https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5268-3240
ABSTRACT
In this Introduction, the Guest Editors situate this themed issue on (Re)Sounding Pedagogy within ongoing communication research interrogating voice, argumentation, race, and power. We also offer a description of how we work to make sense of some of the relationships among sound, pedagogy, and social contexts. We encourage you to engage playfully with our work and with the scholarly pieces, oral/aural and written, included in this issue. We provide an audio clip of recorded sounds that we developed for this Introduction in the spirit of playful engagement, and we outline the artistic constraints we adopted in developing this clip. We also briefly frame the scholarly pieces that constitute this issue, which, notably, is the first issue of a National Communication Association journal to feature audio works.
Introductory (re)sounding: playing with pedagogy and sound
Listen. Pedagogy sounds, it vibrates. Sound and critical communication pedagogy are entangled.Footnote 1 Sound shapes and is shaped by pedagogical practice.Footnote 2 Sound permeates and resounds in pedagogical contexts and interactions in ways that are cultural, material, and relational.Footnote 3 And the consideration of sound and pedagogy as relationally meaningful is an opportunity for considering the institutional, political, historical, and culturally mundane implications of sound as pedagogy and pedagogy as sound.Footnote 4
One implication, for us, is the perpetually partial, limited and limiting, character of pedagogical work. The unruliness of sound keeps us, as learners and teachers, on our toes. Sound dances around us, weaving and waving through air and water and other media, always exceeding our efforts to grasp it—and we can feel that quality of sound from the moment we engage it. A train that whizzes by us loudly exemplifies the shifting shape of sound, its swelling urgency dissipating and decaying as it passes. But in more routine sonic experiences we can feel how sound flows and frolics across time and place—with our ears and skin and muscles and bones. As Nina Sun Eidsheim maintains and as Heidi M. Rose’s essay in this issue, “Sounding Sight in an ASL Classroom,” explores, sound does not only physically affect us through audition.Footnote 5 The vibrations of an old song join smell in viscerally sharpening our sensory recall of a particular memory; voices carry through walls and across hallways even when speakers are unseen or unknown; a “quiet” walk in the woods to escape the cacophony of human noise reveals a chittering, buzzing, skittering profusion of sonic abundance.
In communication studies, the fulsomeness of sound in our lives has a deep historical connection to pedagogy. Questions about how to effectively prepare people to share ideas, orally and aurally, in a given social context extend from pedagogical writing as least as early as Aristotle through the elocutionists’ emphasis on precise articulation and style to contemporary critical research on communication as constitutive, and ideally reconstitutive, of social structures that perpetuate power and privilege.Footnote 6 Sound is fulsome in the sense that it is too abundant to be exhaustively harvested through pedagogical labor; we can grasp some of its effects but will always have more work to do, more movement to follow. Yet sound is also fulsome in that it offends our judgment and exceeds our good sense. Joshua Gunn calls this a “lawless” quality in the human voice, claiming that “[t]he uncontrollable and threatening voice of the Other … is thus not simply a speech or voice object but also a voice abject: meaningful speech that does not signify, glossolalia.”Footnote 7 Gunn grounds attention to vocal excess in the roots of our discipline, holding that “[w]e should lament the abandonment of speech from our department nameplates, if only because our founders better understood the primacy of speech and the centrality of the human voice to public culture and daily life.”Footnote 8 This themed issue invites readers to attend, in their pedagogies, to the “lawless” and (re)bounding and, perhaps, fruitful abundance of sound.
Voice and power
Questions about voice and communication index core assumptions in our discipline about mutual responsiveness and meaning-making. John Durham Peters interrogates these assumptions, problematizing casual notions of interlocution by asking: “Does nature speak, does God speak, does fate speak, do bureaucracies speak, or am I just making all this up? Where do projections of my self end and where do authentic signals from the other begin?”Footnote 9 Such questions are pedagogically generative as they call upon us to consider how we claim to know what we know, from which sources (if any), and what we ought to do next as we follow these traces. For Eidsheim, these are not idle pursuits; they are fraught with consequences for continued life for particular people hailed within systems that locate bodies and ascribe meaning to them, as she finds in her study of “race, timbre, and vocality,” and how these are linked to teaching and listening practices. Eidsheim observes that, “within the range of responses to the acousmatic question—the seemingly innocent Who is this?—the dynamic of power relations is played out.”Footnote 10 Michael Eisenstadt’s essay in this issue, “Spreading the Sonic Color Line in American Policy Debate,” focuses on how the effects Eidsheim describes may impact the forensics and debate communities that are often central to pedagogical work in communication. Eisenstadt’s approach extends Justin Eckstein’s efforts to complicate how we conceptualize argumentation. In the 2018 special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy on sound and argumentation, Guest Editor Eckstein considers the ways sound provides an opening for rethinking argumentation. He explains:
When we recognize that the speech act is a sound that also contains ineffable parts (form), does not need to follow sequential time (flow), and can get inside and affect others (force), we expand the potential for argumentation to analyze argumentation as something beyond a disembodied text, but something that is lived.Footnote 11
A thread of extant communication research that has been attuned to questions of voice, power, and privilege for some time is performance studies. E. Patrick Johnson explores how performances of Blackness are appropriated in distinct ways for political ends in the U.S.A.Footnote 13 Johnson also uses oral history and ethnographic/autoethnographic writing and performance to develop geographically and culturally contextualized histories of queer Black voices.Footnote 14 Bryant Keith Alexander examines the pedagogical implications of racialized performances in classrooms and other educational spaces.Footnote 15 Bernadette M. Calafell traces an evolving path within several voices through which a queer woman of color in the academy might search for (and find the “fabulous” through “failure”) models of love.Footnote 16 Scholars working in communication studies adjacent fields similarly engage the relationships among how we listen and how we learn about race and identity. Fred Moten articulates the role of improvisational jazz in constituting a radical Black aesthetics, while Adam J. Banks situates African American rhetoric in artists’ and audiences’ efforts to share experiences and tell stories using digital media.Footnote 17
Performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood’s reconsideration of the history of elocution offers both a critique of the ways elocution functioned as a classed and raced practice, and also points to the ways elocution was deployed tactically as a subversive act by the working-class and enslaved people who were excluded by the norms of this practice.Footnote 18 Conquergood’s work gestures toward sound and the sounds of the voice as both a regulated and citational embodiment. He also calls for listening to the ways the embodiment and sounding of voice might work to resist, challenge, and transform exclusionary practices and functions of institutions and pedagogies.
Marcy R. Chvasta’s audio essay in this issue, “The Person in the Voice,” resonates with Conquergood’s recognition of the ways voices, and the sounds of voices, are made to sound through pedagogical practices.Footnote 19 For Chvasta, the informal and formal evaluations of the sounds of voices work to enact and maintain exclusionary structures and hierarchies of gender. Marquese L. McFerguson’s essay, “Between DJs, Turntables, and (Re)imagining Ivory Tower Experiences,” resonates with Conquergood’s call for a consideration of the ways those who may be excluded by disciplinary practices and histories challenge, resist, and subvert these pedagogical modes and methods. McFerguson spins and samples a beat that sounds and stories a path and pedagogy of Black masculinity in communication studies. One aim of this themed issue is to share research that complicates the role of sound in constituting the voices we hear and the communities we create and sustain. We consider this especially urgent given the immediate need for work that strives to end anti-Black violence and to dismantle systemic racist structures both within the academy and in society as a whole.
An invitation to listen
Sound is a critical and generative site of inquiry, but sound is also playful. Sound enfolds us like its most common medium, air, does—pressing on our bodies through vibration and compression, shaped by motion and buffeting us in waves. It presents an opening for play, for disruption, and for possibility. This themed issue takes up the playful possibilities of sound for generating an Introduction to (re)sounding pedagogy that is dialogic and invitational. We are playing, here in our writing, with how we sound as Guest Editors in order to convey our own conversation about the essays in this themed issue, and in order to invite your own conversation as readers/listeners with these essays.
These introductory remarks are accompanied by an audio recording of found sound that attempts to both honor the robust scholarly and artistic inquiry generated by sound, and to begin playing with the relationship between sound and critical communication pedagogy. This recording is less about the recorded sounds and more about our process of recording these sounds as a pedagogical act, an act that engages the world and responds to it through (re)selecting and (re)working and (re)imagining. This recording is also less about what you hear as you play back these sounds in the service of making accurate interpretations and evaluations of the recording, and more about your process of witnessing these sounds as an indicator of your situatedness as a listener.Footnote 20 We suggest that one generative way to make sense of sound and of hearing and listening is to attend to the playful, artistic impulses we use every day to respond to all we encounter.
In his keyword entry on hearing, sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne demonstrates the ideological and historical construction of hearing as passive and as preceding the act of listening to invite a more nuanced understanding of hearing as subjective and inseparable from the act of listening.Footnote 21 Questions of how to measure hearing (or that hearing has happened) result in the construction of hearing as a fixed and measurable action, resulting in an understanding of hearing as a passive act that is separate from a more subjective and active practice of listening. Sterne explains:
Our modern measures of sound, like the decibel and normal frequency response of human hearing, arose from a body of research created by scientists who were intent on dividing hearing from listening, and who used listening to give access to hearing.Footnote 22
Regarding this artificial distinction, Sterne offers a caution and critique to sound studies scholars that resonates with the ways communication scholars discuss and define hearing as separate from the act of listening:
When writers in sound studies ascribe to hearing the quality of pure physical capability and to listening subjective intention, they mobilize the same epistemic history. When we talk about hearing in the state of nature, separate from any particular person or cultural scene, we animate this contradiction. Footnote 23
As one autoethnographic–phenomenological point of complication of this implicit framing of sounds as mere “inputs” in communication, one of the Guest Editors of this themed issue (Keith) reflects on his significant changes in hearing, resulting in deaf gain, over the past decade.
I, Keith, first began to notice hearing changes in my left ear around 2011, primarily through two sets of evolving experiences: (1) listening to others’ speech in crowded environments such as sports stadiums and bars, and (2) listening on headphones to music recorded and played back across a wide stereo spectrum. I worked with audiological medical professionals, with some frustration, over several years between 2013 and 2015 to attempt to determine the cause of these changes in hearing and, I hoped, “cure” them.Footnote 24 Audiologists expressed puzzlement because the physiological elements associated with my ear suggested neither damage nor degradation. Eventually, an MRI result—achievable only because a second, more “open” MRI tube used by some astonishingly kind young technical staff members nurtured me past the claustrophobic terror of the first, very brief and unsuccessful, MRI effort—revealed that a cluster of blood vessels in my brain is pressing on the aural nerve leading from my left ear and diminishing my ability to process sounds with that nerve system. The audiologist with whom I worked then prescribed a hearing aid but indicated doubt that it would help much, given the source of the problem. Interestingly, the hearing aid has helped some (especially with differentiation of natural, conversational human speech in crowded environments such as classrooms), suggesting the benefit of learning through practice—in effect teaching myself to listen all over again, differently, in my language of origin.
However, my changing hearing affects my listening with headphones in more divergent ways that raise questions for me, questions this audiologist has not been able to answer medically so far. When I listen on expensive, noise-canceling headphones to some music that I know well and that has a wide stereo spectral range, I recognize that some sounds are inaudible, even if I listen closely for them. I miss them, and the listening experience is hindered; I cannot find the same joy and I am caught up with despair in some sounds’ absence. Yet other sounds on other recordings are audible; I am joyful (even more so because I “find sounds” when I worry that I won’t), and I am caught up with delight in all sounds’ presence. I have tried to do self-tests with a series of recordings to discern patterns of the sounds that are audible vs. inaudible—across distinct frequency ranges, across dynamic ranges in the recording levels, across instrument timbral profiles, and so on—using my home stereo speaker system without headphones as a kind of normative control for these ranges in each case. I have compared across different times of the day and night, to consider the role of fatigue and mood. I have compared across albums that are enormous favorites and those that I have simply heard often but love less, to consider the role of expectation. I cannot discern any pattern. Perhaps someday I will identify a pattern; perhaps someday an audiologist will present a medical explanation. I offer this example to suggest that physiology, neurology, memory, and sensibility intertwine and shape our hearing (and not only our listening) as we engage with sound. When I teach and study communication, I want to take what I learn from my own hearing and listening as an invitation to approach sounds as the differentiated, complex, joyful, and frustrating phenomena they are.
***
So, we invite you to listen to our audio clip. The recording is amateur at best, probably not very clear, certainly not coherent (at least not by design). Although, at first listen, the recorded audio might privilege an “ear-centric” approach to sound and listening, it does not imagine or intend to create an exclusionary model of sound and listening.Footnote 25 Instead, the recording on one level is our effort to increasingly attune ourselves, and listeners, to the richness of sonic phenomena that might be taken for granted in much of our listening lives as “noise” or “background” or even “silence.” This is consonant with the ideas Michael LeVan offers in his recorded piece in this themed issue, “Listening Below.” In creating this recording, we were partly inspired by the profusion of sound we found in the spaces with which we interact daily. Outdoors, especially, we find that a “quiet” walk in the woods is none too quiet. Birdsong is perhaps the loudest element of the sonic landscape, and we endeavored to capture a bit of it (among other ambient sounds) on this recording. Charles Hartshorne contends that these sounds deserve to be characterized as song and, indeed, as beautiful—not only from the perspective of a human subjective aesthetic judgment but, given Hartshorne’s definitions of “complexity” and “avoidance of monotony and chaos,” from the perspective of birds themselves.Footnote 26 While we are not bold enough to assess the validity of this assertion ourselves, we do find birdsong and the other sounds in our everyday soundscapes worthy of more focused listening. Narrowed listening practices that distinguish “real” sounds purportedly meriting attention from those we habitually ignore have even been tactically used to thwart oppressors, as when Harriet Tubman used owl calls as navigational aids to support travel on the Underground Railroad helping formerly enslaved people to freedom.Footnote 27
On another level, the process of creating this recording, not of the performances of listening to the recording, includes the repertoire of knowledges that is intended for documentation and archiving.Footnote 28 And it is the process of creating, curating, and performing this audio file that provides a heuristic for introducing this themed issue. A guiding premise for both this themed issue and the audio portion of this Introduction is that sound asks us to think about pedagogy in ways that we do not think about first as pedagogy. In order to create and curate this experimental recording, we generated a series of guiding parameters or rules.Footnote 29 Over the course of a week, we each created audio recordings of found sound that emphasized for us our phenomenological and relational experiences of sound. Our guiding parameters included things like:
1) Use only a simple preinstalled recorder on our phones
2) Include recordings of touch, smell, sight, and taste
3) Recordings should be made in at least five different locations
4) Include at least 14 seconds of water
5) Include at least 10 seconds of something burning or that uses fire
6) Record from at least four distinct vertical levels
We move through our scholarly work with sound by linking the playful to the hopeful. We hear the cries for immediate, concrete transformation of anti-Black social structures in our communities. We hear the urgent demands to (re)create cultures that lead us away from white supremacy. We hear the calls for reconstituting communication of genders, and of sexualities. We hope that by attending to what is playful in how sounds greet us, and how we playfully take up opportunities to reply, we might become more open to new ways of relating to one another. We adopt this in response to Augusto Boal’s idea that play, especially structured play that encourages a variety of acts followed by critical reflection, is vital to humanely reimagining our social worlds.Footnote 30
Resonances
We understand the act of curating a themed issue on sound and pedagogy, and the process of creating and sharing an audio recording that emerges from our curiosity about sound, as united in an act of care for sound and for learning in dialogue with others. Curation and curiosity share a common etymology in the Latin cura, meaning to care for.Footnote 31 Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren hold that an ethic of care for others and commitment to dialogue are vital within critical communication pedagogy, describing this pedagogy as “an act of love” involving “sensitive and thorough inquiry, inquiry we undertake together.”Footnote 32 Aubrey A. Huber and Chris McRae show how curation within the “cabinet of curiosities” aesthetic can “invite audience interaction and the opportunity for the emergence of multiple points of connection” in ways that might generate a “multiplicity of possible meanings.”Footnote 33 The process of creating an introductory audio recording yielded four points of contact that resonate for us with the theme of this issue.
The first resonance is that to create a themed issue on (re)sounding pedagogy is to acknowledge that pedagogy always already sounds. Or as LeVan explains in the Introduction to a special issue in Liminalities on performance and sound: “Performance is of sound, in sound, in spite of sound, for sound, by sound, through sound, around sound, after sound, and until sound.”Footnote 34 Attempting an audio recording as accompaniment to our Introduction makes this point vivid: sound is ubiquitous in performance, in pedagogy, and in everyday life. A sustained practice of attending to sound also demonstrates the wide range of pedagogical possibilities and openings created by sound and sounding. For example, in this issue, Jacqueline Jean Barrios and Kenny H. Wong's “City Analog” amplifies a pedagogical practice of scavenging for sounds as a new way of understanding, inhabiting, and engaging the city. Michael LeVan’s “Listening Below” finds a pedagogy of sound as a mode of engaging silence, elemental spaces, and dispossession.
The second resonance is an emphasis on the embodied and cultural experience of sound as a site of pedagogy. We each created recordings that are necessarily limited by our cultural locations and embodied positions in the world, during a particular moment in time (each of us located on opposite coasts of the U.S.A., during a global pandemic, at a time of increasing calls for racial justice, with differing domestic and work configurations and obligations). Our recording is layered with these material and cultural realities.Footnote 35 Similarly, the embodied and cultural implications of sound and pedagogy are themes that resonate throughout the essays in this themed issue. Heidi M. Rose’s “Sounding Sight in an ASL Classroom” listens for the body in the American Sign Language classroom as a critical site of sound, sounding, and pedagogical practice. Zornitsa D. Keremidchieva’s “The Labor of Speech” provides a critical analysis of the ways the bodies and sounds of early-20th-century immigrants to the U.S.A. were educated, institutionalized, and commodified. Michael Eisenstadt’s “Spreading the Sonic Color Line in American Policy Debate” listens to and for the ways sounded pedagogical practices of competitive debate are racialized and unequally distributed.
A third resonance is the relational and experiential dynamic of recording an audio Introduction and the relational and experiential pedagogical function of sound. Our approach to sound is informed in part by the work of Eidsheim, who underscores the importance of conceptualizing sound not as a static object or figure, but instead as a “dynamic and multisensory phenomenon.”Footnote 36 For Eidsheim, this expansive orientation to sound is a matter of the relational function of sound. That is, sound is experienced and produced relationally.Footnote 37 By working from an understanding of sound as a relationally experienced and fully embodied phenomenon, new possibilities for thinking about the functions and implications of sound emerge. Deanna Shoemaker and Karen Werner’s “Listening and Becoming through Sound” presents sound as a site of creative practice, relational connection, and collaborative pedagogical practice. Marquese L. McFerguson’s “Between DJs, Turntables, and (Re)imagining Ivory Tower Experiences” engages in a performative play with the sounded practice of the DJ by mixing and sampling to demonstrate the cultural constraints of racialized academic spaces on his lived experience as a Black man finding and making a homeplace in academia. Marcy R. Chvasta’s “The Person in the Voice” listens to and for the relationships between sound, voices, bodies, and practices of listening that engage with others.
A final resonance deals with the process of curating sounds as a compositional and pedagogical practice. Finding and recording sounds over the course of the week was an exercise in engaging constraints, making choices, performing with, and relationally engaging and learning from sound. Similarly, ordering the contributions to this themed issue was an exercise of curating sounds inspired and informed by the theme: (re)sounding pedagogy. As we crafted our playlist (and the order of the essays) we considered the sound of the issue: the rhythms, resonances, dissonances, and vibrations among each of the pieces. We considered themes, approaches, styles, arguments, methods, and modes in our placement of these sounds and essays.
Like a remix of a song, this themed issue, (Re)sounding Pedagogy, playfully rearranges configurations already in place to emphasize something that was already there. Or perhaps we are adding something (back) into the mix that offers a new perspective. Each author in this themed issue finds ways to feature the implications and functions of sound as centrally important to the formation, practice, and future study of the relationships between sound and critical communication pedagogy.
Supplemental Material
Download MP3 Audio (7.6 MB)Notes
1 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
2 As David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny argue, sound is the “substance of the world as well as a basic part of how people frame their knowledge about the world.” (“Introduction,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015], 2).
3 Joshua Gunn, Greg Gooddale, Mirko M. Hall, and Rosa E. Eberly, “Auscultating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 5 (2013): 475–89.
4 Jonathan Sterne identifies the attention to sound, the context of sound, and the history of sound a central focus of the interdisciplinary field of sound studies (“Sonic Imaginations,” in Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne [London: Routledge, 2012], 1–17).
5 Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 56.
6 Keith Nainby, “The Philosophical and Methodological Foundations of Communication Education,” in The Sage Handbook of Communication and Instruction, ed. Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 18–20.
7 Joshua Gunn, “Give Me Some Tongue (On Recovering Speech),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 3 (2007): 362 original emphasis.
8 Ibid., 363.
9 John Durham Peters, “The Telephonic Uncanny and the Problem of Communication,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), 370.
10 Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 42.
11 Justin Eckstein, “The Acoustics of Argumentation and Advocacy,” Argumentation and Advocacy 54, no. 4 (2018): 7.
12 Elsewhere, Justin Eckstein makes an important reminder regarding the consideration of sound, not as a discrete attribute or indicator of some singular external source, but instead as always emerging as part of a broader acoustic ecology (“Response to Groarke: Figuring Sound,” Informal Logic 38, no. 3 [2018]: 343).
13 E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
14 E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women: An Oral History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
15 Bryant Keith Alexander, The Performative Sustainability of Race: Reflections on Black Culture and the Politics of Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).
16 Bernadette M. Calafell, “‘Even Your Failures Can Be Fabulous’: Reflections on Stories, Movement, and Aging,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 7, no. 4 (2018): 49–53.
17 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011); Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006).
18 Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech,” Text and Performance Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2000): 326.
19 As Conquergood states, “Elocution seized the spoken word, the common currency to which the illiterate poor had open access, and made it uncommon, fencing it off with studied rules, regulations, and refinements” (“Rethinking Elocution,” 327).
20 For an extended discussion of listening as a situated and performative act, see Chris McRae, “Performative Listening,” in The Handbook of Listening, ed. Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 399–408.
21 Jonathan Sterne, “Hearing,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 65–77. Sterne points to the implications and formation of hearing as a measurable act stating, “Modern physiology, acoustics, medicine, engineering, and psycho-acoustics animate a construct of the hearing ear as something operational, quantifiable, and separable from subjective experience” (68).
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 68–69 original emphasis.
24 I, Keith, am trying in part through this autoethnography to challenge myself to differently appreciate my evolving experience of hearing. I am learning to grasp my experience not as “hearing loss” that might be “cured” medically—a conception that implicitly recreates a deficit model of hearing as normal and deaf as abnormal—but instead as “deaf gain” that acknowledges the myriad, diverse ways we engage the world through our bodies, our minds, our learning, and our cultures. See Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich, “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” The Senses and Society 7, no. 1 (2012): 72–86.
25 Steph Ceraso, Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 6.
26 Charles Hartshorne, Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 9.
27 Allison Keyes, “Harriet Tubman, an Unsung Naturalist, Used Owl Calls as a Signal on the Underground Railroad,” Audubon, February 25, 2020, https://www.audubon.org/news/harriet-tubman-unsung-naturalist-used-owl-calls-signal-underground-railroad.
28 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
29 Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005).
30 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1979).
31 Merriam-Webster, s.v., “curation,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curation; “curious,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curious#etymology.
32 Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 55.
33 Aubrey A. Huber and Chris McRae, “Wunderkammer: The Performance Showcase as Critical performative Pedagogy,” Text and Performance Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2019): 289.
34 Michael LeVan, “Sounding Off on Sound,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 3, no. 3 (2007): 1, http://liminalities.net/3-3/soundintro.htm.
35 Steven Feld’s description of acoustemology emphasizes this point: “Acoustemology joins acoustics to epistemology to investigate sounding and listening as a knowing-in-action: a knowing-with and knowing-through the audible” (“Acoustemology,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015], 12).
36 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 3.
37 Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich’s efforts at placing work in Sound studies and Deaf studies in conversation similarly emphasizes the relational and multisensory experience of sound: “In Deaf studies, a focus on the visual may erase deaf experiences of sound. Scholars in Sound studies, meanwhile, may miss deaf and Deaf experiences of sound because of audist assumptions” (“Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” The Senses and Society 7, no. 1 [2012]: 81).