Session One: Against Sonic Certitude
Abolitionary Listening: Propositions & Questions
Carson Cole Arthur . Dr. Petero Kalulé . AM Kanngieser
Date: Wednesday 18 January 2023 Time: 12pm – 1pm
In this online session we shall read ‘Abolitionary Listening: Propositions & Questions’, a co-authored text that imagines a listening that is not proscriptive and calculative but unconditional and intervallic. Following this reading and refrain, we strain the limits of listening. This is an invitation for us to surrender to which we cannot understand and ‘hear’.
Discography to accompany reading:
Ayler, Albert. (Albert Ayler Trio). Spiritual Unity. ESP-DISK, 1964.
Carter, Betty. ‘Open the Door’ from Inside Betty Carter. Capitol Records, 1964.
Codou Sène, Yandé and N’Dour, Youssou. Gainde – Voices From the Heart of Africa, WDR, 1995.
Holiday, Billie. ‘Don’t Explain’ from The Lady Sings. Decca Records, 1956.
Taylor, Cecil. ‘This was Nearly Mine’ from The World of Cecil Taylor. Candid, 1960.
NB. Where possible, please read through the text, and listen to these works before the session.
Biographies:
Dr Petero Kalulé is a poet, composer, and lecturer in law (School of Law and Social Sciences) at London South Bank University. Their work attends to issues such as the aesthetics of regulation, Black poetics and law, critical criminology, law and abolition. They are trying to write a book on law, technology, and incalculability.
AM Kanngieser is a geographer and MSCA Senior Research Fellow in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their current projects amplify movements for self-determination in relation to ongoing colonisation through resource extraction, environmental racism and ecological disaster in Oceania. They are the author of Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013), Between Sound and Silence: Listening toward Environmental Relations (forthcoming), and have published in interdisciplinary journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning D. See http://amkanngieser.com.
Carson Cole Arthur is a PhD candidate in Criminology. His research interests include state racial violence, inquests, accountability, and testimony. He also writes cultural criticism. His work has been published in the Crime, Media, Culture, Third Text Online, Paletten, and Foam.
Image Credit: Carson Cole Arthur. Used with permission.
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This programme is supported with funding from: Consortium for the Humanities and Arts South-East England (CHASE) - Cohort Development Fund (CDF)
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Our second online session will be with Edward George on 25th January, 12-1pm (GMT). Free to attend. Book now.
Our third online session will be with Nisha Ramayya and James Goodwin, 3rd February, 12-1pm (GMT). Free to attend. Booking TBA.
AuralDiversities:
An interdisciplinary programme addressing the ‘auraldiverse turn’ in Arts and Humanities research and theory, questioning how and what we hear, what we listen to and why, as situated within our contemporary milieu and its associated crises.
These multimodal sessions trouble accepted norms in audio technology, sound culture and Western epistemologies and question the extent of human perception, our relation in and through the vibratory world, and whether hearing and listening is ever an individual act.
Entanglement Sessions:
By troubling assumptions around a distinct locus for hearing, and the notion of a presumed "singular" or discrete listener, we come to discern a colonisation of the senses, and prickle at arbitrary classifications that categorise and define into a certitute of disconnection. Working outside the assumption of hearing as "individualised" in the sense of separation, and instead vibrating towards the perceived individual’s hearing as necessarily co-constituted and sympoietic, we sit with the notion of hearing and listening as always with…