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Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture Call for Papers

Special Issue on: The Soundwork of Media Activism

This Special Issue of Resonance calls for papers, commentaries, theories, and archival finding aids that examine the implementation of “soundwork” in historical and contemporary forms of media activism. By soundwork we call upon Michele Hilmes’ definition, as “creative/constructed texts that employ basic sonic elements of speech, music, and noise, in relation to but different than music.” When considered as a component of activist strategy, research into soundwork helps to elucidate the sonic dimensions of efforts to assert and reclaim control over the cultural, historical, and technological legacies of human expression as organized struggle, as well as ongoing contests over the management and meaning of systems of contemporary cultural production. Calling upon Charles Hale and Shan Mukhtar, we define activism as methods through which social, cultural, and political agents have “aligned to allow dialogue to shape each phase of the process” (Hale) of social change, while “intentionally embracing discomfort and risk in order to organize for a larger ethical purpose” (Muhktar). We argue that soundwork plays and has always played a central and under-examined role in political activism, taking many forms from community organizing radio broadcasts, to the sounds of a protest, to tactile performative disruptions of sensory spaces, to non- lexemic transmission of meaning in everyday life.

This issue’s Guest Editor panel is comprised of collaborating scholars from History, Performance Studies, Anthropology, and Film and Media Studies. We strongly support pluralistic research, and are interested in interdisciplinary, multi-methodological, and creative works that engage the question of activism and soundwork across local, national, and transnational contexts that cover issues in race, gender, orientation, class, embodiment, and public participation. We are open to proposals to submit short interviews with sound artists and activists, please contact Resonance (resonance@ucpress.edu) to pitch ideas.

Paper submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, including citations and footnotes. Commentaries and finding aids should not exceed 1,200 words. Submissions should abide by the journal’s guidelines for authors.

Priority for possible inclusion in the special issue will be given to submissions received by June 30, 2020. Submissions not selected for inclusion in the special issue may be considered for future issues of the journal. Submissions should be emailed to resonance@ucpress.edu with Media Activism Special Issue in the subject line.

This issue is connected to the upcoming Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force conference, a project of the National Recording Preservation Board. The RPTF supports preservation, access, and research of grass roots and activist voices that promote cultural visibility and recognition. The conference meets October 22 , 23 , and 24 at the Library of Congress. This year’s theme is: “Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal”

Papers might examine:

• Sound Archives, Preservation, and Visibility Research

• Radio Broadcasts

• Memory and Nostalgia

• Noise

• Audio Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights

• Environmental Sound and Activism

• Listening and Surveillance

• Sound Orientation and Embodiment

• Sound in Public History and Shared Authority

• Storytelling Traditions/Repertoire

• The Role of Sound in Ideological Reproduction

• Performance and Privacy

• Sound installation

• Networks, Sound and Media Activism

• Sounds of Protest

• Soundscapes & Sound design

• Gaps in Audio Archival History

• Soundwork documenting marginalized communities

• Sound Resistance

Bios:

Dr. Alex Sayf Cummings is an associate professor of History and director of graduate studies in the History Department at Georgia State University, as well as a senior editor at the history blog Tropics of Meta. Her publications include Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013) and Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy, which will be published by Columbia University Press’s Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism series in 2020. She is also the co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, a public history anthology published in 2020 as part of the Latinidad series at Rutgers University Press.

Dr. Georgia Ennis is a multimodal anthropologist and Junior Visiting Fellow at Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information. Her book manuscript and a companion digital archive, A Voice for the Amazon: Women, Media and Cultural Renewal, highlight Amazonian Kichwa women’s role in a vibrant community media industry focused on renewing linguistic and cultural practices in the face of rapid environmental change and ongoing settler colonialism. In collaboration with the Association of Upper Napo Kichwa Midwives, she produced and edited the multimodal narrative project Ñukanchi sacha kawsaywa aylluchishkamanda/Relaciones con nuestra selva/Relating to our forest. Published as a book and DVD by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture and Patrimony, it is the first collection of Upper Napo Kichwa narratives to be translated into both Spanish and English. Her scholarly work has also been published in Signs and Society and the Revista di Llengua i Dret.

Dr. Josh Shepperd is media historian whose work traces grass roots media strategy, and the politics and labor that go into building and maintaining the logistics of public spheres. He is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Catholic University of America, and the Director of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force. For 2018-2020 he is a Humanities and Information Fellow at Penn State University, and is the continuing Sound Fellow of the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board. His book Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting is under contract with the University of Illinois Press in their History of Communication series. Supported by the Library of Congress, Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Archive Center, and LBJ Presidential Library, it examines the institutional origins of public media in advocacy work conducted by the media reform movement during the New Deal. Josh is additionally under contract to co-author the official History of Public Broadcasting with Allison Perlman (UC-Irvine) for Current and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Josh sits on the Editorial Board of Resonance.

Dr. Jen Shook is a digital and performance dramaturg whose research and practice live at the intersection of literature, performance, dh and media, Indigenous and critical race and gender studies, and commemoration. She is a Visiting Fellow with the Center for Humanities & Information at Penn State and has taught at institutions including DePaul University and Grinnell College. She founded Caffeine Theatre and has participated in the NEH’s Digital Native American Indigenous Studies pedagogy cohort, Harvard Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research, and as a National Women’s Studies Association WikiEdu Fellow. She co-directed Imagining America’s Publicly Active Graduate Engagement Program and sat on the editorial board of the multimedia journal PUBLIC and on juries for Sound of Silent Film Festival, 50pp Latinx new plays, and Native Voices. Her manuscript Unending Trails: The Making of Oklahoma-as– Indian-Territory in Performance, Print, and Digital Cultures contextualizes commemorative performances and virtual reenactments that revise early archives. She’s developing Instead of Redface, a digital resource amplifying contemporary Indigenous playwrights. http://www.jenshook.com/

Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture is an interdisciplinary, international peer reviewed journal that features research and writing of scholars and artists working in fields typically considered to be the domain of sound art and sound studies. These fields may include traditional and new forms of radio, music, performance, installation, sound technologies, immersive realities, and studies-based disciplines such as musicology, philosophy, and cultural studies. The scope extends to other disciplines such as ethnography, cultural geography, ecologies, media archaeology, digital humanities, audiology, communications, and architecture. The journal’s purview investigates the research, theory, and praxis of sound from diverse cultural perspectives in the arts and sciences and encourages consideration of ethnicity, race, and gender within theoretical and/or artistic frameworks as they relate to sound. The journal also welcomes research and approaches that explore cultural boundaries and expand upon the concept of sound as a living, cultural force whose territories and impacts are still emerging.