Welcome to a K3 seminar with Hugo Boothby, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies, K3.
The title of the talk is:
Dissonance, Consonance and Relationality. On Listening and Its Politics.
This will be Hugo’s 50 percent PhD seminar. Ulrika Sjöberg, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, K3, will take on the role as discussant.
The seminar will take place on Tuesday, April 26 at 10.15-12.00. It will be a hybrid seminar. Please either come to room NiB0501 or join online here:
https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).
Please notice that the seminar is on a Tuesday!
Below is an abstract for the talk. If you would like to have the manuscript for the seminar, please mail Hugo (hugo.boothby@mau.se).
In this thesis listening is defined as a relations of attention (Bickford, 1996) generated in the in-between of hearing subject, sound and sound technology (Voegelin, 2019). The politics of listening finds expression in both the communicative engagement (Arendt, 1998 [1958]) and aesthetic experience (Rancière, Panagia, & Bowlby, 2001) that is generated in listening’s relationalities. The relationality inherent in listening’s politics allows one to consider the significance of technical mediation in listening, the possibilities, and limitations of sound and sound technologies as sites of political engagement. This thesis considers expressions of listening’s politics at four sites of research Music for Universities (Boothby, forthcoming-b), Charting Convivial Continuums (Boothby, 2020), Picturing Home (Cory & Boothby, 2021) and Listening with Elephant Ears (Boothby, forthcoming-a). Artistic research (Borgdorff , Peters, & Pinch, 2020) and action research (Aragón & Brydon-Miller, 2021) methods are applied at these four sites to access, perform and analyse the listening subjectivities (Sterne, 2012) and listening publics (Lacey, 2013) that are produced, represented and regulated (du Gay, Hall, James, Mackay, & Negus, 1997) in listening and its politics. The practice-based research methodologies applied in this research demonstrate the potential in sound and sound technologies to form sonic boundary objects as a site of transdisciplinary knowledge production, pedagogy and performance (Cory & Boothby, 2021). Boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989) must carry value for those they engage, but do not demand consensus, with the sonic boundary objects convened in this research accommodating both the dissonance and consonance of listening’s politics. Conviviality (Gilroy, 2004; Illich, 1973) is one of the analytical frameworks applied in this work. The explicit political and ethical charge carried in conviviality’s relational ontology captures the transformative potential in both the dissonance and consonance of listening’s communicative engagement, providing an important corrective to a politics of regulation that seeks to categorise, divide and exclude (Boothby, 2020, forthcoming-a). Hauntology (Derrida, 2006 [1994]; Fisher, 2014) is another of the analytical frameworks applied in this research. Like conviviality, hauntology generates a relational ontology consistent with a politics of listening that exists in the in-between of hearing subject, sound and sound technology. Hauntology is attentive particularly to the materialisations of non-semantic sound in sonic boundary objects, non-semantic sound that is often categorised as noise. Hauntology here providing an analytical framework capable of capturing the significance of dissonance and consonance in listening’s politics of aesthetics (Boothby, 2020, forthcoming-a, forthcoming-b). The central argument advanced in this thesis is that political engagement through sound and listening generates alternatives that are denied in political engagement that privileges the academy’s dominant visual, logo-, and anthropocentric paradigms.
References.
Aragón, A. O., & Brydon-Miller, M. (2021). Show me the action! Understanding action as a way of knowing in participatory research. In D. Burns, J. Howard, & S. Ospina (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Enquiry. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]). The Human Condition (2 ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bickford, S. (1996). The dissonance of democracy: listening, conflict, and citizenship. New York: Cornell University Press.
Boothby, H. (2020). Charting a Convivial Continuum in British Post-war Popular Music 1948–2018. In O. Hemer, M. P. Frykman, & P.-M. Ristilammi (Eds.), Conviviality at the Crossroads: The poetics and politics of everyday encounters. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boothby, H. (forthcoming-a). Listening with Elephant Ears. undecided.
Boothby, H. (forthcoming-b). Music for Universities: Composing with MP3 and iPod. Article for Artifact & Apparatus: Journal of Media Archaeology.(Special Issue, The Allure of Obsolescence).
Borgdorff , H., Peters, P., & Pinch, T. (2020). Dialogues between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies: An Introduction. In H. Borgdorff, P. Peters, & T. Pinch (Eds.), Dialogues between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies (pp. 1-12). Oxon: Routledge.
Cory, E., & Boothby, H. (2021). Sounds Like ‘Home’: The Synchrony and Dissonance of Podcasting as Boundary Object. radio journal: international studies in broadcast & audio media.
Derrida, J. (2006 [1994]). Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge.
du Gay, P., Hall, S., James, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. (1997). Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage, Open University.
Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
Gilroy, P. (2004). After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Oxon: Routledge.
Illich, I. (1973). Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars.
Lacey, K. (2013). Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Rancière, J., Panagia, D., & Bowlby, R. (2001). Ten Theses on Politics. 5(3). doi:10.1353/tae.2001.0028
Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387–420.
Sterne, J. (2012). MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Voegelin, S. (2019). The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. London: Bloomsbury.