This post looks at silence in a new light. "Feminists' construction of voice and silence is trapped in an opposition, creating a dualism of voice, seen as always powerful, and silence, seen as always powerless," writes Khadija Al-Ali. But "It is simply erroneous to restrict silence to a reductionist meaning, which evades the complexity and the interrelatedness of silence and voice." Silence can be empowered. I can understand this conceptually, but it seems to me that there needs to be something like a pre-existing shared understanding to know that, for example, silence on the part of the professor means refusal of a request, and not simply a faulty spam blocker - in other words, a "dialogically extended mind, discussed earlier, refers to the integration of individuals' minds into one system in which participants become each other's cognitive extensions." I don't know that this is possible.
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