Sound Carries: Special Journal Issue Comes Out of Music Futures Workshop

The contributions stem from a workshop held in summer 2022 by Jazeel and Western, as part of UCL Music Futures. You can read about the workshop here.

Tariq Jazeel is Professor of Human Geography and Tom Western Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography in the Department of Geography.

Explore the Special Issue

“Over a couple of days, we gathered friends and colleagues from a range of disciplinary backgrounds in the orbit of this institutional geography to share thoughts, ideas, and nascent work in progress, all of which had at its core a concern with the relationships among sound, space, and politics. Unsurprisingly, given our locatedness, in the process our temporary collective generated conversations that gravitated toward London — a London intractably positioned as postimperial metropolis, a city animated by ongoing colonialities, anticolonial echoes, and postcolonial potentials, and thus one whose postimperial spectral presence could not not haunt our conversations about many other elsewheres. We shared and heard work on radio infrastructures and wavelengths beyond empire, the musical geographies of independence and postcolonial nation building, the spatialities of British-Asian underground club nights in the metropole, the soundscapes of carceral spaces in the colonies, antiphonies and insurgencies between places sonically surveilled by the imperial state, and the multitudinous musics that cluster and swing together in the city and are always collapsing the distances between the privileged and excluded, or between empire’s inner and outer spaces." (The editors, in their Introduction, Sound Carries: Techniques for Hearing Space and Politics)