Sounding Off: A Multiphonic, Polyphonous Counter-Story (Remix)

• In Event: The Belly of the Beast: Resisting Racial, Gendered, and Sexual Oppressions Through the Power of Performance

Abstract

Objectives:
This proposed performative piece attends aspects of everyday, lived oppressions in the Midwestern United States through the sonic. Such experiences are significant as they document the kinds of daily micro and macro aggressions that are regularly experienced in formal educational ecologies produced by schools and schooling (e.g., Love, 2019; Woodson, 1933).

This work refutes an understanding that such explicit aggressions were ever truly unacceptable or that our current moment is a kind of backlash against progressive rights (e.g., Lowrey, 2023; Thiwanda, 2019). Instead, this autoethnographic performative work utilizes a variety of student counternarratives (on counternarratives and counterstories, see Stovall, 2006; Berry, 2018) drawn from multiple studies that together form a multiphonic polyphony (Author, 2022; in press). As such, this combined counternarrative can also be understood as a remix, a sonic reorganization of previously expressed sounds in ways that their original narrative remains recognizable yet creates further possible understandings through their reorganization.

Theoretical framework:
Sounds are educational (Author, 2006, 2017, 2020) and can be combined in ways differently than text and other vision-oriented scholarship and attend to aspects of scholarship that are literally overlooked (e.g., Aoki, 1991; Sterne, 2021). As a result, the sonic often interrupts our theoretical and practical understandings (e.g., Kim-Cohen, 2009; Sterne, 2012).

Counterstories and counternarratives—autobiographical stories about oppressions and aggressions that intentionally interrupt the privilege in dominant discourses to overlook or intentionally ignore intentional injustices—are central to forms of Critical Race Theorizing in education (e.g., Berry, 2018; Stovall, 2006). In light of the normative nature of formal curriculum in schooling, less traditional scholarly expressions such as sound can also be understood to counter the oppressive nature of texts and the visual (see Author, 2017, 2018).

Rather than utilize the linear metaphors of entanglement (Delezue & Guattari, 1987) and assemblage (Barad, 2007), this piece conceptualizes its expression as a multiphonic, polyphonous counternarrative. Multiphonic, in that each piece intentionally expresses multiplicities where understandings are often conceptualized as singular, and polyphonous in that it is multiple, simultaneously sounded counternarratives that are each as important to the collective whole and need not be resolved to be considered significant (Author, 2022; in press).

Methods:
Performative autoethnography argues that the ethnographic study of one’s own experiences through Arts in all their intentions, attentions, and expressions (Author, 2020) are strong tools for study and building knowledge (Harris, 2017; Harris, Luka & Markham, 2022). In this case, the arts are sonic in form and function. The proposed piece is a combination of recordings and live improvisation, sonic counternarratives that explicate everyday oppressions across multiple autoethnographic that are simultaneously sounded.

The choice to freely improvise musically underscores the power of affect and how the sonic can express ways of beingknowingdoing (Author, 2017) when words and language fall short and a key facet of performance-oriented scholarship. In these ways, this work sounds off in multiple senses of the phrase, at once voice narratives against oppression, listening to stories about how “off” an educational feels and operates, and its multiphonic, polyphonous delivery.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University