Sound Politics

AAA–CASCA Roundtable Toronto 2023

The aural and sonic soundscapes through which we move provide affective knowledge about our situated experiences–even when we’re not listening!

Given that visual anthropology has favored images over sound as both object of inquiry and method, what are the politics of centering sound in media production?

While anthropology tends to overlook the sonic register in our worlds and works, how does sound invite affective, sensorial insight into differently situated lived experiences?

Online Event Recording

In SOUND POLITICS, two independent artists and filmmakers explore sound as a critical intervention through their experimental soundwork. Nadia Shihab and Nguyễn Trinh Thi discuss how their work as filmmakers and sound artists finds tension, connection, and collaboration across mediums and genres anchored in the personal and the relational. Nat Nesvaderani and Emiko Stock draw from their experience as sonic ethnographers and teachers of multimodal anthropology to guide the conversation.

Based in Hanoi, Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a filmmaker and artist. Traversing boundaries between film, documentary, video art, installation, and performance, her practice currently explores the potential of sound and listening, and the multiple relations between the image, sound, and space with ongoing interests in history, memory, ecology, representation, and the unknown. In 2009, Nguyen founded Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and moving image in Hanoi. Nadia Shihab is an award-winning filmmaker and artist whose work explores the personal, the relational, and the diasporic. Her first feature-length documentary JADDOLAND was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit "Truer than Fiction" Award in 2020 and went on to broadcast for three seasons on US public television. Nat Nesvaderani (she/they) is an amateur potter, knitter, and watercolorist of misshapen fruit. Nat is an Assistant Professor of anthropology at Université Laval, where she co-directs the new Multimodal Anthropology Lab. Emiko Stock loves trying, playing, failing and starting over with new mediums to relate to one another through ethnography. She is currently attempting soundscapes and sketchnotes as a fairly valid reason to procrastinate on poetic musings or her usual pixel and analog image-making.

AAA–CASCA Roundtable Toronto 2023

The Soundscape as Feminist Homework
Organized by Emiko Stock and Nat Nesvaderani
Saturday, November 18, 2023 | 10:15am–12:00pm

Click here to watch a recording of the roundtable.

This roundtable explores the ethnographic soundscape as a form of homework imperative to feminist epistemology. Our works are in conversation with feminist anthropologists and theorists who have long called for an integration of ethnography, feminist practice and knowledge production within our academic home disciplines, and beyond. We take as our points of engagement Kamala Visweswaran's notion of fieldwork/homework as an 'anthropology in reverse' anchored in the places where we are located (1994), while embracing Lynn Bolles call for 'casting a critical eye' into the offices, meetings, and classrooms of habitual academic practice (2013). We take up Sara Ahmed's method for doing 'feminist homework,' as work and practice of the everyday (2017). Here, our exploration of sonic ethnography is a practice of feminist multimodal anthropology. Anchored in the multi-positionalities of the anthropologists, activists and artists participating in this roundtable, we foreground an attentive and immersive listening to ethnographic soundscapes. Feminism, homework and fieldwork are not discrete projects. This roundtable presents sonic ethnography rooted in the multifaceted spaces and places through which artists and scholars move. Soundscapes showcased in this roundtable are in various stages of production–from works in progress to finalized pieces– in order to resist, on one hand, the content driven distraction economy and, on the other hand, the linearity of academic wring that foregrounds fieldwork as a distinct practice from homework. Our collaborative engagement in this event is, in itself, a piece of feminist homework in progress.

Works Cited: Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017. Bolles, Lynn. 2013. 'Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Intellectual Thought in Anthropology.' Transforming Anthropology 21 (1): 57–71. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions Of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.

Call for Sounds! Beats & Bites (Closed)

Do you teach with sound? Do you use sound in your art or research? Or are you interested in expanding your sound practice? We are seeking sonic Beats and Bites for our second curated collection of resources for making, publishing, collaborating, and teaching the multimodal! This is a mini-collaboration in crowdsourcing sounds. Did you miss the Sound Politics event? No problem! Submissions open to all, feel free to share around and distribute widely!

The Beats: In a beat, what does "home" sound like for you? send us a 5-15’ second beat from “home.” Here we are interested in sonic experience, not descriptions or explanations. Send us… sounds!

The Bites: send us a 60-second (max!) recorded description of your sound practice! Think of a tip, a provocation, an experiment with sound related to your teaching, artistic practice, or fieldwork. Here we are interested in your thoughts, processes, and reflections… in words!

You can share one Beat or Bite; or a Beat and a Bite. But please do not submit more than one of each.

How to send your Beats & Bites:

You will need a (free) SoundCloud account to proceed.

Identify Beats & Bites following this format:

Beats: YourName [any name can do] + your city + one word that conveys the affect or mood for home.

Bites: YourName [any name can do] + your city + one word description of your Bite

*Feel free to add a caption if you would like to

Upload your sound Beat and/or Bite to your SoundCloud account as a “track.” *Make sure the track is set to public, as we are unable to hear private tracks.

To send us your track, go to our CoMMPCT Soundcloud page. Follow us. Send us your audio file(s) through the SoundCloud messaging app (the small envelope icon on the top right end of your SoundCloud account). Please do so by April 7, 2024.

And then what?

These Beats and Bites will be curated in two separate playlists to be distributed through the CoMMPCT SoundCloud. They will be launched before our next CoMMPCT virtual event this summer (“Reimagining Ethnography through Audio-Visual Archives”, check our website in a few weeks for more info!). These two playlists will become publicly available resources for all who are interested in working with sound and anthropology.

Questions? Contact us at CoMMPCT@gmail.com.

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