ABSTRACT
This performative, dialogic essay and experimental performance in sound for 2+ voices explores collaboration through audio as an embodied and emergent critical communication pedagogy. We frame two audio projects as inherently pedagogical forms of creative inquiry while evoking the uncertainty, joy, and chaos of our evolving processes on the page and in aural resonances. Sound-based collaborations as critical communication pedagogy offer an intimate third space where an expanded “we” emerges and communicates in concert with other environmental actors, such as the seasons, birds, and vibrant matter. Using audio as a uniquely intimate medium, we explore critical inquiry through context-based assemblages of seemingly disparate parts and experiences that coexist and can (re)constitute each other. Voices and sounds become coagentic through affective and material gestures; there are many dramatic movements and messages in play, if only we listen.
Beginnings (a relational pedagogy)
Several summers ago, we were introduced to each other through email. Karen is a radio and audio scholar–artist who lives in a village in Massachusetts; Deanna is a performance studies scholar–artist who lives near the ocean in suburban New Jersey. In early email exchanges, we share links to our work and offer resources based on our mutual interests in autoethnography, audio storytelling and performance, voice and sound, and experimental theatre. When we are invited to collaborate on a performative presentation on autoethnography and working collectively in troubled times for the 2018 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, we eagerly say yes. Eventually, we speak by phone and are struck by each other’s voices. Deanna hears Karen’s voice as musical, inviting, and punctuated by full belly laughs. Karen experiences Deanna’s voice as rich, embodied, deep, and rooted. As we initiate an improvised and creative process of sound-based autoethnographic inquiry through virtual meetings over Facetime and audio recording swaps, we open up an expansive dialogue about what we are reading, thinking about, and working on while sharing experiences that have shaped who we think we are. We are excited to learn from each other based on our different but related passions and funds of knowledge.
Chis McRae and Aubrey Huber, longtime collaborators in performance-based teaching and art-making as research, “advocate for the creation of a pedagogy that privileges performance and creative practices as a way to critically work toward social justice.”Footnote 1 Developing various processes that emerge within particular learning spaces over a period of time, they focus on pedagogical interactions of “play, experimentation, repetition, and preparation,” as well as embodied and collaborative relationships between teachers and students as colearners.Footnote 2 Their pedagogical approaches and performative, experiential “practice sessions” apply to learning beyond classrooms as well, and articulate the creative processes we use in our audio collaborations. After we watch, read, and listen to various shared materials, we gradually establish intentional structures, routines, and prompts through which to think critically about and through sound and listen deeply to/with our domestic and environmental surroundings through individual audio recordings. Together and separately, we study and reflect on our different places/spaces, our relational dynamics, our daily practices situated within larger power structures, and our various bodies of knowledge. Our goal in this written iteration of our collective work is to theorize, describe, and evoke accessible, adaptable collaborative practices in sound as critical communication pedagogies that (re)value experimentation, play, and embodied learning. We offer a short performance in sound that readers can listen to, and we end with a brief description of a more recent, larger scale “radiophonic quilt” project that Karen designed and we cofacilitated with almost 100 students and faculty in Deanna’s department at Monmouth University.
Critical communication pedagogy
Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren define critical communication pedagogy (CCP) as an ongoing and shared process of knowledge construction that emerges in and through communication as a constitutive and potentially resistant force. Rejecting models of pedagogy that “transmit” knowledge and only perpetuate institutionalized inequalities, CCP offers a model of teaching and learning as “working together to create generative, transformative spaces” where we can (re)consider and work to (re)constitute “social, cultural and economic relationships.”Footnote 3 The “critical” in CCP includes both structural critique of unjust practices, norms, and discourses as well as enactments of activist possibility; struggle and hope are both valued as necessary to social change.Footnote 4 Importantly, the ways power, culture, and identity are constituted within both mundane and discursive forms of communication are not necessarily a given but rather relational and emergent; thus, learning spaces can become sites for social justice.Footnote 5 In our initial sound collaboration, we strive to listen to ourselves and our troubled worlds in new ways, listen more deeply, include more perspectives, expand what counts as “voice,” and disrupt the primacy of our own voices as well as ways of seeing. Our sound-based and relational “gatherings” of human and nonhuman expression are in part a response to human-induced climate change and a catastrophic loss of empathy and connection among both human and nonhuman beings. In this work, we reach toward fluid reverberations of identity that allow for “more complex and nuanced understandings of power, privilege, culture, and responsibility.”Footnote 6
CCP positions dialogue as both a relational metaphor and a critical method of teaching and learning. Our experiments in (re)sounding rely on dialogic audio processes as “loving inquiry and unflinching self-reflexivity” that invite engagement across ideological and experiential differences.Footnote 7 As a way of being and moving in the world, Fassett and Warren note that CCP “asks us to encounter the world with open minds and hearts. . . to find ways of listening” to the voices and concerns of those (human and nonhuman entities) around us rather than trump their voices with our own.Footnote 8 Ultimately, CCP is grounded in interaction and critical, ethical encounters that can function as radical community building and a (re)imagining of our world.
In her “Poetics and Politics of Nonfiction Audio Storytelling” course, Karen Werner finds that her students’ duet audio autoethnographies tap into often hidden and intimate parts of themselves that, when articulated and cowitnessed through collaborative audio storytelling, make academic spaces more humane.Footnote 9 Werner claims that audio stories can be a form of resistance within institutions of teaching and learning when we realize “the full political, creative, and spiritual implications of autoethnography, of critical storytelling, of critical ethnography.”Footnote 10 Tessa W. Carr and Deanna Shoemaker’s autoethnographic performance, “Hauntings: Marking Flesh, Time, Memory,” opens with a shared conjuring of intimate soundscapes from their everyday lives (“THE SIZZLE AND SPATTER OF COOKING, / someone practicing guitar, [. . . .] the quiet hum of crickets, / SOMEONE SIGHING IN SLEEP. . .”) to revalue fleeting past/present/future joys and terrors experienced in and through our fragile relationships with others.Footnote 11 In this personal and political feminist performance about loss and discovery through aging female-marked academic bodies, campus spaces are reframed and transformed, at least momentarily, through these evocative, domestic, relational sounds and stories. Grounded in Karen’s research on community economies and Deanna’s scholarship on collaborative performance, community building, and social justice, our work in and around sound reflects a desire to generate more “ethical spaces of exchange and relationship” where our sense of a narrow self, especially within learning communities, can “break open” into more expansive forms of knowledge production invested in “world-making capabilities.”Footnote 12
As we fall deeper into the rhythm of our collaboration across soundwaves and over time, a friendship is emerging. This relationship matters. The material resonances of our voices, bodies, stories, and settings intensify into what we experience as an ambulatory, relational pedagogy. This is an intimate, moving, shape-shifting, and vibrating practice that allows for coproduction of knowledge through commitment to experimentation, ambiguity, creativity, play, repetition, and mutual discovery. We generate audio prompts inspired by our various ways of collecting, our questions about what it means to work collectively, and our embodied and conceptual engagements with sound, voice, and resonance. These open prompts allow for audio autoethnographic exchanges as a rich, reflexive dialogue. Karen starts by recording a sound-based walking meditation that considers collecting steps as a moving practice. This improvisation “on foot” exemplifies thinking, learning, and composing in and through sound and embodied space/place.Footnote 13 Deanna is struck by the delicious crunch of Karen’s brisk footsteps somewhere in Massachusetts and creates a late-night recording reflecting on her own emotional experience of physical immobility after invasive foot surgery in the dead of winter in New Jersey. After more swaps, we begin recording our freewheeling virtual conversations as well. In this way, our generative process of discovery opens up new and unexpected ways of making, being, and thinking collectively.
As snow bombs repeatedly hit the northeastern U.S.A., our collaboration through sound continues to unfold. Karen encourages Deanna to buy an external mic and wind muff for her iPhone (tools for learning); Deanna listens and builds her capacities by learning some more basics of audio recording and editing. Karen intuitively starts assembling our solo and duo recordings into something wholly new; Deanna listens to these multivoiced performances in sound and offers feedback, drawing on her experience in devising and directing performances. Karen playfully reassembles all the bits and pieces again and again as a recursive, nonlinear process. We keep recording our conversations and then record these recordings, weaving them into our evolving sound piece: speaking, recording, listening, reflecting, refracting, repeating. A brutal winter slowly transforms into spring, and our growing collection of soundsharings becomes a cacophony of entangled, intra-active human and nonhuman life in our seemingly separate yet deeply connected spaces.Footnote 14 Initially animated by human-centered questions about collecting and collective (im)mobilities, what emerges are orchestrated, intimate assemblages of human and nonhuman sounds stretched across and attuned to the dramatic movements of winter, spring, and summer. As we virtually explore place-based audio as an embodied CCP, we revel in the uncertainty, joy, and chaos of our evolving process.
The space in this journal is only one representation of our pedagogical collaboration in sound. Laid out below, the transcript of our audio performance looks like poetry. We insert brief prose commentary in places for context, and to keep this dialogue going. This work is telling us something. It is its own being. We are collaborating with it. We invite you to surrender to the sonic experience of this ongoing experimental autoethnography. Let your eyes dance lightly across the page and then let the human and nonhuman sounds wash over and through you as you listen to our 7 ½ minute sound art.Footnote 15 We start with a question. Wait, birds come first:
birds
D: What is this?
um hmmm, wooden windchime
K: or undoing our ideas of what a self
D: Willing to move
D: Expanding reverberations of self, unraveling—beyond self? Or maybe that self ... ?
K: Movement ...
um hmmm
like I’ve lived on this hill where I live
wind chime, birds, footsteps, crutches
D: of self, um with these two voices—I’m super excited to
wind chime, birds
K: One of the things about radio is this kind of,
you can think of it as like a dispersal of a self,
Like, into the Air?
birds
K: The pacing is the word coming to my mind!
um!, screen door opens
D: Counterpoint
door squeak, birds
D: A kind of deep listening?
peepers, chuckle, owls hooting
D: What is this thing that Karen and I are doing?
It’s collaboration. audio handling noise
Reconstitution ...
What is collaboration?
... of our ideas of what self even is … together
owls hooting, birds
D: Is it sitting here, in this space, listening to these wrens?
owls, peepers, birds, washing machine sounds
D: Diffused, stretched out, into a Whole
New
World.
***
Collaborating selves (a moving practice)
In this shared sonic world, we strive to conjure a performative experience of audio autoethnographic collaboration that embraces partiality, refraction, and tentative fragments over full sentences, certainty, and security. There are more questions than answers. The emergence of interconnected selves here makes audible the very creation and transformation of self-ness through sound-based communication and inquiry. Within this collective space-making, selves and/as matter reconstitute, intermingle, and resonate in harmonic and dissonant ways/waves. Collaboration. Sound. A journal page. Our Facetime chats, the audio editing suite, our homes and workspaces, our communities, our histories, and our ways of moving through our seemingly separate yet connected worlds and bodies. In these richly layered pedagogical contexts that have distinct and overlapping qualities, there are particular relationships to time, space, memory, and futurity. Audio collaboration as CCP here offers an intimate and complex third space where an expanded “we” emerges and is scaffolded in new ways, in concert with other environmental actors, such as the seasons, the birds, and vibrant matter. Using audio as a medium, voices and sounds become coagentic through affective and material gestures; there are many dramatic and playful movements, if only we listen. Human and nonhuman voices and bodies intra-act as matter that collectively “feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers.”Footnote 16
screen door opens and closes, footsteps, owl hoots
D: Just all the different kinds of stepping, stepping up stepping out, um, stepping into—
a kind of deep listening?
exhale, chuckle
K: funny uh broken mirror in the best sense you know of like, these um,
of what this time together has been,
maybe we could think of it that way—
D: It’s very full and round and open and warm.
audio handling noise, bird, door opens,
D: It’s hard.
door locks, walking upstairs, washing machine
K: Classical music has movements
laugh
D: yeah uh huh I know, I know!
door opens, closes
K: so like almost like you know “Movement One” um,
you know like this issue of walking, and then …
D: um hum
crutches
K: it’s a moving practice
footsteps
K: The theme of a disaster zone, domesticity
water running, birds
D: This is not a secure dwelling
K: like not knowing but just kind of t-, taking steps
D: um
K: What is a self and two voices becoming a self? (overlap) D: There’s all kinds of ways of moving.
D: Voice, what is voice?
K: Really I- I’m a Buddhist, and like um you know like I think
D: I think voice is a space.
It’s very full and round and open and warm
yeah okay, laugh
K: um yeah that thing of …
bird
D: unseen
pause, birds
K: There is a quote from this guy Walter Ong
birds
K: Sound incorporates; Sight isolates
Exhale, birds, windchime
***
Breaking the mirror
Karen Barad and others argue that representationalism in Western culture is ocularcentric; our ways of seeing are overdetermined, culturally produced, and removed from the material world.Footnote 17 Listening as a relational and performative doing draws us into the world in more complex and just ways. “Sight isolates, sound incorporates,” Walter J. Ong reminds us.Footnote 18 Visual optics often separate and reduce the “we” through representation, objectification, categorization. Tuning into “dissonant and harmonic resonances” speaks to Barad’s notion of intra-action as entangled agencies in and between people, things, materials, discourses, and time. Intra-actions suggest that responsibility and accountability are distributed between and among constitutive agencies.Footnote 19 This perspective is both a CCP, and like any meaningful pedagogy, an ontology, a way of being that rejects hard boundaries and tears down human made walls to reveal the artificial and destructive boundaries we have invented. Paulo Freire insists that pedagogy is more than a teaching method; it is “a way of living in and seeing the world.”Footnote 20
Barad reminds us that nothing is predetermined, including agency—rather it emerges relationally, through performative doings.Footnote 21 Inspired by her work, our audio autoethnography attempts to conjure the cohabitating matter around and within us and just beyond our doors. There is an urgency here—what and how must we learn? There is much at stake in our own pedagogical approaches and embodiments of knowledge that will determine how we teach and learn and create with the next generation of creators and thinkers. We are heartened by the radical words of Gloria E. Anzaldúa:
Many are witnessing a major cultural shift in their understanding of what knowledge consists of and how we come to know … [moving towards] the inner exploration of the meaning and purpose of life … beyond the subject object divide, a way of knowing and acting.Footnote 22
Experimental forms of collaborative aural storytelling and audio refraction and assemblage in sound can shatter our overreliance on the visual, distort our constructed sense of time and space, deconstruct dominant narratives, and reveal multiple possible perspectives, overlaps, and recursive loops. Playing with a refracted form of assemblage, including different qualities of recording, handling noises, and strange cuts, we push on autoethnographic documentation and/as coherent ways of narrating self, experience, process. Visual modes of representation and their underlying assumptions are productively troubled through the use of sound-based practices. In thinking of our form as assemblage, we boldly embrace fleeting material, affective, sensory, posthuman traces. If soundwaves are tactile undulations that penetrate and flow through matter, we (autoethnographers, teachers, students) must become tuning forks listening more deeply to the layers of resonance and dissonance within and around us.
K: One of the things about radio is
funny uh funny broken mirror in the best sense you know
D: to stretch, and to be outside
crutches
K: It’s a moving practice
crutches dropped, birds
D: to stretch my tight arch
footsteps, sigh
D: to stretch my tight toes
water running
D: What is collaboration?
K: It’s showing us a mirror about what collaboration is?
K: It’s a funny ref-funny uh
pause
D: of self with these two voices, okay!
K: Issues of collaboration and mobility and getting
D: Pinball! You said something I’ve got it some …
K: feels like a pinball comes in when you speak
and it kinda knocks around my ideas
and knocks around one or two in your head
and then back/forth you know like
so there’s this way in which this like knocks around
footsteps
K: There’s a mobility that happens in that
footsteps, cough, throat clear
D: um hum um hum! I have a kind of mobility, a willingness to move
K: Rough rough rough something …
D: Ruff ruff!
D: okay
birds, sigh
D: What is this?
K: Or undoing our ideas of self
windchime, throat clear
K: um also …
D: and I’m out walking, expanding reverberations of self …
K: One of the things about radio is
D: that there’s all kinds of ways of moving
Beyond self?
Counter point
Self—maybe that self
K: Into the air?
K: And sound is so different from like sight!
D: Voice. What is voice?
water sound, um
D: Voice is a space
windchimes
K: It’s less transitory in a way—you know, like you see it, you can go again and again and again and look at it.
water running
K: Sound moves and changes
D: moving towards the unknown
loud door opens, laugh, birds
D: A kind of deep—yeah!
peepers (frog chorus)
D: Mmmm … wow
peepers, shared laughter, owls hoot
***
Postscript (making a radiophonic quilt)
Thanks for taking a listen! This experiment in sound inspired Deanna to invite Karen to be a guest artist-in-residence in the “ArtNOW: Performance, Art, and Technology Visiting Artist Series” at Monmouth University. Taking place over one week in Fall 2019, Karen collaborated with almost 100 communication students and faculty across six sections of four communication courses (Introduction to Digital Media; Introduction to Audio; Voice and Diction; and Communication, Culture, Community) to create what she calls a “radiophonic quilt” made up of many sonic self-portraits woven together across multiple classroom communities. Through careful planning, assigned readings and listenings, and provocative prompts before Karen’s visit, we were able to support the creation of 90+, 1–2 minute audio portraits that used voice and found, self-made, or prerecorded sounds in evocative ways. These mini stories in sound were “quilted” together by Karen for a 90-minute public broadcast on our college radio station at the end of her weeklong residency.
Working quickly created a heightened level of intensity that opened up interesting spaces of vulnerability and immediacy. The cumulative flow of making the audio work collectively felt exciting, risky, and full of uncertainty. Students went off by themselves, worked together in small editing suites, stayed after class and talked with us, sat on floors in hallways, stepped outside, ran to their dorms, went to the ocean, and came to open lab hours to create their portraits. They recorded themselves in their academic spaces: at the water fountain, walking up and down stairs, riding the elevator, sitting in bathroom stalls, singing, making funny mouth noises, tapping on a desk….We all generated funny, fragile, weird, and meaningful fragments of overlapping identities that constitute our campus community. Student audio stories revealed that they are worried, anxious about their futures, heartbroken, far away from home, depressed, in love, angry, empowered, philosophical, ill, passionate about their sport, first-generation students, lonely, having identity crises, claiming their identities, and deeply connected to the ocean, trees, fall leaves, the wind, music, their dogs, their home countries, strange radio.…We were struck by how vulnerable and sincere participants were and how willing they were to jump into multimodal, collective communication practices and pedagogy.Footnote 23 Arguing for mixtaping, everyday anthologies, and DJ practices as alternative writing/compositional practices, Adam J. Banks wants “students to always feel empowered to create their own narratives and counternarratives and … to share content in networks far beyond the classroom.”Footnote 24
This weeklong communication-based pedagogical collaboration highlighted our uniquely collegial community and our students’ generosity, which feels urgent within this moment of crisis in higher education. Our final time on-air in the college radio station with two amazing student engineers who also made audio portraits was a poignant experience as we (re)listened to all these rhetorical performances resonating with and against each other as listeners called in and texted about the work. This polyphonic broadcast continues to linger as it is rebroadcast and shared in classes and within families and circles of friends. As a resonance of our initial duo collaboration, this radiophonic quilt weaves together many more voices and identities as a learning community to listen and interact in more inclusive ways, experience the interrelational self through others’ sounds and stories, and feel the communal waves that remix us into becoming something more expansive, together.
Supplemental Material
Download MP3 Audio (7.2 MB)Notes
1 Chris McRae and Aubrey Huber, Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning: A Practice Session for Pedagogy (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 5.
2 Ibid.
3 Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 22.
4 Ibid., 26.
5 Ibid., 40.
6 Ibid., 41.
7 Ibid., 56.
8 Ibid., 131.
9 Karen Werner, “Autoethnography as a Way of Being (Radiophonic),” International Review of Qualitative Research 10, no. 1 (2017): 97.
10 Ibid., original emphasis.
11 Tessa W. Carr and Deanna Shoemaker, “Hauntings: Marking Flesh, Time, Memory,” Text and Performance Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2017): 71–72.
12 Werner, “Autoethnography as a Way of Being (Radiophonic),” 97–98.
13 Louis Bury, “On Writing on Walking (Composed on Foot, Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 2:48 pm),” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5, no. 4 (2009): http://liminalities.net/5-4/walking.pdf.
14 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2003): 801–31.
15 In addition to this journal's website, the audio file is available at “What Is Collaboration?” karenwerner.net, n.d., https://karenwerner.net/audio-stories/1/0.
16 Karen Barad, “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad,” in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, ed. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 48–70.
17 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 803–804.
18 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), 71.
19 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.”
20 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary ed., trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 25.
21 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.”
22 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Now Let Us Shift … the Path of Conocimiento … Inner Work, Public Acts,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (London: Routledge, 2002), 541.
23 Adam J. Banks, “Dominant Genre Emeritus: Why It’s Time to Retire the Essay,” CLA Journal 60, no. 2 (2016): 179.
24 Ibid., 188.