The Documentary Audit (Columbia University Press, 2025) is a book about how documentaries listen, the habits of listening they endorse when they appeal to justice-seeking audiences, and what those habits teach us about listening’s accountability. Its central argument is that documentary listening is not inherently ethical or democratic, despite its associations with the progressive values of objectivity, access, and justice.

 Documentary films often announce their moral probity through aural metaphors. They “give voice to the voiceless” and they ask publics to listen: to bear witness, to hold power to account, and to adjudicate what counts as reality. But these metaphors—listening as oversight, listening as accountability, listening as verification—often obscure the values embedded in the conventions of attention and comprehension that documentary forms make normative, especially in pursuit of justice.

 In this regard, documentary listening shares a rationale with auditing, understood as a form of moral and administrative oversight. The term audit—historically necessitated by taxation, a state mechanism for extracting revenue and profit from land and labor—is colloquially understood as a verification of financial accounts that ensures integrity and compliance under circumstances of mutual mistrust. The veneer of transparency functions as a means for the state to evade the very accountability it demanded of others. But audit also has other meanings. In pedagogy it refers to an informal mode of attendance. And the sound scholar John Mowitt defines it as an auditory counterpart of the gaze, or that which exceeds and conditions hearing.

Drawing on these blended meanings, Rangan asks how the mantle of accountability has come to provide a moral cover for listening practices that justify linguistic profiling, ableist exclusion, and carceral enclosure. The logic of audit culture, which underpins these practices, is propelled less by a desire to ensure equity than by a drive to manage risk, shift responsibility, and protect institutional legitimacy. Documentary listening habits, she argues, are as socially consequential as they are formally unobtrusive. What happens, then, when we stop treating listening as a moral imperative, and instead start treating it as a site of struggle?

In this collection of responses from Neta Alexander, Tory Jeffay, Jordan Lord, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Pavitra Sundar, and LaCharles Ward, these filmmakers, curators, and scholars extend and expand upon Rangan’s investigation into how listening functions within documentary—as form, as labor, as epistemology, and as ethics. 

* Exchange Value, Lakshmi Padmanabhan
* I Detest the Term ‘Nonverbal’, Neta Alexander
* Toward Reparative Listening, Jordan Lord
* My Accented Ear, Pavitra Sundar
* The Spatial Audit, Tory Jeffay
* Outlaw Communities of Care, LaCharles Ward