"And These Are the Chickens": Sonic Entanglements of Violence and Joy at an Urban Middle School

• In Event: Educational Sound Studies and Sonic Pedagogies: Tales From the Field

Abstract

We lead sonically entangled lives. This is because sound is not just about what is heard, or misheard (Another & Author 3, 2015), it is about how sound both moves and is moved by human and nonhuman bodies. What resonates on, with, or against one’s ontoepistemological position is therefore just as much about what is perceived through listening as it is about what is felt through sound. To borrow from Barad (2007), we are all in an intra-action with resonances where we are responding to and with sounded experiences.

Using the data from a two-year sonic ethnography (Author 3, 2012) with queer middle school youth of color in the United States, this paper argues that Black and brown queer consciousness (McKittrick, 2021) is formed and informed by sounded quantum entanglements that resonated with and against students. Although attending to sound-as-voice and representation is a well-trodden path across scholarly conversations in sound studies (e.g., Sterne, 2012), the author builds on these dialogues by centering her argument on the significance of sounds as they exist in students’ lives, becoming ontoepistemologically tangled up (Nespor, 1997) in schools and communities. This is important for at least the following reasons. First, as Author 3 has argued, what one conceptualizes through sonic ways of “beingknowingdoing” (p. 2) contributes to how one can come to know and understand sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Second, conceptualizing sound as it territorializes and deterritorializes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977) the spaces that marginalized youth encounter and inhabit daily is significant in unpacking the everyday affects that are central to a place that where some students spend most of their time—at school.

The scholarly impact of this work is significant, adding to complicated conversations focused on how the sounds of schooling are central to everyday affects and expressions of violence (e.g., Cooper, 1892; Dimitriadis, 2009; Love, 2012), that are sometimes expressed through the school-to-coffin pipeline and the school-to-prison pipeline. In this way, while much of the literature on such violence tends to focus on visual understandings and metaphors, this study attends to sounded ontoepistemologies to consider how one might interrupt such resonances before they cause harm, or at least better understand how their polyphonic nature affects queer youth of color. Although not intended as a binary, this work also attends to how joy, hope, and love resonated in the lives of students, adding to the complex echo chambers that are spaces and places like schools. In this way, this paper not only seeks to think through the sounds of schooling to interrupt violence but it attends to how such attention can be used to proliferate the joy found in Black and brown queer youth lives as it moves within the structures of schooling.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University - Abington
  Presenting Author