We started the work for this special issue in the spring semester of 2019 with a call for proposals and an audio file...
Original CFP
[Music fades in]
Shewonda: This special issue of Kairos is titled: "Writing, Composing, and Circulating Sound for Social Change." Recent scholarship in writing studies signals that ethical and effective sonic practices are an important element of community work. We also contend that sound has the potential to circulate experiences of othered or ignored people. For this special issue, we invite proposals for webtexts focused on writing, composing, and circulating sound as a means of enacting social change.
[Mashup of voices that fade into dialogue]
Eric: I want this issue to be able to legitimize alternate composing forms that don’t really center the page and to speak to my own ways of knowing. I was changed by the cassette tapes that I would get from friends with recordings of local punk bands...
Shannon: This sounds obvious, but sound invites us to listen. And I’m excited for the ways listening invites participation; by asking someone to listen, we then also have to make space for people to participate. And this listening, sharing, participating is a way that social change can happen.
Ja’La: Social change is about having an awareness of the issues and concerns affecting people at large, and also making intentional decisions with the work that we do to attack those issues at face value. It’s all about doing something about it.
Ben: Social change is something that is incremental. I think often we talk about wide, sweeping social change, and that is important, but I also think that incremental changes that have big impacts matter quite a bit.
Eric: Most movements for change have a soundtrack, so, why not ours?
[Music fades out. Audio CFP ends.]
When we released the above CFP, we were reflecting on the role of sound and the emergence of social change having just finished a project called MI Homeless Voice, which was focused on using recorded sound to transform hearts and minds about homelessness in Michigan. For that project, we’d partnered with a speakers bureau whose goal was to bring about change by using stories and storytelling. Our role on the project was to help the storytellers audio record their stories, and at each storyteller’s direction, to amplify their retellings by adding music in support of each story. An important theme of the project was understanding and communicating the urgent need for changing our societal relationship with homelessness, but also, just how hard it could be to feel like you don’t matter—that your life and your story is inconsequential to the person sitting next to you at the bus stop or in the coffee house. Sitting with the stories of the MI Homeless Voice project is one of many projects and experiences that inspired each of us to ask our field to intentionally think about the role of sound in social change.
Today, as we write this introduction, the spring of 2019 feels like a lifetime ago for so many reasons, at least partially because of the isolating effects of the global pandemic COVID-19. In truth, we have no way to predict what the status of the pandemic will be by the time this special issue is published. In some ways, because the pandemic has forced so many people to stay home, it has also brought overdue attention to discussions about racial discrimination, police brutality, and to white supremacy’s structural hold on our society. For many of us, we could not engage these discussions in-person with family members, friends, and colleagues without the risk of spreading the virus. Instead, we were left to mediated environments to connect with those folx in some way. Connecting digitally could be exhausting, and at times, tragic. This dynamic created and troubled generational relationships. Many of us lost loved ones or supported those who did. Some of us were essential workers or lived with them—those brave enough to go to work, worried that each taken precaution was not enough to save their loved ones from the unknowns associated with infection.
The isolation of COVID-19 forced many of us to look deeply at ourselves and to grapple with our own privilege. While some of us were thinking of this time as an opportunity to finish passion projects, others saw the pandemic as a moment to pause and rethink our relationship to the world. As a result of this rethinking, some of us took up activism projects such as attending Black Lives Matter protests/rallies (content warning: the below audio clip depicts a crowd chant at a Black Lives Matter protest), rethinking our syllabi, teaching our kids about systemic racism, talking to family members, and engaging more intentionally in our neighborhoods and communities.
In this audio clip, a crowd is chanting "we are not the threat" at a Black Lives Matter Protest during the summer of 2020. Audio was recorded by Ja'La Wourman.
We hope it is not audacious and/or naive to think our individual and collective experiences during COVID-19 have changed our relationships with each other as humans and will lead to meaningful social change. As we interpret it, the image to the right of this text shows that change comes from standing up for what is right. To use our voices, skills, and abilities to sound out against injustice. Yet, as we sit down to write this introduction, it is in the moments following an insurrection at the United States Capitol, and we can’t help but wonder: What will be the effects of the malicious spread of misinformation over the long-term? How will we look back at this period of time? How will we describe the ways it transformed our society? Will we look away or come together? How will we move forward? Because we have to.
One thing that is difficult about social change, as former President Barack Obama noted of his time as a community organizer in A Promised Land, is that it can be nonlinear and incremental—and that can be infuriating when the urgency of the moment feels all too real for some, and less important to others. As collaborators, we’ve learned that social change often starts individually when we become aware of people living in and dealing with the burdens of unjust systems. Like with MI Homeless Voice, listening to stories that far too often go unnoticed is the work of social change. It’s also the work of this special issue.
What follows in the next section of this webtext is a table of contents of the webtexts included in this special issue. While we wish to let the authors and webtexts speak for themselves, we do want to point out several themes to this special issue we think are important for your consideration.
The first theme is in the form of a question that results from A.D. Carson's "Sleepwalking 2 Roundtable," which inspires us to ask: What conversations can music help to open up? What are some ways to collectively listen, to understand in community? This theme is also echoed in a PraxisWiki webtext titled "Sounding out at a PWI," offered by Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Margaret Fernandes, Jonathan Adams, and Michelle Kim.
We also want to share the theme of the role of sound in protest and remembrance, as offered in the keynote webtexts from the Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing conference, S.D.C. Parker's work on Japanese incarceration, and Jon Stone's interrogation of the role of expressing doubt in faith as protest in Evangelical Christian podcasts.
A final theme of this special issue is the relationship between sound, culture, and community, particularly evident in Jose Flores Manuel and Lucia Dura's work on the border soundscapes project, as well as Sarah Snyder, Holly Hassel, Mark Blaauw-Hara, Jacob Babb, and Harley Ferris's sound symposium.
We thank you for your attention to our special issue of Kairos, and sincerely invite you into a conversation about sound and social change.
In this Praxis webtext, Jose Manuel Flores Fuentes and Lucia Dura explore how soundscapes, constituted by "different knowledge-making perspectives such as music, architecture, design, computer science, sociology, biology, health, psychology, philosophy, rhetoric" converge in an "authentic concern for sound," and "the sound phenomenon," specifically in the Borderlands of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez. Through the inclusion of sounds from the border, the authors make the case that the development of a cultural repository for borderland sounds contributes to the (re)mapping of sound studies through a rhetorical perspective that emphasizes the dynamic nature of borderlands.
Composing the Sonic Sacred: Podcasting as Faith-Based Activism
In the Disputatio section, Jon Stone draws our attention to activism happening within conservative religious traditions that is often overlooked but crucial for social change. This webtext suggests a listening experience to forms of activism—such as the role of doubt, questions, and lived experiences of difference—can help push "the progressive needle forward within conservative Christian communities." In arguing for the role of sound and listening, Stone illustrates ways of engaging with differences that help forward incremental, but not insignificant, change practices.
Come Together, Right Now: How the Compositional Affordances of Music Shed Light on Community, Identity, and Pedagogy
In this Topoi webtext, Sarah Snyder, Holly Hassel, Mark Blaauw-Hara, Jacob Babb, and Harley Ferris give examples of how different genres of music can be used to teach writing and foster community and reflect on individual identity. They explain, "Our goal in describing these resonances ... is ultimately to offer some new ways to listen to writing, new ways to read music that invite readers and listeners to reflect on the relationships between textual, linguistic, and musical composing, as well as the companionability of language and sound."
Filling in the Emotional Gaps: Primary Voices of Japanese American Incarceration
In this Topoi webtext, S.D.C. Parker works from oral histories of Japanese Americans during internment in the Second World War and argues for vocal and aural rhetorics as important ways of remembering and understanding these incarceration experiences. By visually analyzing the sound waves of multiple speakers, Parker makes a case for the ways in which one’s voice can help listeners and viewers "fill in the emotional gaps" between one’s own position and time period and historical atrocities.
A Listening Roundtable for Sleepwalking 2: A Mixtap/e/ssay
In this Inventio webtext, A.D. Carson shares a listening roundtable about his mixtape Sleepwalking 2. The roundtable was moderated by Njelle Hamilton, associate professor in the Department of English and Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia. The featured participants were Lanice Avery, assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality and psychology at the University of Virginia; Marcus "Truth" Fitzgerald, Chicago-based producer and rapper; Jack Hamilton, associate professor of media studies and American studies at the University of Virginia; Deborah McDowell, director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and Alice Griffin Professor of English at the University of Virginia; and, Guthrie Ramsey, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. The webtext calls our attention to the roundtable listening session as a method for opening up conversations through collective listening, discussion, and reflection.
Sounding Out in a PWI: Circulating Asian American Sound for Institutional Change
In the PraxisWiki text, "Sounding Out in a PWI" by Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Margaret Fernandes, Jonathan Adams, and Michelle Kim, listeners and readers are introduced to the ways sonic intervention challenges white noise in an institutional context. The authors ultimately argue that sound intervention through extracurricular events is more than just a moment, but an event that provokes action within and beyond the walls of the institution, and into our communities.
"Testimonios, Microphones and Sonic Soliloquies: Speaking Through and Claiming Our Auditory Narratives"
In the first Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing conference keynote address, Eric Rodriguez, Cecilia Valenzuela, Magnolia Landa-Posas, and Todd Craig present on and perform their sonic work.
"Breaking and Making: Hip-hop Aesthetics across Place, Sound, and the Moving Image"
In the second Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing conference keynote address, Emery Petchauer, Stephany Bravo, Jared. D. Milburn, and Vanessa J. Aguilar present on and perform their sonic work.
Abolition as Praxis: An Interview With Sylvia Ryerson and Luis Luna
Rosa Tobin interviews Sylvia Ryerson and Luis Luna, the co-creators and organizers behind Melting the ICE/Derritiendo el Hielo, a bilingual podcast and radio show centered around amplifying and circulating testimonio from people directly impacted by ICE detention. In this interview, Sylvia and Luis join in conversation to discuss their podcast, and how they approach abolition as a praxis in their work.
A Conversation on Sound, Rhetoric, and Community with Karrieann Soto Vega and Stephen Hammer
In this interview, Karrieann Soto Vega and Stephen Hammer discuss their work in sound and where they hope to go next. In conversation with each other, they discuss the importance of community engagement in their work as scholars and sound practitioners.
In this review, Victor Del Hierro and his students at the University of Florida discuss, via podcast, the influences and impact of A.D. Carson's most recent album.
Book Review: Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening
In this review, Shannon Kelly tests out Steph Ceraso’s call for composing in sound, and the important role that sound plays in expanding conversations about classroom accessibility. Kelly tries out one of Ceraso’s assignments titled "My Listening Body" to explore listening multimodally in practice and to experience how sound constructs and affects our surroundings.
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