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SUMMARY:Sound's Colonialities: Formatting\, Recording and Saving on Indige
 nous Lands - Dr Max Ritts\, Department of Sociology\, University of Cambri
 dge
DTSTART:20220225T130000Z
DTEND:20220225T140000Z
UID:TALK169913@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Speaker to be confirmed
DESCRIPTION:Geographers have done much to explore sound’s role in spatia
 l production (Gallagher 2015)\; social difference (Kanngieser et al. 2016)
  and formulations of value (McFarlane 2018)\; and have noted sound’s abi
 lity to foment violent multispecies relations (Ritts 2017) and hierarchies
  (Pavan et al. 2020). But the question of sound’s colonialities – e.g.
 \, its relation to constitutive\, onto-epistemic practices of colonialism 
 – remains undertheorized (but see: Kanngieser 2021). Recent trends in en
 vironmental conservation cast this absence into sharp relief. Worldwide\, 
 various governments and NGOs are now celebrating the use of fixed\, distri
 buted\, and multi-purpose acoustic sensing systems as critical eco-governa
 nce infrastructure\, set to resolve key issues of species monitoring\, def
 amation\, and even community engagement (Gibb et al 2019\; Odom et al. 202
 0). Yet these terrestrial acoustic observatories are non-innocent projecti
 ons of other social logics too. Within them\, one finds an emergent "calcu
 lative reason... [that] promises to collect a heterogenous\, changing grou
 p of elements 'beneath' some higher-order goal" (Carse 2016\, 35-36). What
  does this "calculative reason" do to conservation politics? And how might
  situated digital captures on sound relate to the broader environmental an
 d social concerns of Indigenous communities?\n\nThis talk shares some init
 ial reflections on the play of sound within the critical ambit of "colonia
 lity" (Mignolo 2011)\, a matrix of power which extends unevenly across tim
 e and space. Hypothesizing sound's digitisation and appeal to contemporary
  eco-governance as one possible expression of coloniality\, we ask: What i
 mpacts do emergent sonic governance programmes pose to Indigenous communit
 ies\, now routinely asked to collaborate in their implementation and use i
 n the context of global conservation projects? What epistemological horizo
 ns\, deskillings/reskillings\, and kin relations are being valued and deli
 mited in these observatories? And if the digitalisation of sound can be mo
 bilised in ways that benefit Indigenous communities\, how can researchers 
 verify this is indeed what is transpiring on the ground?
LOCATION:Hardy Building rm101\, Downing Site
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