Migration and Listening: Political Life in Motion
(2023)
author(s): Ximena Alarcón and Ed McKeon
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Boundaries, thresholds, and limits characterise both political geography and the politics of voice and listening. The effect of hearing yourself speak, as Derrida noted, is foundational for sovereignty, self-identity, and relations to others. In this conversation, we explore experiences of border crossings and passing across limits through migration and movement alongside corresponding encounters with Deep Listening. Alarcón reflects on her experience of migration from Colombia to the UK and how this also involves ‘speaking and travelling in-between different languages’. McKeon draws on experience of ‘losing’ his accent, the voice’s marker of political identity. For both of us, Deep Listening has become an essential resource to forgo the desires of returning ‘home’ or arrival with their visa privileges and passports of legitimised status. Migration and movement are instead embraced for their potential to constitute another practice of centring and of balance without fixed and immovable boundaries. We aim to articulate this politics of listening and voice not through conventions of debate and polemics, defending ideological territories, but through exchange in dialogue, in what passes in the movement between us.
Dialogue on Experiments in Listening
(2023)
author(s): Ed McKeon and Rajni Shah
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Rajni Shah is a performance maker, writer, and producer. Their practice-based doctoral research – Experiments in Listening – was published in the Performance Philosophy book series in 2021. It effects a shift that provides a key thematic thread of this special issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies, one that interweaves all the contributions in different ways but is rarely stated explicitly: listening-based practices dissolve ossified lines separating “art” from “life,” aesthetic practices from the political. Shah’s reflections are presented as this red thread, a collection of vignettes that can be followed as one line or taken as an invitation to pause between each article, resonating in that liminal and medial space. It is fitting, then, that we round off the issue with a review of Shah’s book, not in the mode of judgement – a critic’s 1- to 5-star rating – but in the spirit of our thematic of voice and listening, as a dialogue. Co-guest editor Ed McKeon, whose own jointly-authored contribution to this issue uses dialogue as a method, posed the questions.
Collective listening as survival: how to be not okay together
(2023)
author(s): Rajni Shah
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The writing that follows (interspersed between other articles) is a series of personal reflections on “listening” – a term which, for me, refers to an embodied attentive state, including but not limited to the ears. I write from my own experiences as a trans non-binary person of colour and reflect specifically on the ways in which listening work relates to anti-racist and anti-colonial work. Within the writing, certain words are hyperlinks. These are offered as moments of dialogue – moments where you are invited, if you wish, to read other texts that are in relationship with the particular word, phrase, or idea that is linked. At the end of the section titled “4. Portals,” there is a short list of links to artists and authors who are directly mentioned in the text as well as a list of further references in case they are of interest.
1. Learning the shape of racist rooms
(2023)
author(s): Rajni Shah
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The writing that follows (interspersed between other articles) is a series of personal reflections on “listening” – a term which, for me, refers to an embodied attentive state, including but not limited to the ears. I write from my own experiences as a trans non-binary person of colour and reflect specifically on the ways in which listening work relates to anti-racist and anti-colonial work. Within the writing, certain words are hyperlinks. These are offered as moments of dialogue – moments where you are invited, if you wish, to read other texts that are in relationship with the particular word, phrase, or idea that is linked. At the end of the section titled “4. Portals,” there is a short list of links to artists and authors who are directly mentioned in the text as well as a list of further references in case they are of interest.
2. Listening Tables
(2023)
author(s): Rajni Shah
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The writing that follows (interspersed between other articles) is a series of personal reflections on “listening” – a term which, for me, refers to an embodied attentive state, including but not limited to the ears. I write from my own experiences as a trans non-binary person of colour and reflect specifically on the ways in which listening work relates to anti-racist and anti-colonial work. Within the writing, certain words are hyperlinks. These are offered as moments of dialogue – moments where you are invited, if you wish, to read other texts that are in relationship with the particular word, phrase, or idea that is linked. At the end of the section titled “4. Portals,” there is a short list of links to artists and authors who are directly mentioned in the text as well as a list of further references in case they are of interest.
3. We are capable of so much more
(2023)
author(s): Rajni Shah
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The writing that follows (interspersed between other articles) is a series of personal reflections on “listening” – a term which, for me, refers to an embodied attentive state, including but not limited to the ears. I write from my own experiences as a trans non-binary person of colour and reflect specifically on the ways in which listening work relates to anti-racist and anti-colonial work. Within the writing, certain words are hyperlinks. These are offered as moments of dialogue – moments where you are invited, if you wish, to read other texts that are in relationship with the particular word, phrase, or idea that is linked. At the end of the section titled “4. Portals,” there is a short list of links to artists and authors who are directly mentioned in the text as well as a list of further references in case they are of interest.
4. Portals
(2023)
author(s): Rajni Shah
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The writing that follows (interspersed between other articles) is a series of personal reflections on “listening” – a term which, for me, refers to an embodied attentive state, including but not limited to the ears. I write from my own experiences as a trans non-binary person of colour and reflect specifically on the ways in which listening work relates to anti-racist and anti-colonial work. Within the writing, certain words are hyperlinks. These are offered as moments of dialogue – moments where you are invited, if you wish, to read other texts that are in relationship with the particular word, phrase, or idea that is linked. At the end of the section titled “4. Portals,” there is a short list of links to artists and authors who are directly mentioned in the text as well as a list of further references in case they are of interest.
Decolonial Listening and the Politics of Sound: Water, Breathing and Urban Unconscious
(2023)
author(s): Rodrigo Toro and Donovan Hernández Castellanos
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay is based in the urgency of questioning the coloniality of being and power (Quijano, 2014), present in the hegemonic aural regime. It is based on two pieces: Wet Season / Dry Season (2021), a sound installation by the collective of Cuban visual artists Celia-Yunior that was presented at the Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; and Breathe (2020), an interdisciplinary piece combining dance, literature, sound and video.
Covered Mouths Still Have Voices
(2023)
author(s): Tom Western
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
overed Mouths Still Have Voices
Tom Western
UCL Geography – t.western@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
The title of this essay is a political slogan. It borrows from the chant of medical workers in Greece, who have been asserting that covered mouths still have a voice (“Και τα καλυμμένα στόματα βγάζουν φωνή”) since long before the Covid-19 pandemic began at the start of 2020. The slogan has become politically useful on wider scales since then, and I take it as a jumping off point – a means of understanding political techniques of vocality that have been retuned in pandemic contexts. My focus is on forms of vocal-spatial resistance, hearing how people contest political hierarchies of vocality that have been tightened during Covid, and create new spatialities of voice through pandemic activisms. The essay listens to how voices signal and sound out multiple forms of mobilisation, and it outlines a global sense of voice that develops as a result. From this, ways of hearing mouths and voices emerge not just in terms of speaking and sounding, or only as forms of identity and agency, but as a gathering, a refusal, a resource, a navigational tool, a transformation.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to friends in Athens. To Kareem al Kabbani and Urok Shirhan, whose soundworks resound into these pages. To Fani Kostourou, Pasqua Vorgia, and John Bingham-Hall for organising and running ‘The City Talks Back’. To Fadia Dakka for her kindness and patience in waiting for this essay to be done.
From a Modern/Colonial Sensorium to Relational Response-ability: Listening Into What Separation Has to Say
(2023)
author(s): Sarah Amsler
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Dedication – to life cut on the sharp side of separation
I dedicate this essay to the heartbreak on the sharp side of the sadness of separation. Every pulse and river that has been silenced by insensibility to life’s gifts of companionship and cries for care. Every species, kind, and gender sentenced to death for their illegibility, unprofitability, their queer intimacy with the mysteries and reciprocities of creation. Every relation of every victim of every scale of every act of extraction, enslavement, genocide, ecocide, epistemicide, and linguicide that is committed by the white colonial capitalist heteropatriarchal human West.
Editorial
(2023)
author(s): Fadia Dakka, Kirsten Forkert, Ed McKeon, Jill Robinson and Ian Sergeant
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Editorial
Fadia Dakka, Kirsten Forkert, Ed McKeon, Jill Robinson and Ian Sergeant
Voice as Instrument: Performance Poets in Conversation
(2023)
author(s): JillR
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This videoed conversation with two young spoken word artists, Ryan Sinclair and Sipho Ndlovu, took place in Autumn 2022 and explored their motivations to pursue what many would view currently as a precarious career in the creative and cultural industries. The project was prompted by findings from a doctoral research study undertaken by Jill Robinson in collaboration with Beatfreeks, a youth engagement organisation founded in Birmingham by Anisa Morridadi in 2013. It uses creative practices to build young people’s confidence and competences and open up opportunities for them to disrupt the unequal power relationship between them and policymakers.
There was no ‘dry run’ for the recording as Jill wanted Ryan and Sipho to speak in the moment and not come with well-prepared responses to questions provided in advance; hence the pauses and stops and starts on the recording as each of them take time to reflect before answering. Inter alia, they consider how their own experiences of growing up in Birmingham have shaped their interest in music and spoken word and how these have enabled them to make their own and other young people's voices not only to be heard but listened to by those with decision-making powers over their daily lives
Ryan and Sipho will perform their poetry as part of the launch event for this special issue on 10 March 2023. Details will be made available shortly.
The Labour of Listening in Troubled Times
(2023)
author(s): Kate Lacey
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article explores some of the implications and limitations of framing political debates as a politics of voice and builds on the idea of “listening out” as a necessary technique of political action (Lacey 2013: 3-21). Political listening in this sense is about keeping channels of communication open, accepting ongoing difference and conflicts of interest. It is, therefore, a difficult, challenging and risk-laden labour in the best of times and all the more so in times of division and conflict (Bickford 1996; Hofman 2020). Meanwhile, listening in media studies has tended to conceive of listening, if not as entirely passive, then primarily as a kind of decoding or translation practice – a practice of response. This article is concerned with the labour of political listening in the mediated public sphere. It describes the productive power of listening to generate a space for “voice” and explores the labour involved in preparing the space, time, setting, mood, technologies, and techniques for listening and how that labour is variously valued and exchanged. And it builds on work that thinks about listening not exclusively in relation to sound, finding that sonic vocabulary and metaphors can help reframe notions of the public sphere and politics long shaped and distorted by a reliance on the visual registers of print culture and the spectacle.
