Sounding Posthuman Education Research: Exploring Sonic Power Relations in Game-Based Learning Ecologies

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Learning With New Qualitative Methods in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

While education researchers have begun investigating sound within the context of learning environments (see Brownell, 2019; Gershon, 2017; Wargo, 2019), this research often frames sound as a byproduct of human action. But sound studies literature conceptualizes sound differently, defining sound as both an agentic actor and relational entity within posthuman matrices (Ceccheto, 2013). To this end, we use this paper to explore the following research question: How can education scholars engage sound--and sound’s entanglement with power--within posthuman research?

We begin this paper by presenting an overview of posthuman literature with a particular focus on technological posthumanisms (see Hayles, 1999; Pettman, 2011). We then draw connections between this body of literature and education research focusing on sound. In doing so, we build on previous definitions of sound as a pedagogical and cultural technology, one used by human actors to control and regulate student bodies, and reveals the ways that sound can engage what Pickering (1995) defines as “the dance of agency” between humans and technologies. Within this frame, scholars can begin to recognize the agency of technologies, including sound, as they act on their own in response to other immediate actors. We then turn towards analyses of a university classroom’s sonic ecology during a role-playing activity. To conduct this analysis, we begin by transcribing two 90-second clips of the activity using an intentionally posthuman transcription process based on the graphic scoring methods of experimental musicians (see Authors, Date). These clips, which feature two groups of pre-service English teachers positioned side-by-side and collectively restorying the events of the poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” because of the rich sonic elements of the learning activity (dice shaking & rolling, background music playing, papers and pencils moving).

Through this analysis, we uncover two distinct ways in which sound asserts its agency within the context of learning ecologies. First, our transcription process foregrounded multiple instances in which sound subverted hierarchical relationships. Creating what Serres (2007) might define as a parasitic noise, we illustrate multiple examples where contextual sounds engage the dance of agency and challenge the position of Game Master as leader. Players suddenly turn towards these sounds (e.g. the clack of a dice hitting a desktop) and respond to these sounds in turn. Building on queer theory framings of sound (Daniell, 2011; Sundell & Berglund, 2020), we also argue that sound subverts human constructed borders between actors within this space. By travelling between the two roleplaying groups being studied, sound created a medium of interaction between actors and undermined these anthropocentric divisions. This paper therefore contributes to the growing body of both sound studies and posthuman approaches to education research by situating sound within the intersection of these two intellectual traditions. Beyond framing sound as merely a regulating technology, our analysis challenges scholars to reimagine sound as both agentic actor and medium through which meaning circulates and forms, challenging future research to more fully examine the flow of power through sound in pedagogical contexts.

Authors

• Peter Jacob Woods, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Karis Michelle Jones, Hobart and William Smith Colleges