What (Educational) Sound Studies can Teach (Educational) Posthumanisms

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Sound Studies for Remedy and Repair in Education and Education Research (Table 7)

Abstract

Recent works have attended to the posthuman through the sonic both within and outside of education (e.g., Truman & Shannon, 2018; Valee, 2022). In addition, a forthcoming review of posthumanist literatures in education (Rosiek et al, forthcoming) also enlarges its definitional boundaries to include Indigenous scholarship through a careful argument documenting how Indigenous Wisdom Traditions have attended to Relations since time immemorial, whether or not such understandings use the language and constructs of posthumanism. Then there are discussions from scholars such as Alex Weheliye’s linking of Black Fem sound studies and the posthuman in the recent collection Feening: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology and Dylan Robinson’s linking of the posthuman and Indigenous traditions in Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for an Indigenous Sound Studies.

However, in general, there appears to be a continuing lack of attention to sonic in educational posthumanist and postqualitative scholarship with most work continuing to attend to the visual.
This is surprising not only because the fields of sensory studies, affect theories, and sound studies fomented around the same moments from the late 1990s and early 2000s (e.g., Bull & Back, 2004; Siegworth, 2005; Stoller, 1997). It is also surprising because such disjunctures often exist in spite of publications that clearly link affect with sound and sound with posthumanisms within (e.g., Rousell et al., 2023; Wozolek, 2023). While part of this absence is about citational politics and how algorithmic inquiries often lead to narrowed particularities, there seems to be a bit more afoot, especially across educational subfields. There are also significant questions about the ocular linearity that is foundational to much of posthumanisms that document some possible areas of argument where, parallel to Bresler’s (2005) arguments about music, this proposed paper argues that there are ways that sound studies might serve as a tool for strengthening educational posthumanisms through the sonic.

This proposed paper addresses such possibilities in three moves. First, it addresses how grounding scholarship in Deleuze and Guattari’s linear, sequential, Western art music constructions of sounds present the sonic in a narrowed, ocular fashion. Second, this paper will address concerns about more mimetic uses of scientific metaphors and implications of false universalisms embedded in questions of relations and narration (e.g., James, 2020; Sterne, 2021). Finally, working from more recent scholarship that at once advances and critiques sound studies (e.g., Goh & Thompson, 2017; Perea, 2021; Pinto, 2016; Steingo & Sykes, 2019) in conjunction history of sonic studies in education (e.g., Dimitriadis, 2001; Erickson, 2004; McCarthy et al, 1999; Pinar & Irwin [Aoki], 2005) provides opportunities for considering how the liminal, omnidirectional possibilities of sound can further understandings of relations, affects, and the agency of things.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University