July 31, 2017  

¡¡¡¡Resist!!!!: Blog-o-Versary 8.0

** Click here if you are the kind of person who opens the gift first and the card later and you want us to just give you the mix already!! Otherwise, scroll down following this post**

Never have we been prouder in the history of Sounding Out! that nothing much has changed over here in year 8.0. In what has been a period of unrelenting fear, volatility, violence, hate, and uncertainty, we have not only maintained our commitment to amplifying sound studies knowledge in the service of social justice, but we have deepened and intensified it. While, like so many, we struggled with the roller coaster of emotions the injustices of 2016-2017 have wrought, we at SO! did not flinch, we did not falter, nor did we shirk or evade: we rolled up our sleeves and went to work, taking good care of each other while figuring out the best ways to publicly flex our intellectual muscle where it’s most needed, in our own communities and, hopefully, far beyond.

When editorial collective started SO! eight years ago—first gen academics, all—we used to joke (rather seriously, actually) that we started the blog so we could show our families how and why the work we did mattered, especially because it all too often kept us so busy and far away (and “for what?” they kept asking). We wanted to show the people who mattered to us—but quite frankly rarely seem to matter on our university campuses–not just the abstract “importance” of sound studies research, but that the best research in our field could reveal to *everybody’s folks about how the politics of sound and listening were already impacting our lives, in ways both small and tremendous, life-affirming and death-dealing, in ways that enact subjection and enable resistance. 8 years later this mission still guides us—our readability-focused design, our accessible tone that refuses condescension, and our use of multimedia forms of argument and explanation—the only thing different is that we’re coming for y’all’s families too!

Usually spread across three time zones, Team SO! met IRL in 2016 and it was GLORIOUS. (l-r) Ed. in Chief Jenny Stoever, Managing Ed. Liana Silva, and Multimedia Ed. Aaron Trammell

Monday after Monday after Monday, SO! has not only resisted, but has flat out rejected the tired, inaccurate narrative that the humanities somehow don’t matter in our current moment of crisis.  Far from it, the knowledge we help surface regarding the cultural, political and historical meanings of sound and shifting formations of listening has an undeniable urgency in our everyday lives—unabashedly challenging automatic modes of perception and disrupting how we listen in the moments that matter most—while exerting transformational power over the inequalities of our institutional structures one reader at a time.  SO! delivers the most cutting edge artistic praxis, theories, ideas, and discoveries of the field of sound studies through on-point applications to often very contemporary issues, events, spaces, and places; this year alone SO! brought you sounds and listeners’ perspectives from  Standing Rock, anti-abortion protests+ Trump rallies, the film Moonlight, Leftist election protests in Paris, France. the January Women’s March in the US, and footage of the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling (as well as King Britt’s artistic protest in response).  We’re here, we’re listening, and we aren’t going anywhere (and we👏🏼 Tweet👏🏼too!👏🏼).

As the posts just mentioned show, more than ever before, SO! 8.0’s watchword was resistance.  With this guiding ethos, we curated our posts to explore paths to liberation across and beyond borders—in addition to our nuanced explorations of the peoples, power dynamics, and soundscapes of the United States, this year saw posts from the Caribbean diaspora, Cuba, France, Germany, Iceland, Turkey, and indigenous nations in the Americas—to resist the limitations and silences of established historiographies—revealing punk rock’s  Queer Chicana history, for example, or radical re-definitions of  “silence” in Ojibwe culture and “quiet” in Black women’s lives and art—to explode the idea that sound technology isn’t human and that instruments can be played but not played with—see our posts on what knowledge “vocal deformance” gives us, for example or what experimentations with Adaptive Use Musical Instruments teach us about music and each other, or dig DJ/Producer Primus Luta explaining how and why he created the new instrument he calls the “Rhythm Box.”   Our themed forums took on established terms, fields, and institutions, presenting fresh hot takes on the Digital Humanities (DH and Listening), Medieval Studies (Medieval Sound), Punk Rock (Punk Sound), Ability (Sound, Ability, and Emergence), and K-12 education (Pencils Down: Sound in the K-12 Classroom).

Punk singer Alice Bag performs at Cornell University with Fiona Ngô in March 2017; we featured Alice’s “Women in LA Punk” archive in November 2016 and a story on her voice in March 2017 called “If La Llorona was a Punk Rocker.”

While we can’t stop and we won’t stop, we also can’t front.  Spiritually and politically, this past year was frustrating, exhausting, depressing. . . . grueling even.  But because of SO!, the editorial collective has never felt alone in these struggles, nor have we let the world wring the joy out of our labor, performed with and for our community.  The thing is, though, we didn’t do anything more this year than you did and continue to do, which is why the quality of work on SO! this year was sharper and more incisive than it’s ever been (and its why we are already happily drowning in badass submissions for year 9).  Special props and deepest thanks must go to our regular writers Regina Bradley, Justin Burton, and Robin James who bring it three times a year, to our Spring 2017 intern and MVP Ariel Taub who created and maintains our new SO! Instagram feed   (follow us!), and our writers’ faith, generosity, and patience with SO!’s stringently hi-fi editorial process and our low-fi “just the three of us” DIY publication style. And of course, we are grateful to our readers; without you we are nothing, but together, we are EVERYTHING. Let’s keep on pushing in year 9.0–and keep listening, better, deeper, and more thoughtfully.

💪🏾💪🏽💪🏿💪🏼SO! 2016-2017 Highlight Reel💪🏾💪🏽💪🏿💪🏼

  • Regina Bradley published her first short story collection titled Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South and started a new position as Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies, Kennesaw State University.

 

 

  • Yetta Howard has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University. Howard’s book Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground is forthcoming in 2018 from the University of Illinois Press. She is also editing a collection, Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (under contract with Ohio State University Press). For more information, visit www.yettahoward.com

 

And remember, the “notes” on our Facebook page is *still the best place to hear about calls for art, calls for posts, and upcoming conferences, shows, and volumes in sound studies. “Like” us here and please continue to keep us in the loop regarding new projects. We love to signal boost!

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Jennifer Stoever is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out! She is also Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, lead organizer of The Binghamton Historical Soundwalk Project and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016).  

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Click here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary “!!!!Resist!!!!” mix 8.0 with track listing.

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  1. Sounding Out! Podcast #62: ¡¡¡¡RESIST!!!! | Sounding Out! - August 2, 2017

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