Listening with Displacement: Researching Forced Migration through Sound and Music

What does citizenship sound like? How is forced migration a sonic as well as a spatial process? How do people use sound and music to protest border regimes and assert belonging at street level? Can listening – as method and as political act – disrupt dominant tropes of ‘refugee crisis’? This workshop puts sound at the centre of forced migration, asking how listening opens ways of thinking about diversity and migrant activism, borders and solidarities, displacement and emplacement. Sound is an access point to the agency of people on the move; a way of tuning in to everyday life. Sounds are always moving, and can help us rethink society itself through movement. Our discussion centres on three ideas. First, on the connections between sound and citizenship. Second, on the concept of refugee voices. Third, on listening as ethnographic method. We will combine discussion with some practical recording activities, with the aim of developing methods of sensory and sonic ethnography, and considering the disruptive potential of listening with displacement.

Please send an email to Aydan Greatrick <aydan.greatrick.15@ucl.ac.uk> to join the workshop. 

Suggested readings:

Berg, Mette Louise and Nando Sigona. 2013. ‘Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space’. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 20(4): 347-60.

Chávez, Alex. 2017. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp.1-34.

Trnka, Susanna, Christine Dureau and Julie Park. 2013. ‘Introduction: Senses and Citizenships’, in Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life, ed. Trnka, Dureau and Park. London: Routledge, pp.1-32.

Weidman, Amanda. 2014. ‘Anthropology and Voice’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43: 37-51.

Western, Tom. Forthcoming. ‘Listening with Displacement: Sound, Citizenship, and Disruptive Representations of Migration’. Migration and Society.