Call for Papers

“Unintelligible: Noise Against Capture” APRIL 20-23, 2018
University of California, Santa Cruz

Keynote: Jeramy DeCristo (Assistant Professor in American Studies, UC Davis)

Since the 1970s, numerous scholars have engaged the discipline of Sound Studies through critical frameworks exploring race, class and gender. As Kara Keeling and Josh Kun suggest in their 2012 anthology Sound Clash, this developing interest in the field of Sound Studies exists alongside a larger project in the humanities “to dismantle hierarchies of knowledge production and critical thought,” especially among scholars working in cultural studies, feminism, queer studies, and critical race and ethnic studies (447). Our goal with this conference is to cultivate an interdisciplinary understanding of the field of Sound Studies, as well as actively contribute to the development of critical research that unsettles dominant discourses inside the field.

To that end we are taking up the ubiquitous sonic trope of noise, considering its counter- productive character, and asking how it can be a tactic for critique against the capture of individuals and communities of resistance. Jennifer Lynn Stoever describes noise as a “shifting analytic” that “renders certain sounds—and the bodies that produce and consume them — as Other” (67). This conference will look at how such “Others” are produced by noise—or conversely how noise is an index of that process—and how culturally specific forms produce counter-public spheres. Can we understand subjects, objects, ideas, and events that destabilize normativity to be a kind of noise? Can noise understood as a negation in its many derogatory connotations (“disruptive,” “illegible,” “unintelligible”) still be productive as a counter-hegemonic device? What is the consequence of obscuring the materiality of noise, and how do we resist (or at least slow) the impulse to turn noise into a metaphor?

This conference is organized by Counter-Production: Noise as Critical Research, a UCHRI- funded interdisciplinary working group of sound scholars from across the University of California system. We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations from graduate students involved in multi/trans/interdisciplinary work that approach sound as an area of study and that use noise as a tool for critically engaging the arts, social-sciences, and humanities.

Presentations might explore:

• Bodies as forms of noise and disruption.
• Cultural, social or physical excess.
• How noise can be understood productively in the context of critical theories of

  race, ethnicity, gender, bodies, citizenship, language, art, semiotics,

  psychoanalysis, etc.

• “The Sonic Color Line” and other auditory markers.
• Recordings of noise in literature, history, or media.
• How noise counters essentialist assumptions that people can be recognized,

  comprehended, or understood.

• Transnational differences in sounding and hearing.
• Noise as a productive process or source in composition.

• The way in which language and communication is made noisy, and as such is a form of resistance or critical engagement with the world.
• Materialisms of Noise (Historical, Feminist, New)
• The relation between noise and a politics of consent.

  We encourage scholars from all disciplines to apply with the following:

• Brief Biography
• 250 word abstract + keywords
• Any media requirements

  We especially encourage queer, trans, people of color, working class, disabled and other underrepresented scholars in the field of Sound Studies to apply, and scholars whose work addresses related structural inequalities.

  Please email proposals to: unintelligiblenoise@gmail.com

  We ask for submissions by January 7, 2018.
  We will contact applicants no later than February 1, 2018.

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  Works Cited:

• Keeling, Kara and Josh Kun, editors. Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies.

  Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 2012.

• Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer. “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York.” Social Text 102, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 59-85.