Allie Martin | Unmuting Black Life: Digital Humanities and Listening to Gentrification

As the population of the rapidly gentrifying Washington, DC hurtles toward one million, the city is dealing with the frictions accompanying a drastic wealth gap, a significant homeless population, and its ever looming its lack of statehood. Much of this friction and the city’s subsequent negotiations are sonic, and speak to the complex relationships between sound and race that manifest across urban spatialities.

In this talk, I argue for the use of digital humanities methods to listen to processes of gentrification in DC, thinking through how DH might aid in resisting the surveillance that so structures Black life in order to imagine more equitable soundscapes. Listening to gentrification in this way has the potential to change the way we hear and study Black life, especially with an incorporation of digital tools and methods such as mapping and soundscape analysis.

This talk is part of a larger project that calls for engagement with the sonic right to the city, histories of legislating music and sound, and with the sonorities of memory and nostalgia.