Acoustic Justice

Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform for engaging struggles over the right to speak and to be heard that extends toward a broader materialist and planetary view. This entails critically addressing questions of space, borders, community, and the acoustic norms defining capacities of listening, leading to what LaBelle terms "poetic ecologies of resonance." Acoustic Justice works at issues of recognition and resistance, place and displacement, by moving across a range of pertinent references and topics, from social practices and sound art to the performativity of skin and the poetics of Deaf voice. Through such transversality, LaBelle captures acoustics as the basis for strategies of refusal and repair.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. His books Acoustic Territories, Second Edition (2019), Background Noise, Second Edition (2015), and Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), are all published by Bloomsbury Academic. He is the Editor of Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, and Professor at the Art Academy, University of Bergen, Norway.

1. Holding, Healing, Attending: Towards Collaborative Living 2. Acoustic Performativity: Practices of Composition 3. Poetic Ecologies: Resonance, Imagination, Repair 4. Skin-Work: Queer Acoustics, Borderspaces, Economies of Desire 5. Deaf Attention: Peripheral Visions, Spatial Meanings, Sensory Politics 6. Acoustic Support