a conceptual framework, but as a lived, perceptual, relational, and embodied practice?
At its core, Listening Ecologies creates conditions for attention—where listening becomes a way of engaging ecological realities, and where learning emerges through shared presence, sound, memory, and reflection.
Listening Ecologies 