Rhetoric and Echoes: Beyond Qualitative (Post) Nexts

• In Event: 52.023 - Quantitative and Qualitative Methods Are Not Enough! The Ethics of Research Beyond Methodocentrism

Abstract

From a sonic point of origin, entanglement is not news, the crushing messiness of multiplicity is commonplace, and incessant waves of vibrational affect crash into the messiness that resounds in our metaphorical and material selves (Kim-Cohen, 2009; Sterne, 2012). It is only to Western eyes that current waves of new materialism that such understandings are either new or material (Author, 2016). By this I do not mean that new materialism isn’t a very helpful tool for reimagining norms, values, and practices or that it somehow should not be taken seriously. Rather, the point of this proposed contribution is that sound ways of beingknowingdoing are resonances and reverberations that echo across possibilities/time/space in ways that: a) at once are always already affective, b) attend to questions of power that can be dampened and exploded, and c) are more readily attuned to Indigenous and non-Western notions of beingknowingdoing.
A heart beats with another as two people walk side-by-side the material, entrained physicality that waxes rhapsodic in ways that make it feel as though trees sway just so, in time with each step, and each step so many heartbeats. This kind of experience underscores some of the ways in which soundunderstandings can press at our textual limitations—closing both metaphorical trajectories and conceptualizations of the material that circumscribe our methodological practices. To these and other similar ends, this paper builds on a growing exploration of sonic methodologies (e.g., Dreaver, 2002; Makagon & Neumann, 2009). In so doing, it seeks to articulate how sound events simultaneously enunciate and collapse questions of scale while providing practical possibilities for qualitative researchers to complicate the necessarily ethical polyphony of their positionalities. It is an argument for sound matters, in rhetoric and echoes.
References
Drever, J. L. (2002). Soundscape composition: The convergence of ethnography and acoustamatic music. Organised Sound, 7(1), 21–27.
Kim-Cohen, S. (2009). In the blink of an ear: Towards a non-cochlear sonic arts. New York: Continuum.
Makagon, D., & Neumann, M. (2009). Recording culture: Audio documentary and the ethnographic experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Sterne, J. (Ed.) (2012). Sound studies reader. New York: Routledge.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University