This new issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, guest edited by sound and music scholars Gascia Ouzounian and María Edurne Zuazu, offers a heterogeneous body of work tackling the importance of sound, noise, and silence in our analyses of power. From scholarly essays and commentary to audio, visual, and other experimental formats, the issue listens to the absence of death and occupation as well as the overwhelming presence of the sound and noise of nationalism and policing. The contributions incisively work to materialize and advance studies of “counterlistening,” or listening against “dominant regimes of audibility,” as both a methodology and an ethics of resistance. On the one hand, the interventions serve to identify and understand the technical complexity of the production and management of a variety of sound and silence apparatuses embedded in everyday governance. On the other, and at the same time, this analysis is connected to ethnographies and archives, social movements and collective survival that take the materiality of this technology into new forms of listening and building audible life in the present.
The issue is divided into three movements to gesture at (more than exhaust) potential lines of analysis and contestation in counterlistening work. With “Counterlistening Against Empire,” “Counterlistening Against Institutional Violence,” and “Fugitive Auditions,” we hope that the readers take this framework and methodology into their own lives and notice, in the true interdisciplinarity of both sound studies and S&F Online, the many physical and elusive (yet still all material) ways in which we are all involved and traversed by sound politics. The issue makes clear that we are all implicated in sound violence and surveillance, and that, although a criminalizing and targeting force, no one is exempt from their reach.
This special issue offers S&F Online’s first intervention in current debates in sound studies and their relation to feminist, anti-racist, and queer struggles. Accordingly, the issue invokes a wide variety of disciplines (such as sound studies, media studies, feminist STS, urban studies, musicology, legal studies, reproductive health and justice), practices (music production and sound recordings, drawing, journaling or experimental writing, poetry), and methods (ethnography, archival research, content analysis, legal analysis). Its global contributions additionally span many geographies and histories, weaving past and present narratives of Kenya and Cameroon, of Romani and Armenian populations in Europe and the SWANA region, of Kashmir, Lebanon, the US, and Chile.
Thank you to the guest editors for the wonderful opportunity to be part of this project and the shared labor of love to bring all of these perspectives together — it has been a great honor to work with these amazing contributors. I am equally grateful to the S&F Online editorial team: our associate editor Sarah Ross, editorial assistant Kelsey Kitzke, and senior associate director Margot Kotler. Special thanks to former executive editor and director Beck Jordan-Young for all her careful work with the pieces as the issue was taking shape. And finally, thank you and welcome to Maja Horn, who is inaugurating her term as executive editor of the journal as part of her new role as director of BCRW. We hope the readers enjoy learning from these pieces as much as we have enjoyed working and growing with them.
